Darryl Billups is having a rough week. The fictional Baltimore newspaper reporter is on deadline, on the trail of a murder from 18 years ago and on the outs with his fiancee.
Meanwhile, his creator, Blair S. Walker, is having a great time. The native Baltimorean and former newspaper reporter is on tour to promote his third Darryl Billups novel, Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes. He's also on his way to a full-time fiction-writing career and on track personally with a wife, Felicia, and two daughters, Blair, 14, and Bria, 12, in Columbia.
"I always feel like the luckiest man in America if I'm writing fiction and getting paid for it," says Walker, 46, who will be at the Enoch Pratt Free Library at 6 p.m. tomorrow to discuss and sign his book.
"Darryl is a good guy, with warts and foibles like anybody else," says Walker, "but he can be galvanized into action if the proper set of circumstances arise." Although Walker likes to think he shares his hero's decent core, he says Darryl is more strait-laced than he is. And, Darryl "has a spectacularly messy love life."
"My main theme is that the world is a chaotic, sometimes even cruel place," says Walker, "but most people have a basic goodness that helps us get through." Darryl embodies that, Walker continues. He may backslide and have bad habits, but if he sees someone in distress he tries to help out.
Walker says the ability of a writer to get into a character's skin, and to show the universality of people's experiences, "that's what really makes a writer."
Another thread is that "I can't get away from Baltimore," says Walker, a Northwestern High School graduate. Besides being familiar territory, Walker says the city "has 10 times the character of a Washington, D.C. It's rich fabric to be working with."
Mystery writer is not Walker's ultimate dream job -- that would be race car driver, which he tried in the early 1990s -- but it is a rewarding occupation for a man who always gravitated to the written word.
"He was a little monster ... who was into everything," Walker's mother, Dolores Pierre, says affectionately. And "he has written stories since he could hold a pencil."
Pierre, who lives in Owings Mills, and Walker's father, James Walker, of Randallstown, are retired teachers who encouraged their son's love of reading.
Walker says he didn't consider a writing career when he was young. "I didn't have role models," he says. "I didn't see black people engaged in the business of writing to put food on the table." But he was attracted to the atmosphere in The Sun newsroom when he took a job as a copy boy the summer after his junior year of high school.
He remembers a fog of cigarette smoke, the "incessant clickety clack" of typewriters, uncensored comments and flasks hidden in desk drawers. "It was a much more interesting place than it is now," Walker says. And while he doesn't want to romanticize that less progressive time, it seemed to him like a really cool way to make a living.
College made him restless, so he joined the Army and spent three years as a Korean linguist. The G.I. Bill helped him get his bachelor's degree at the University of Maryland University College in 1980. A journalism career led him to the Tampa Tribune, The News American, the Associated Press, New York Newsday, and back to The Sun in 1989.
As a Sun business writer, he says, "I took pride in introducing readers ... to African-American entrepreneurs."
He also earned a law degree at night while working for The Sun and, later, as a business reporter for USA Today. He has never practiced law, but he has drawn on the education since he became his own agent.
Walker broke into the book-writing business by taking a leave of absence in 1993 to write a biography of Reginald Lewis, who grew up in a blue-collar Baltimore family and became a billionaire entrepreneur. The book, Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?, was well-received and Walker knew he wanted to try writing fiction.
Now, from a home office crowded with books, files, jazz CDs and a bit of car racing memorabilia, he writes novels as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and other great African-American authors watch over him from a poster on the wall behind his desk.
Walker's first novel, Up Jumped the Devil, introduced Darryl Billups and the fictional Baltimore Herald in a story in which neo-Nazis threatened to bomb the headquarters of the NAACP. In the next, Hidden in Plain View, Walker "let his inhibitions down a bit" as Billups investigated murders in which African-American professionals were found dead with Confederate flag decals on their foreheads.
Walker still supplements his novelist career with nonfiction writing. But he has a new publisher and more support for his growing fiction career. And he says writing fiction -- most often at night, when the house is quiet -- is the most fun.
As a reporter "you always imagine the types of stories you'd like to do when you are doing stuff that can be rather mundane," he says. Reality may not be full of Pulitzer Prizes and front-page stories, but now, "I get to let Darryl do all the fantastic stories I didn't do."