William Kerrigan

William Kerrigan was born in Los Angeles in 1943. His family soon moved to Orange County, where William's father began working in the Santa Ana branch of Hockaday and Phillips, a chain of auto parts stores co-owned by his grandfather. Kerrigan was a bookish, spirited lad. He can't remember not loving movies, especially ones made in 30s and 40s. He played basketball and tennis, surfed a bit, and worked as a delivery boy at Kerrigan Auto Parts, which his father opened about the time his grandfather sold his stores and purchased the Main Street Emporium at the new Disneyland amusement park. He graduated from Stanford with a BA in English in 1964, then went on to graduate study at Columbia University, receiving his Ph.D in English Literature in 1971. Kerrigan taught literature and writing courses at Middlebury College, the University of Virginia, the University of Maryland, and finally at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. During these years he wrote literary criticism and scholarship, including two books each on William Shakespeare and John Milton. Along with his capable partners John Rumrich and Stephen Fallon, he also edited Milton's complete poetry and selected prose for the Random House Modern Library. Retiring in 2002, he returned to California with his wife Amelia. They settled in Orcutt, a small town on the southern edge of Santa Maria. Kerrigan had always hoped to write fiction, and this was his chance. Six of his novels are detective stories centered on his grandfather Wallace Kerrigan. They are carefully plotted in the tradition of "Golden Age" mysteries, and explore various aspects of the motion picture industry in California. The first, 'Santa Barbara Malice,' takes place at the American Film Manufacturing Company in Santa Barbara in 1913, when his grandfather was the company's business manager and his great uncle, J. Warren Kerrigan, its major star. The second, 'Shooting in Universal City,' is set in Hollywood in 1917, and introduces Wallace's witty mistress Pearl Seagrove in a tale about an ambitious but secretive young director. Their long romance is woven through the next four books. 'Voluptuous Death' finds Wallace working for Mary Pickford Productions in 1922, and stumbling across a secret organization catering to the perverse tastes of Hollywood's rich and famous, Mary's dissolute brother Jack in particular. In 'Finding the Midnight Sun,' Wallace is Vice President of the failing United States Costume Company in 1932, and receives a summons from his old friend Douglas Fairbanks, who is filming in Tahiti. Wallace is employed by the California Bank in 'The Talking Cure Murders.' Much of the book takes place in the Psychoanalytic Institute of Los Angeles in 1946, at the height of Hollywood's fascination with Freudian psychoanalysis. The series concludes with 'Fade to Orange,' set in 1952. There Wallace visits his son's family in Orange, gives his grateful grandson his first dictionary, and after a brief visit to Catalina Island ends the career of a movie-obsessed serial killer. All of the novels contain authentic period detail and little-known but clarifying facts about the history of California. In 2014 Kerrigan began a second series, "Tales of the Ghost Killers." These are supernatural thrillers, though in some respects they retain the conventions of the mystery story. So far he has written two of them. 'The Ghost Killers of Black Ash Canyon' takes place in fictional versions of Los Alamos, Buellton, Los Olivos, and Solvang. Its murderous spirit dates back to the days when California was a Spanish colony administered by Mexico. The most recent, 'The Passed On,' transpires in a seaside mansion in Ventura, where the ghost of a notorious black magician, Aleister Crowley, now resides. He is now at work on a third Ghost Killers tale. The story unfolds in an out-of-the-way corner of the Coachella Valley. Its tentative title is 'California Hell.'