From newsman to mystery writer

Bill Ruehlmann

BRAD PARKS, former reporter for The (Newark) Star-Ledger, current author of mystery novels, sat at a signing table between the Self Improvement and Cooking sections of the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Greenbrier Parkway, Chesapeake.

It was a Sunday afternoon. Flanking the writer were stacks of "Eyes of the Innocent" (Minotaur Books, 294 pp., $24.99), his second thriller just out in hardcover, and "Faces of the Gone" (Minotaur, 330 pp., $14.99), his first, just reprinted in paperback. Last year "Faces" won the Nero Award for Best American Mystery from The Nero Wolfe Society, a national organization of Rex Stout fans, and the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Both are crackerjack books.

Before Parks, arranged in three rows, were 10 chairs. Expectations for crowds tend to be low at book signings for new authors. Parks, 36, a spare 6-footer, spiffy in a sport coat, closely resembled his narrator-hero, Carter Ross, investigative reporter for the Newark Eagle-Examiner, which closely resembles the Star-Ledger.

"I don't really think of Carter as me," Parks said. "I'm left-handed. I'm color blind.

"But being on the other side of the notebook is very difficult, because I know all the machinations that went on in my head."

He pointed to my legal pad: "For example, I know you're sitting there looking for an angle."

Already had one. Because Parks and Ross share an acute eye and a wry voice; their lines of work both require them to make black marks on paper; and they both have sense enough, when confronted by a bad man with a gun, to bolt. But the differences between them are crucial.

Parks is happily married with two children, which is why, unlike happily unwed Ross, he is exempt from extracurricular romance. And that is also why Parks is self-employed, writing fiction in Virginia, instead of corporately engaged, writing fact in Newark. Narrative, Parks concluded, may provide a more secure future for his family than newsprint.

"At 33," he said, "I reached the sad conclusion that my newspaper would be dead in 10 years, maybe five."

Enter the alternative.

"I always thought writing mysteries would be a great semi-retirement occupation. After a long, successful journalism career, I'd retire to this. So I accelerated the calendar."

It helped that wife Melissa secured a job in rural Middlesex County as a school psychologist; they like it there, Parks reports.

Meanwhile, he already has two more Carter Ross novels in the can and a young-adult book on the front burner.

"I'm a journalist. I'm not a thumb-sucking literary type. I write fast."

On Saturday he had sold 40 books in two hours at Twice Told Tales in Gloucester. On Wednesday he would appear at Fountain Bookstore in Richmond. Now the upbeat author turned to devote his attention to the seven people seated in the 10 chairs at Barnes & Noble.

Best-selling writer Lee Child once told him that it took a decade to become an overnight success.

"I'm in Year Two," Parks said.

Bill Ruehlmann is a journalism/communications professor at Virginia Wesleyan College.