About... Philip Warren
May I offer a few quick facts about myself and why I like to write
stories?
​
~I was born in Buffalo, NY, in a community that seemed
to be 100% Polish--just like me. And while I'm proud of
my Polish ethnicity, my surname is a longish one people
rarely pronounce or spell correctly--hard to look up on
Amazon! Philip Warren is my real name, I tell people--
just not all of it.
​
~I went to Our Lady of Czestochowa elementary school
in Cheektowaga, a suburb of Buffalo until age 11, when
we moved for my father's job at Ohio's Lorain Ford Plant.
​
~And so, it was to St. Peter's School in Huron, Ohio, that I finished primary school and then, on to Huron High School. Huron could have been the town where Beaver Cleaver grew up--an idyllic place on Lake Erie where, back then, no one locked their doors. I love to go back for visits.
​
~On to Xavier University in Cincinnati, I finished there with a BS in History/Political Science and a minor in Philosophy.
​
~It was 1968, and my draft board was determined to make a decision about my future unless I made other plans. Surprisingly, I became a Chinese linguist for the US Army Security Agency and served at several US locations before spending nearly two years atop a mountain in Taiwan keeping tabs on Red China's plans during the Vietnam War.
​
~On the same day in 1973, I was offered two jobs and taking my father's advice, I went to work for the US Civil Service Commission as an Investigator, GS-7 at the grand salary of $9520 per annum. After 7 years working in Cincinnati, across southern Indiana, Ohio, and parts of West Virginia and Kentucky, Denver became my next assignment as a Supervising Investigator with responsibility for six states.
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~I went to Denver as a newlywed and a few years later our son was born. A few years later, our daughter came along in Grove City, PA (which I call Foreston in Winter's Dead).
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~In 1985, I became the Assistant Division Chief, then Chief of Investigations at the US Office of Personnel Management's Investigations Center in a deep limestone mine near Boyers, PA, where I worked for the next 18 years for the government, and then, as Chief Operating Officer of the private iteration of OPM's investigating activity until I retired in 2004. The mine is featured in Murder Down Deep.
​
~Since then, I've served on many non-profit boards of trustees, including my alma mater for six years, and as trustee and treasurer of Grove City College's board since 2008 and counting.
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~Over the years, I've published 5 novels, and write because I'm always looking for the answer to, "What if...?"
​
Winter's Dead and Murder Down Deep are about my beloved western Pennsylvania where I wake up to the sounds of birds and buggy wheels, but where life goes on, and things happen...
like murder.
​
Was that enough for you?
