Phillip Gilliam

Bio
Phillip Gilliam was born on March 6, 1959, in Norfolk, Virginia. He graduated from Morgan State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Engineering in 1981 and immediately went to work for Verizon. A senior engineering manager by trade, he was awarded United States Patent 5,957,878 on September 28, 1999 in Biomechanics for custom compression garments. He was awarded United States Patent 7,803,092 on September 28, 2010 in Biomechanics for an exercise device called the Sisyphean Chamber.
He became a fan of the music, stories, tough guys and dangerous women of film noire at a young age. He was mesmerized by the stylish Hollywood crime dramas and hard boiled characters with their cynical attitudes, lost causes and sexual motivations. His heroes were Philip Marlowe, Cody Jarrett, Terry Malloy, Jake Gittes and Vito Corleone. Roles and films made famous by actors like Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Edward G. Robinson, Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. All led or misled by femme fatales like Jane Greer, Mary Astor, Lauren Bacall, Gene Tierney, Betty Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner or Faye Dunaway. Some of them were just rotten to the core.
The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, Key Largo, The Maltese Falcon, White Heat, On the Waterfront, Chinatown or The Godfather. Flash ahead to L.A Confidential, Basic Instinct, Se7en, Devil in a Blue Dress, The Usual Suspects, Black Dahlia or Public Enemies. Mention them and you could almost hear the slow, distant saxophone solo in concert with a solitary piano keeping pace with the brushes lightly kissing the drums. Before the age of 15, he was listening to Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Count Basie.
The idea for Black Leather Apron began one spring when he went to Louie’s Book Store to get a book called “The Complete History of Jack the Ripper”. He had an Idea, woven around that infamous serial killer and a tribute to the genre he loved. He didn’t like that the Ripper was never caught and he was going to catch him. The guy who would do it was John Talion.
An ex-cop who fell on hard times but was about to show how far he would go in pursuit of evil. Phil studied the actual 1888 crimes in nauseating written and photographic detail. The book took him back through the gruesome murder scenes, terror and pure evil that engulfed White Chapel. He read it cover to cover to get angry enough to come after the Ripper in print. The book felt evil and he would periodically have to put it down to cleanse his soul before he started again, lest it would become a part of him. Then he just started writing, from the heart.
The locations in 1888 White Chapel looked strangely like an area of Baltimore called Fells Point. You could drive up Charles Street to the Washington Monument and Walters Art Galley area and down to Fells Point and the alley ways and by ways matched almost perfectly the deserted streets where Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Kelly and Emma Smith were gutted, butchered and disemboweled.
He walked these alleys at night until he found the perfect replicas, scene for scene. He would stay after work and be the only person on the 3rd floor with a few cubicles still lit. He would write and if he needed to, drift out to see the locations, make notes and take photos. It felt like what was needed to catch the Ripper. As he wrote, the story just flowed out of him. He wrote a story with characters that he believed in delivering the justice these women deserved.