MANSFIELD, Ohio — Ray Dyson came to Mansfield in April 1971, to work at a newspaper.
Today, nearly four decades later, he still lives here, but his career has taken the kind of turn a character from one of his novels would appreciate.
The Ohio State graduate has cranked out three novels and has a fourth one sitting in the editing pipeline — all since his retirement from the News Journal in 2009.
“I had written a short story about a baseball player for the News Journal for the Sunday magazine section in the early 1990s,” Dyson said. “I think it was John Futty (a former reporter) who said ‘You ought to turn that into a book.’
“We were on our way to see an Indians game and I thought, ‘I could do that easy.’ ”
When he retired as a copy editor, Dyson did precisely that. His first novel, “Smokey Joe, A Baseball Fable,” was released in 2012.
“Basically what I did was take a farm boy (Smokey Joe Hood) that talked from that turn-of-the-century era and put him in the middle of some old baseball stories I collected,” Dyson said. “It did reasonably well for a first-time book with no real publicity.”
That inspired Dyson to continue, and his next work was another fiction piece set in Arizona in 1879. “Bannon: The Scavenger Breed” is a story about cowboys, Indians and the wild frontier before Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday’s escapades at Tombstone.
Dyson’s novel includes renegade Apaches, murderous outlaws, a missing U.S. Army payroll, a kidnapped woman and political intrigue playing out across the Arizona desert. Joel Bannon is the hero, trying to rescue the damsel in distress, who has a veiled secret of her own.
“My dad always liked to watch Westerns so I grew up with them,” Dyson said. “I always wanted to write a Western, and I knew that area. My sister lives out there. I would visit when I went out there to watch the Indians in spring training.
“I saw those places and did some research on the Old West and created a fictional character. It’s a story of friendship and betrayal.”
Dyson said Bannon was more successful than Smokey Joe, and boosted his confidence enough to take the plunge into mystery writing.
That triggered the release of “Ice Cream Blonde.” It came out over the summer and has been nominated for two awards. The Edgars selected “Ice Cream Blonde” among its Best New Crime Novels. It earned a nod in the same category from the International Thriller Writers.
“This is definitely the best book I’ve written so far,” Dyson said. “I always loved Sam Spade and grew up on those old Raymond Chandler characters.
“My character, Neil Brand, is a World War I veteran who was framed as a dirty cop,” Dyson said. “His old partner who knew he was innocent sets him up as head of security for a Hollywood studio and one of the studio’s stars turns up missing.”
Brand’s job is to find the star, and what happened to him.
“I wrote it in the first person, as though I was Neil Brand,” Dyson said. “Neil will do what he thinks is right. He’s not a by-the-book-guy, he’ll stretch the law if he has to, but he’s not a criminal.”
Dyson said in all of his books the key is to be true to each character. He begins writing with an outline, but it’s always subject to change, and the character may change it at any moment.
“Raymond Chandler used to say ‘If you’re stuck in the plot, have someone walk in the door with a gun,’ ” Dyson said.
The challenge of writing a mystery appealed to Dyson, and Neil Brand has given him a character deserving of more attention.
“It was a little harder to write a mystery, a little more complicated,” Dyson said. “In a mystery there are a lot of shady characters and you have to find out what each of them can and will do.”
Born in Evansville, Indiana, Dyson graduated from Caldwell High School in Ohio. He covered the 1968 national championship football team at Ohio State as a sports writer at The Lantern, and has a pocketful of Woody Hayes stories, too.
But his next literary dance is called “The Naked Nymph in the Dark Flickers.” It’s a sequel to “Ice Cream Blonde” and is under an editor’s eye at the moment. It will be released by Black Opal in 2016.
For more on Ray Dyson and his work, be sure to visit his website at http://raydyson.com/site/Ray.html.
