By Arden Berry | Staff Writer
While others might think retirement means relaxation, Dr. James Nogalski and Dr. Mark Biddle have murder, mystery and more on their minds.
Nogalski is a Lulie Craig Professor of Old Testament, and Biddle is a founding dean of Sophia Theological Seminary in Virginia. They published “Murder in the Tidwell Building” recently, but the seeds were sown for the novel long before.
Nogalski and Biddle have known each other for 50 years and started college together at Samford University, then did doctoral programs around the same time at the University of Zurich. One of their professors at the University of Zurich bet his children that he could get a detective novel published.
“They said, ‘No, you couldn’t; you just write all these academic things that nobody reads — 400-page books that maybe two people in Europe read,’” Nogalski said.
He then wrote a novel that became a bestseller in Switzerland for several weeks in the early 1990s, winning the bet.
“We’ve told that story for years,” Nogalski said.
Nogalski and Biddle went on to become professors themselves. In 2022, one of Nogalski’s graduate students found the book on Amazon and gave him a copy. Nogalski then sent the book to Biddle.
“One of us said to the other, ‘I mean, it was pretty good, but I could do that too,’” Biddle said. “So we just decided we would do one and see what happened.”
As a retirement project, they decided to write a trilogy of detective novels, something far outside their expertise in religion and seminary departments.
“We don’t watch daytime television, so what were we going to do?” Nogalski said. “[We said], ‘Well, let’s write something fun.’”
They would each write a part, then swap edits, meeting on Wednesday nights to discuss what came next. Nogalski said trying to smoothly integrate their different writing styles seemed difficult at first, so they would write about different characters each chapter so the differences in voice made sense. However, Biddle said their writing became “homogenized” during the process.
“By the time we’d all gone all the way through it and we were going back for that final edit or two, I would read a passage and couldn’t tell whether I had written it or Jim had written it,” Biddle said.
According to the synopsis, the book is about a skeleton found during the 2020 renovation of the Tidwell Bible Building. Two detectives take on the case, investigating the suspects: three Baylor staff members who worked for the religion department at the time of the murder.
“Two detectives meticulously and creatively pursue the killer, despite encountering bureaucratic resistance from the higher echelons of administrators in the Waco Police Department and Baylor University,” the synopsis reads.
Nogalski said the characters in the book are amalgamations of people they have known.
“We say in the acknowledgments in the front of the book that this is the place where the authors usually thank the people who’ve helped them research things about things that they didn’t know,” Nogalski said. “We say, ‘We didn’t have to do this. This is about people we have known through our careers.’”
Students may recognize the detectives’ journeys from their own class routes, as the characters in the book are scattered across campus.
“During that time, there were about 25 religion faculty, and they were in buildings all over campus, because they were supposed to be put in one place, but then COVID hit, and they couldn’t cram them all into that one space,” Nogalski said.
For example, Nogalski said the detectives walk from Morrison Hall to Pat Neff Hall to the Alexander Residence Hall basement and Cashion Academic Center.
“One of our readers said, ‘You know, Tidwell is actually a character,’” Nogalski said. “The Tidwell Building is actually a character in this novel, but so is Baylor University, because it’s all over the campus.”
The book also includes multiple restaurants around Waco, including Sascee’s Southern Style Eatery, Cajun Craft and the downtown Café Cappuccino.
“I asked my wife if it sounded like two academics wrote the book,” Nogalski said. “And she said, ‘No, it sounds like two police detectives eat and solve crimes.’”
Nogalski said the next two books will be “Missing from the Tidwell Building” and “Mayhem in the Tidwell Building.”
“We’ve already started the second novel,” Biddle said.
