- Born
- Died
- Thomas Francis Morgan Walsh was an author of mystery and suspense stories, with some brilliant crime novels to his credit, contemporaneous with Cornell Woolrich, but unduly neglected and much less remembered.
He was born in New York City on September 19, 1908, the son of Thomas Walsh and Margaret Hefferine, Walsh started writing for his high school paper and continued writing while he attended Columbia University, he would later leave Columbia mid term of his sophomore year and move to Baltimore, where he took a job as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun working as a police beat reporter, and also working for the U.S. Army Historical Branch, but by 1933 he retired from journalism and turned to writing short stories.
His writing career began with writing crime stories under the editorial tutelage of Joseph Shaw, the legendary chief of Black Mask Magazine, Walsh wrote and sold crime and suspense stories to several magazines, including Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Dime Detective, Good Housekeeping, Woman's Home Companion, and other periodicals.
As a self-employed writer, Walsh published more than fifty short stories and eleven novels, many of them featuring hard-shelled, tender-hearted Irish-American cops largely working alone, but in their ordinary tours of duty, and each of them set in the streets of New York City and depicting various elements of the city's vital population.
By 1950, he had published his first novel "Nightmare in Manhattan" for which he won the Edgar Allen Poe award for best first mystery. The novel was made into a movie called "Union Station" starring William Holden, Barry Fitzgerald and Nancy Olsen. Walsh wrote another 11 crime novels and continued to write short fiction long after the last of the pulps had folded, his other novels include, "Dark Window", "Dangerous Passenger", "The Action of the Tiger", and "The Eye of the Needle", and "Night Watch", which was made into the 1954 movie, "Pushover," starring Fred MacMurray and Kim Novak.
Walsh died October 21, 1984, in Danbury, Connecticut at the age of 76.
- IMDb mini biography by: F.J. Trescothik
- Worked sporadically as a pulp fiction writer. He had 6 crime stories appear in Black Mask from 1933-1936. A story of his was part of a Black Mask anthology published in 1946 as 'The Hard Boiled Omnibus.'
- Thomas Walsh was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America as the Best First Mystery of 1950 for Nightmare In Manhattan (the first of eleven novels). It was filmed as Union Station the same year.
- One good thing is that you can work wherever you hang your hat, but writing is a frightening business, you sit down there with a blank piece of paper and you have to fill it. A doctor or lawyer or insurance man gets out and talks to people, but a writer just sits by himself and writes.
- Writing mysteries takes a thief's mind.
- The life of a writer isn't all beer and skittles.
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