A new Darryl Billups mystery, a scholarly discussion of military "brats," and a first-person account of surviving the hardship and heartache of the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Blair S. Walker ’80: Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes

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You shouldn’t hear too many complaints from mystery writer Blair S. Walker these days. Bookstores are currently stocking Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes (Ballantine Books, 2002), the third in a series of novels that have won him favorable reviews. Every day he gets closer to his dream of a career as a full-time fiction writer.

"I always feel like the luckiest man in America if I’m writing fiction and getting paid for it," Walker told Baltimore’s The Sun.

Walker, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, drew from his own background as a journalist to create the character of Darryl Billups, who works for the fictional Baltimore Herald. Billups is also the central character in Walker’s earlier novels, Up Jumped the Devil and Hidden in Plain View. In Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes, Billups gets involved when the mummified body of a long-missing black socialite is discovered in a West Baltimore storage space. The grisly find brings old fears and suspicions to the surface, implicates a community leader, and eventually puts Billups’ own life in danger.

It wasn’t the sort of thing that typically happened to Walker when he worked for The Sun, New York Newsday, or USA Today, but, he told The Sun, "I get to let Darryl do all the fantastic stories I didn’t do."

When he’s not thinking up his own fantastic stories—or working on the other freelance writing projects that help pay the bills—Walker spends time with his wife, Felicia, and daughters, Blair and Bria, at their home in Columbia, Maryland.

And if writing doesn’t work out for him, he’s got a few other skills to fall back on. He drove race cars for awhile in the early 1990s—his ultimate dream job, he said, even better than being a writer—and he earned a law degree by taking night classes while working for The Sun and USA Today. He has never practiced law, but the legal training has helped him act as his own agent in his writing career. As if that’s not enough, while he was in the Army, he worked as a Korean linguist.

Apparently, for those who have known Walker his whole life, none of it came as a surprise. His mother, Dolores Pierre, told The Sun, "He was a little monster . . . who was into everything."

Morton G. Ender ’80: Military Brats and Other Global Nomads

In Military Brats and Other Global Nomads (Praeger, 2002), Morton G. Ender edits 13 chapters by various authors writing what he calls "indigenous ethnographies—people studying their own subcultures." He is, himself, the author of one chapter, "Beyond Adolescence: The Experiences of Adult Children of Military Parents," which reports on a study he conducted—one of the largest ever—of more than 600 adults whose parents served in the military or foreign service. The study uncovered patterns of a sense of "otherness" and "rootlessness" among the children of these families, but also found that these same individuals later in life appreciated the opportunities they had to travel and live in exotic locales, and the perspective they gained from it.

Ender, a graduate of UMUC’s Munich Campus, in Germany, is associate professor of sociology at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is co-editor of Teaching the Sociology of Peace and War: A Curriculum Guide, and his most recent scholarly works have been published in The American Sociologist, Teaching Sociology, Armed Forces Society, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, and Death Studies.

Betty Owen Trimble ’83: The Path from the Cellar

Betty Owen Trimble lived most of her adult life in Maryland’s Montgomery County, north of Washington, D.C. She became interested in writing while working for an educational research organization in the city, and, after she retired, her family encouraged her to write about her experiences during the momentous first half of the 20th century.

The Path from the Cellar (Pentland Press, 2000) is one woman’s story, but it tells of the struggle faced by common men and women during the Great Depression and World War II as they worked to preserve their communities and cultures in the face of economic collapse and global war. It is a story of courage, faith, and the will to survive.