About Kevin Doyle
Hello there and welcome to my site. Please enjoy and I hope the stories that I write will intrigue you.
Born in, raised in, and a lifelong Midwesterner, I’m a walking, talking cliché. (And yes, I realize that “walking, talking” is pretty much a cliché in itself.) For over a quarter century, I’ve worked as a teacher of English and communications while churning out fiction on the side. However, it’s hardly been a fast track (darn, another cliché) to success:
When I was in fifth grade, I read a short story by Arthur C. Clarke called “The Star.” To this day, it probably ranks as my favorite short story. Even at such a young age, I was blown away by how epic of a story Clarke tells in something like, maybe, two thousand words.
When I was nineteen, sitting bored at home one day, I decided to haul out my mother’s old Smith-Corona typewriter. For lack of anything else to do, I took a stab at hammering out a short story of my own. (Spoiler, it was total dreck.)
At the age of twenty-four, my first story appeared in print. Titled “The Prime Ingredient,” it showed up in one of the old-time “little” magazines, in this case a publication from South Carolina called Starsong. The total readership was around two hundred. Even so, it was not only my first fiction publication, but Starsong continued to publish more of my stories over the next few years. (Wherever you are, thank you publisher and editor Larry D. Kirby III.)
In between that first published story and what was to come, I worked in a candy store to pay my way through ten years of night school, acquired a bachelor’s and a master’s, landed my first teaching job through a complete fluke, (teaching was not in my career plan at all). After a few years of bouncing around found myself working at a small high school in rural Missouri. All that time, to one degree or another, working at honing my fiction writing skills.
Fast forward (cliché again and really not all that fast) to the ripe old age of forty-eight when my first “book” a novelette titled One Helluva Gig appeared in e-book form, released by Vagabondage Press out of Florida. A different genre from most of my material, Gig tells the story of a faded rock and roll superstar and how his death and posthumous fame impacts a man with only a passing acquaintance of the star. A new edition of Gig is currently available from The Wild Rose Press. (Check out the Books page of this site.)
Now, a decade removed from that first e-book publication, we’re up to two series of mystery novels: the set of books that began with The Group, currently out via The Wild Rose Press, and the Sam Quinton private detective series, released by Camel Press. I also have a couple of standalones I’m kind of proud of from Night to Dawn Magazine and Books.
March of 2023 will see the release of Clean Win, the fourth in the Sam Quinton series. The story comes out only a few months before I finally retire from teaching English and settle down to doing whatever I want.
A long journey, a rather bumpy one, and one that I plan to not conclude for quite some time to come. In the future, I plan to do a bit of traveling, get a pet to keep me company, and oh yeah, keep churning out the stories. Happy Reading!