In the 1960s, Edgar winner John McAleer didn’t spend his days in a maximum-security prison brooding. Instead, he masterminded a brilliant escape plan using nothing more than a set of typewriter keys.
As McAleer recounted in the Epilogue of his novel Unit Pride, one September morning in 1965, he entered his Boston College office to find on his desk a single letter addressed to him in a boyish scrawl. “Across the first page, in letters red and bold as a cutlass wound, was stamped the single word—CENSERED.”
The letter writer, William “Billy” Dickson, was serving time in Cedar Junction “Walpole” State Penitentiary—then Massachusetts’s maximum-security prison. How he got there his letter didn’t say.
Billy wrote McAleer with questions about a review McAleer had written for the Boston Globe regarding Theodore Dreiser. A review, Billy felt the need to add, that he’d “retrieved from a wastebasket.”
McAleer thought Billy’s questions were worthy of response, so, slipping on his professor’s cap, McAleer answered them in detail. The professor’s response would ignite a 1,200-letter correspondence between professor and prisoner.
“I had no idea,” McAleer wrote, “what its implications would be for Billy. Into the dark well that he inhabited someone had lowered a rope’s end. He grabbed hold of it and held on as though his life depended on it, as, in fact, it probably did.”
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Edgar winner & Boston College Professor John McAleer with Korean War combat veteran William “Billy” Dickson. McAleer & Dickson wrote UNIT PRIDE while Dickson was serving a 30-year bid for bank robbery.
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McAleer never asked Billy why he was doing time. Instead, he sent Billy lists of books he should read—Crime and Punishment, Moll Flanders, Pepy’s Diary. “Billy,” McAleer noted, “took in information like a sea sponge takes in moisture.”
At the end of three months Billy came clean about his incarceration. He was convicted of bank robbery, took a hostage, and was now doing a 30-year bid. As it turned out, the bank teller he held up was McAleer’s sister-in-law and this writer’s aunt, Alice. In any event, if Billy thought bank robbery was his calling, he couldn’t have been more mistaken.
In 2007, at age 91, Alice still recalled the botched hold-up in vivid detail. “I remember he [Billy] slid me a note,” she said, “and I slid it back to him because I thought it was a slip to open a new account and I didn’t handle that. Then he slid it back to me and I thought he was being fresh, so I slid it back to him again. He was a lousy bank robber.”
Despite the “Alice” connection, McAleer continued the correspondence and began visiting Billy in prison. Upon learning that Billy, at age 17, served front-line duty in Korea, McAleer—a WWII-veteran—encouraged Billy to write about his wartime experiences. Having seen so many lives torn and shattered in WWII, McAleer saw Billy as a troubled veteran, who, like so many others, found it difficult to adjust.
McAleer critiqued his new student’s initial writing attempt.
“Billy’s first ‘chapter’ reached me a week later…. It was ungrammatical, wooden abrupt…. Yet the picture was not altogether bleak. His dialogue…was honest in its thrust. His pace was brisk. His capacity for serving up incidents both unusual and exciting showed promise… Most striking of all was the evidence that Billy had total recall.”
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McAleer outside his Carney Hall-Boston College office circa 1980s.
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The co-writers met regularly at Walpole Prison. In a fifteen-month period from March 1966 and June 1967, they had produced a 1000-page manuscript they could call a novel. The accomplishment came with a price, however; “prison life” changed McAleer.
“Unwittingly, I came to share some of [Billy’s] attitudes, finding myself, for example, as mistrustful of the screws (the guards) at the prison as he was. I suspect they knew it, too. Because they always frisked me thoroughly when I came to call. They never found any contraband on me, however, because the only thing I was smuggling was ideas.”
The freshly typed manuscript titled, The Platoon, became the tool McAleer used to loosen the parole board’s grip. Impressed with Billy’s rehabilitation, parole released him in time to stand in as this writer’s godfather in August 1967.
Billy (whose marriage survived his incarceration) would go on to have another son and attend his daughter’s wedding in 1973. McAleer recalled the occasion, “Billy grabbed my arm as we sat there talking in the waning hours of the reception. ‘You’re my best friend,’ he said, ‘I want you to know that.’ I knew also that it meant a hell of a lot for him to say that…. Seven months later Billy was dead—stabbed to death by a disgruntled employee of his cleaning business. Only one newspaper took notice—fives lines under the caption ‘Ex-Con Slain.’ Seven years of going straight didn’t matter.”
McAleer went on about his fellow veteran, “At the cemetery an American flag draped Billy’s coffin and they played taps over his grave. It never sounded lonelier. His country at least remembered him as a man who got blown up, machine-gunned, and bayoneted…and not a one-shot bank robber who spent eleven years in prison paying for his mistake.”
So tragic was Billy’s death that it wasn’t until 1978 that McAleer could pick up the manuscript again and only did so at the behest of Billy’s widow.
McAleer reflected, “Although Billy wasn’t there to hold me in check or spur me on, in effect I made no move without consulting him. Would Billy like this? Would he have my ass for that?”
After a 450-page trim and title change, Unit Pride was released in 1981 (Doubleday & Bantam). The Ontario Globe credited it as the definitive novel of the Korean War and Best Sellers as one of the most harrowing depictions of the horrors of war ever written.
Mission completed, McAleer looked back on that September morning in 1965, when he first learned of a man named Billy Dickson.
“At last I rested from labors begun fifteen years earlier when a man in prison pulled me out of a wastebasket, like a rabbit out of a hat. Would I have written that review had I known all that would have become of it? I like to think so. It’s weird, I admit, but I like saying yes to life. It’s more interesting that way.”
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Andrew McAleer is the best-selling author of the Detective Henry von Stray classic British crime series created by Edgar winner John McAleer. Von Stray’s adventures appear in A Casebook of Crime Volume One. A second von Stray collection, A Casebook of Crime Volume Two, is scheduled for release in March 2026 (Level Best Books). Mr. McAleer taught classic crime fiction at Boston College and served in Afghanistan as a U.S. Army Historian before returning to public service in the criminal justice system. Visit the Henry von Stray Museum of Criminal Artifacts at: www.Henryvonstraymysteries.com
