Journalist, pulp novelist, and Navy historian, Walter Karig wrote under his own name and under at least four pseudonyms.
Karig served in the Infantry in WWI, then worked as a journalist, contributing to the Newark Evening News, The Guardian, the Saturday Evening Post, and Colliers. He was also book editor at the Washington Post. He worked for the US Navy from 1942 to 1954, earning a Legion of Merit award, and was in charge of the Navy Narrative History Project, which chronicled Allied naval operations during WWII and released a series of six books. He was one of the writers and a technical director for the television documentary Victory at Sea.
There is also, according to the Washington Post, some speculation that Karig worked as a spy, and that this house was the setting for secret meetings for the military in the months leading up to the US entry into WWII.
Karig wrote detective novels under the name Keats Patrick such as Death is a Tory (1935), and The Pool of Death (1942), and genre novels under his own name such as Lower Than Angels (1945), and Zotz! (1947), later made into a Hollywood movie starring Tom Poston and Jim Backus. His titles also include the memoirs The Fortunate Islands: A Pacific Interlude (1948), and The Pig in the Parlor (1949), co-written with his wife Eleanor Karig. In addition, he wrote twenty mysteries and adventure books for children, including books in the Doris Force Series (under the name Julia K. Duncan), and in the Perry Pierce Mystery Series (under the name Clinton W. Locke). Most notable among his ghost writing credits are three of the Nancy Drew mysteries that he wrote under the name Carolyn Keene (1932-33). A former member of the Cosmos Club and the National Press Club, he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
The Homes
3834 Seminary Road, Alexandria, VA
Walter Karig
3834 Seminary Road
Located in Northern Virginia