More Stories by Joe!
Still on Bookstore Shelves
Wonderful... It's like looking at old postcards,
addictive and unpredictable.
-- The Arizona Republic
It features 365 rare and spectacular images from the unmatched photo archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, one for each day of the year. Inside you'll find images I guarantee you've never seen before: Lou Gehrig posing with the Marx Brothers; Babe Ruth boxing with Jack Dempsey; Ty Cobb at the checkerboard; Casey Stengel with a presidential trifecta: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson; wartime ballplayers; Negro League stars; World Series heroes and goats; and a host of other players, fans, and celebrities (including Al Capone, William Jennings Bryan, and Milton Berle!)
My Newest Baseball Book: Now Available
It’s an overflowing, batter’s-up buffet
stocked with goodies for fans of all ages.
—Neil Pond, American P
Grand Old Game, my first 365 Days book, included photographs and stories covering 1900 through about 1970. Baseball: 365 Days, featuring magnificent color photographs from the archives of Major League Baseball, picks up where the first book left off. It contains spectacular images and fascinating background stories of every great star of the game’s eventful last forty years from Willie Mays and Tom Seaver through George Brett and Ozzie Smith and all the way to Derek Jeter, Ichiro, and David Ortiz. Not to mention fans, surprising spring-training and behind-the-scenes shots, and highlights from great All Star Games and World Series, and you’ve got a book to remind you of why baseball remains America’s Pastime, more than a century after it first came on the scene.
Offering “wonderful color photographs for every day of the year” (Bruce Dancis, Sacramento Bee),
Baseball: 365 Days is available at bookstores or here.
My Latest Mystery Story
I’m proud to say that my story “The Big Five” is appearing beside terrific works by such literary heroes of mine as S. J. Rozan, Lawrence Block, and Kevin Baker in Bronx Noir. Publishers Weekly loved the collection, saying that it contains “memorable tales of betrayal and despair that reflect the borough's varied ethnic populations and geography.” The review also mentioned my story, saying, “The most imaginative entry, Joseph Wallace's 'The Big Five', about a hunter who targets his prey in the Bronx Zoo as part of a national contest, concludes with a satisfying noir twist.” Hope you enjoy it!
HUNTING FOR TREASURE
Hi, I'm Joe. Thanks for stopping by.
I’ve been a professional writer now for more than a quarter of a century. (And a writer for even longer, ever since my parents bought me an Olympia electric typewriter for my thirteenth birthday.) But unlike most freelancers, who focus on one area of expertise throughout their careers, I’m always bouncing around from one subject to the next. Baseball. Natural history. Mystery stories. Science and technology. Children’s books.
People sometimes ask me what ties together all these varied subjects. I usually joke that I just have trouble concentrating on any one thing for long. But I think I’ve finally figured out the real reason. (Better late than never).
Everything I write feels like a treasure hunt. And what’s more fun than hunting for treasure?
When I put together my new Baseball: 365 Days and Grand Old Game, I spent weeks searching through the vast photo archives of Major League Baseball and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, looking for the rarest, strangest, most revealing images I could find. Every time I found a photograph I knew I’d use, I felt like I’d come upon a gold nugget in a mine filled with them. And the same held true for uncovering the stories behind all those marvelous photos.
When I write my other nonfiction books, like A Gathering of Wonders: Behind the Scenes at the American Museum of Natural History, the treasure is the perfect detail, the telling quote, the unique angle that will vividly bring to life a complicated subject. I love telling stories that few others have heard, and opening readers’ eyes to our remarkable world while I do so.
And when I create the crime stories I’ve been focusing on the past couple of years, I feel like I’ve discovered treasure when I come up with the twist ending—the moment that readers suddenly understand that I’ve been playing with them, setting them up for the story’s exciting climax. Read my story “The Big Five” in the new Bronx Noir,, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
I hope you enjoy my books and stories. Please feel free to contact me with any comments or questions, or just to tell me your own stories. Because those can be treasures, too.
