D.K. Causey was born Kerry D. Marshall on 24 October 1959 in Mishawaka, Indiana. The third of eleven children, Kerry grew up in a crowded two bedroom home located on the right side of the tracks—but just barely. His father worked as a janitor while his mother worked as a drug store clerk when she wasn’t having children.

 

The author credits his large family and the problems inherent to being a member of such a family for helping him to understand human nature. And, of course, the family’s economic condition quickly taught the young author the value of hard work.

 

Despite the dearth of financial resources, the eldest four children all did well enough in school to get admitted to college. Kerry credits his mother for this success. “She read to us all the time and when we were old enough to read she took us to the library every week where we were allowed to check out five books each. This meant that we all read ten to fifteen books each week as we would read each others books when we completed our own.”

 

This love of reading did not turn into a passion for writing until Kerry was a freshman in high school and starting reading Kurt Vonnegut’s books. “I may have never read Vonnegut except for the fact that the pastor of our church once warned from the pulpit that our parents should keep us away from bad books and then cited Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five as one such book. Of course, I checked it out of the library the very next day.”

 

The irony here is that irony in Vonnegut’s writing style was the thing that got the author excited about writing. “I was used to books like biographies or mystery, or drama and they all came with this predictable tableau of the type of things they teach you in literature—foreshadowing, climax, denouement—but the idea that you could take some known thing and turn it on its head to make it seem ridiculous or otherwise absurd, well, this clicked in my mind as something very special.”

 

“I read Slaughterhouse at about the same time that a neighbor got drafted and shipped to Vietnam. Then Kent State happened. As an impressionable young person I felt the awkward push/pull of wanting my recently-drafted neighbor to have the sort of battlefield success I’d read about in those war novels and at the same time feeling this incredible sense of compassion for these long-haired freaks protesting that same war.

 

“Vonnegut’s book, which I had hoped would be filled with salacious tales of naked women, used irony and sarcasm to berate these adventures in mayhem. It was the times, my impressionable age, and that book that set me on the path to becoming a writer.”

 

In an interview with the South Bend Tribune after the publication of his first book, A Boy, A Ball, and a Dream, the author credited the school system in Mishawaka for helping him achieve his literary objectives. “From kindergarten to graduation I had great teachers who took an active role in seeing that I had the tools to be what I wanted to be. And when I got to college I was surprised to discover that my writing skills were far more polished than that of my colleagues. In fact, I was a better reader and writer than most of the freshman I met and I owe it to those English teachers who spent all those hours making us diagram sentences and complete book reports.”

 

This education proved quite valuable, but equally important was what Kerry describes as one in a long line of “gifts of fate.” During his freshman year the movie “Breaking Away” was being filmed on campus, granting Kerry and a lot of others to get a first hand view as to how Hollywood makes a movie.

 

The experience brought the author into contact with Angelo Pizzo and David Anspaugh, classmates who would later create the motion picture “Hoosiers.”

 

That movie was based upon real events involving a small town basketball team. Ironically, Kerry had played high school basketball for the real-to-life coach of that team and, in fact, had approached the coach, Marvin Wood with the idea of doing a book.

 

When the movie started making news in the papers Wood agreed to allow Kerry to write his story. “A Boy, A Ball, and a Dream,” the author’s first book under his real name was published in 1989 and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

Kerry wrote two more basketball biographies “Two of a Kind,” and “A Legend in High School Basketball.” The later was later turned into a documentary film for which the author wrote much of the script.

 

In 1991 the author took a sabbatical from writing to open his own publishing/distribution company, Scott Publication. Then in 1996 the author sold his fledgling publishing/distribution company and went to work for Macmillan Publishing. He left Macmillan at the end of 1999, bought a racquet club and began work on his first book of fiction, “Taxman.”

 

The short novel is loosely based upon the author’s experience as a tax collector with the IRS circa 1984-89. Not unlike Mr. Karst in Taxman, Kerry was never comfortable with his employer, but did good work anyway. He was a good tax collector—especially adept at getting people to tell him where they had their money.

 

Kerry decided to make the switch to fiction because he had been experimenting with a writing style that he felt would not work with a non-fiction piece. “By the time my own books were being published, I had already grown uncomfortable with the typical plot line of the biography, too, I had been tinkering with a different writing style but worried about alienating readers who had read my earlier stuff.”

 

The writing style could best be compared to the disgraced French author, Louis Ferdinand Celine. Vonnegut had mentioned Celine in one of his letters, encouraging the author to read “Death on the Installment Plan,” and, later, “Journey to the End of Night.”

 

Celine’s style lit a fire in the author who finally found someone with a “voice” similar to his own. “Celine opened my eyes to the extreme possibilities. He came right at the reader with an intensity that just would not let up. The dark humor he evoked could make you laugh and cry all at the same time.”

 

Kerry spent several years working on his own style (much to the chagrin of a passel of editors) until he finally came up with “Taxman” his first novel.

 

An avid tennis player who participates in national amateur tournaments, Kerry resides in Boca Raton Florida where he helps his brother Todd, a single parent, raise his teenage son, Josh.

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