His children knew he was a writer, but he wasn’t one to talk about it much, according to his daughter, Sara Jeanne Beddow. “He always said that if he didn’t treat his writing career like a regular job he wouldn’t get anything done,” said his son Tim Wade. They thought so much alike they rarely argued. Miller revised it, and the two polished the final product together. In 1946, he and Miller wrote their first novel, “Deadly Weapon.” For the next 15 years, working 9-to-5 days at an office in La Mesa, they turned out two books a year, sometimes three, many of them featuring a San Diego private eye named Max Thursday. He was a beach-landing infantryman in North Africa, worked counterintelligence in Tunisia, and served as a combat correspondent during the liberation of Rome - experiences that earned him a Bronze Star and gave him lessons in human nature that shaped the writing soon to come. Wade took various jobs to finance those pursuits - grocery clerk, shoe salesman, truck driver - and then entered the Army when World War II started. They worked together on school publications at Hoover High and San Diego State, and formed a small theater group and motion-picture company. That launched a partnership lasting 30 years. Miller were asked to write a one-act play for their English class at Woodrow Wilson Junior High. “Luckily,” he later joked, “no copies survive.” Their son took to books early and wrote his first novel when he was 8. His mother, Camille, was a teacher and stay-at-home mom. His father, Wilson, worked in the railroad and health-care industries.
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