Charles OBrien

Charles O'Brien, a Columbia University educated historian, embarked on his mystery writing career in 1988, six years before he retired from the WIU history department. O'Brien's wife Elvy, an art historian, had moved to Williamstown, VA, after accepting a position with the J. Paul Getty Trust, then at the Clark Art Institute. That began a series of long commutes for O'Brien. When O'Brien retired in 1994 after 22 years of teaching at Western, he began to seriously study the art of writing fiction with colleague Tama Baldwin of the WIU English faculty.