Bio of Jim Ingraham

I joined the Marine Corps right out of high school in 1942 and served in the First Marine Division assault force on Peleliu and Okinawa. I also served in the occupation of Japan.

Until the end of World War II, I never thought about going to college or becoming a writer. But the government gave veterans the chance of a lifetime, and I obtained a bachelor's and a master's degree at NYU and would have gone on for a Ph.D. but the money ran out. I later obtained a doctorate in Florida and served for thirty-five years as a professor of history at Bryant University in Rhode Island. Upon retirement I served as an adjunct professor of history at Edison College in Florida where I now live with my wife of some forty wonderful years. While at Bryant I served as chairman of the Social Sciences Department and was the founding president of the first faculty union of a four-year college to achieve collective bargaining in the United States. I quit teaching at the age of eighty and devoted my time to writing fiction. I've published eight stories in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and have a novel, REMAINS TO BE SEEN, released by Five Star/Gale in July 2008 now in libraries and on sale in book stores and on the internet. I currently devote three hours a day, every day, to writing fiction.

I have been a skip chaser in Detroit and New York, a cello player in the Michigan State University Symphony Orchestra, an extra in two movies in Los Angeles, a portrait painter, a piano player in bars in Detroit and Providence, Rhode Island. I've been in jail in Japan and kicked out of mansions in Beverly Hills for party crashing. I was a paper boy on the waterfront in Portland, Maine, where my series character, Duff Kerrigan, now lives and works. I twice ran away from home and was expelled from high school for knocking down a priest who belted me in the back of the head for not doing my homework. At another high school I earned letters in football and basketball. I sang in a cathedral choir and in the a cappella choir at Michigan State University. I wrote the English lyrics of a Rachmaninoff lieder for Bethany Beardsley's senior recital, and I wrote the fight song still used by South Portland High School's football team in Maine.

People ask where I get my ideas and I say I don't know. They just come from everyday observations. The varied experiences of my life have made me comfortable writing about the rich and the poor, the unknowns and the celebrated. I write not for fame or for wealth. I write because I enjoy writing.