VERO BEACH — Though he didn’t know it yet, the decades that local author William Walker spent as a pilot for Delta Air Lines stored up the resources he would need to succeed as a writer from the habit of precise observation to a collection of fascinating stories.
Fiction by the Pebble Bay resident garnered top honors from the Florida Writers’ Association. His novels, particularly “The French Teacher,” are perennial strong sellers at the Vero Beach Book Center.
Walker, 66, is a Nashville native who attended the University of Tennessee, where he met his wife, Maureen.
He graduated with a degree in economics in 1969, during the last stages of the Vietnam War.
Trained as a military pilot, he flew B-52 bombers in Vietnam. Once back in civilian life, his love of planes and flying led to a long-term career piloting international flights for Delta.
Though the opportunity to travel would pay off in his writing, it did come with a cost: frequent and lengthy absences from home.
“Maureen pitched in as a Little League and Cub Scout mom, as well as handling lots of the day to day tasks involved in raising our son.”
Walker began writing by chance.
“Almost 20 years ago I was asked by a local newspaper editor in Virginia to write a column about airline travel during the holidays from a pilot’s perspective,” he recalls.
The insider’s glimpses were so successful that he was asked to write a regular column, which continued until the Walkers moved to Florida in 2001.
The transition from newspaper column to novel was “as natural as breathing,” he says. “Give me a newspaper columnist, and I’ll give you a guy or gal who’s got a novel underway.”
Walker credits Vero Beach resident John Mackie, a writer of contemporary thrillers, for helping him make the transition into fiction.
“Six, maybe seven years ago, his workshop threw me into high gear, and I’ve never given a thought to downshifting since.
“I began writing what I knew best: airplanes and the personalities who were thrust into roles that stressed them beyond their comfort levels,” Walker says.
His first book, “Errand of Mercy,” was self-published in 2010. Using locations in South America, Africa and the U.K., the novel is a contemporary thriller about two pilots involved in a mission more sinister than it first appears.
“Not overplaying the level of technical flying detail was a primary concern. You don’t have to write everything you know,” he explains.
The story locations also drew from his travels as a pilot. It was on crew layovers scheduled around London flights that Walker first visited the picturesque “Lanes” area of Brighton, England, where much of the latter half of the book is set.
Like many other writers, Walker found literary agents cool to a first novel by an unknown writer.
“It’s possible to write a good novel, yet find it doesn’t get traction from agents or publishers due to considerations of marketing and economics,” he says. “Authors today can use print-on-demand publishing and e-book platforms that bypass the traditional publishing industry.”
Walker’s second novel, “The French Teacher,” brought his work from contemporary thriller to historical romance.
He credits the enjoyment he had writing the heroine of “Errand of Mercy” as inspiration for the shift.
“I liked writing her so much, and women liked reading her, that writing my next novel with a female protagonist was a natural transition.”
The characters at the heart of the book had been with Walker since his high school days. He remembers that the French husband of his American-born French teacher would visit the classroom every day to chat with her.
The memory of their meetings, as well as small details like the scar on the husband’s face, stayed with him.
“Even if I’d never attempted a single line of prose in my life, the storyline would still be with me the day I died. I don’t think many people are handed a story line like that, one so complete that it could have almost written itself, so to speak.”
With the German attack on France under way in the summer of 1940, the meeting of its protagonists, Noelle Stevenson and Adrian Bonnet, leads both to love and intrigue. Though the protagonists are fictional, other characters in the tale are historical figures.
The story’s authentic period details were drawn from wide reading, interviews and personal experience.
“My younger brother and I lived for a summer during the late ‘60s with a European family in Brasschaat, Belgium,” he recalls. “‘The French Teacher’ draws on many of my observations from that time.”
With the novel drafted and polished, Walker produced both a Kindle and a paperback edition. The print version hit the number one spot on the Vero Beach Book Center bestseller list upon its release and stayed in the top ten for many months.
Part of the novel’s local success is thanks to Deborah Sentance, one of the staff at the Vero Beach Book Center.
“The most wonderful thing about my job is the opportunity to do what is called hand selling,” she says. “Book Center browsers often request recommendations. I ask what they’re in the mood for and what they’ve read recently, so my responses will vary.”
“Recommending ‘The French Teacher’ is easy,” she continues. “Bill has put everything into the story you could possibly want: suspense, drama, romance, history, travel. It’s very touching — and he’s a local resident as well.”
In addition to its local success, “The French Teacher” won the Royal Palm Literary Award in Historical Fiction at the 2012 Florida Writer’s Association conference.
His third novel, “The Cold Season,” won the same award in the romance category that year, as well as being honored with one of the conference’s top awards, Unpublished Book of the Year. It was the first time any author had won the three awards in a single year.