bio

When the Middle East opened up for business in the mid 1970’s American companies were not ready. Their reluctance to export was based on a limited international financial structure for doing business outside the borders of the United States. Spotting an opportunity, David Paul Collins set up a merchant banking business in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. In 1978, at the invitation of the Pahlavi family, he opened an office in Tehran. The company engaged in merchant banking using Letters of Credit in favor of American companies who were paid in US dollars to ship products to the Middle East. By 1979 most of the company’s business came from Iran. That experience led to his latest book An Improbable Spy.

An Improbable Spy draws on David’s adventures during the time of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and the takeover of the American embassy by radical Islamic students.

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In the book, protagonist, Jack Devlin escapes the raging chaos in Tehran, leaving behind 80% of his business and 100% of his heart. Weeks later in London he enters a devil’s bargain with the CIA and MI6 to rescue the girl he left behind in Iran, Farideh. In exchange, he accepts the CIA’s condition to return to Tehran and to steal the client ledger of the world’s largest arms dealer, Mustafa Khaki, Farideh’s father.

David’s lifelong enjoyment of writing short stories and poetry expanded to a fictionalized memoir in his first book, Shanghaied. It is a coming-of-age story based on his personal experience. At the age of 15, Jack ran away from home to find a job on a cruise ship. His search took a life changing turn when he woke up on an African freighter far at sea with no idea how he got there, where he was going, or if he would ever get home again.

On the S/S Iron Prince, the largest ship in the world, we meet the fictional protagonist, Jack Sligo. Unknown to Jack, the ship’s deck master, Bo’sun Manor Nelson, a Cayman Islander, protects him from members of the crew who would have made Caribbean pirates seem like drawing room gentlemen.

In 2001 David traveled with his wife to Grand Cayman to track down the real bo’sun, Orman Whittaker. It had been decades since they had seen each other, and David brought photos he had taken when they were at sea together. The pictures became treasures for the family who did not have any photos of the bo’sun from his younger days. The family enjoyed hearing firsthand stories about their father as the ship’s bo’sun and how he protected David. Finding the bo’sun triggered the writing of Shanghaied.

David Collins is the CEO and managing director of Active Living International, an advisory firm in the business of senior living. He has been in the business of senior living for more than 30 years. David’s travels have taken him to 161 countries. He has flown move than 14 million miles, ten million of which were on American Airlines. David’s writing, whether in planes, hotels, or coffee shops anywhere is his favorite activity other than spending time with family.

Books

Short Stories

“A Cold Gray Morning” by David Paul Collins

No cold gray morning had ever been so cold or so gray. A rasping rattle shattered the softness of the silence. He was about to die and we both knew it. The infirmary’s electric green walls numbed dawn’s dullness as light bulbs surrendered their importance to the light of day. No one was in the room but the two of us. If he felt the presence of God, I did not. Where was He anyway? What happened to Him? Why did we have to go through this torment, this pain that, for Dad at least, would define forever?

Just two days ago, it was hope that we measured. My father had an uncanny way of hanging on to hope without letting anyone know he needed to do just that. Not me. I screamed hope, prayed it, sang it, and lied to God that if He let my dad live I would never commit another sin. But hope diminished within my struggle to hold on to the life escaping before me, leaving for another world.

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Townspeople glanced curiously at the two small-town boys skipping down the street but Jack didn’t care. He felt the sun warming his back, urging him forward to see and feel everything the world had to offer, even though it was only the next town.

“Where’s the train depot?” he asked a cobbler straddling a workbench inside the door of his shop. He smoothed his tan leather apron and stepped into a sunny spot under a pair of bronze horseshoes nailed to the wooden doorframe. “Goin’ somewhere, kid? Takin’ a train?”

“Sure, Mister. Maybe not today, but I’m sure gonna’ take one soon. Is it far to the depot?” “Other side of the street, go down two blocks, you’ll see a sign. It’s up a flight of stairs where trains cross over Elm Street. My son took it last week, went to military intelligence school in Washington.”

“Aw, your son must be really brave.”

“He’s brave all right, but he could get killed in some far off lonely place. He’d be better off as a private in the army. Might’ve got stationed up at Fort Devens so’s he’d be back here for church and Sunday dinners.” The cobbler turned back to his work.

“I’m goin’ back to the hardware store,” Bernie said.​ In the afternoon sunshine, young Jack felt it, a new sensation, a stirring, about where his belly button hid. A knowing kind of feeling, imagining himself traveling to faraway places, maybe to an even bigger town. Along the side of the Elm Street Bridge, loose gravel slipped under Jack’s feet as he climbed a worn path up to the train station.

The first sign he saw read Platform One. He wondered why it was called platform one, it was the only platform and there was only one track. A few people in the small crowd held suitcases, others had armfuls of bawling kids. One smiling guy held a bunch of flowers. The faded red station master’s house was just big enough for the old man’s desk and the ticket-seller sitting behind a brown wicker grill. Jack watched the station master walk out of his office, don a blue hard bill cap then grab a wagon yoke loaded with bags. The ticket-taker helped push it to a spot where the bags could be tossed on the train.

Then Jack heard it, a loud whistle announcing a roaring power smoking up from the valley to the little knob of the town on the crown of the hill. He could almost feel the power and strength of the engine when he saw white smoke puffing out of its soot-black stack. He felt his excitement build, overjoyed that just by chance, he had made it for the arrival of an iron giant. He ran up to help push the baggage wagon as if he was one of the railroad company’s team.

Another whistle, the train was coming. He wished it was coming for him. “Someday,” he said to himself, it would. He’d jump aboard and head out of town, learn how to be a detective, maybe even become a spy.

“Thanks for your help, sonny, now run along,” ordered the station master.

“Okay, mister, but where’s this train coming from?” “New York.”

“Wow. And where is it going?”

“New York, Sonny. This here’s the end of the line.”

“No it isn’t. It’s the beginning.”


“My Grandfather” by David Paul Collins

My grandfather was special to me with all his Irish blarney and the absolute conviction that he could lick any ten men. He never urged me to wander nor suggested I stay safely at home as his sons had done. But the stories he told about magical, faraway places jump-started my wanderlust just like letting out the clutch in an old Chevy sputtering downhill, sparking the engine and burning out.

His name was Padriagh McGuiness, Pat in English, my childhood hero. His love of travel was restrained by a low paying job, hardly earning enough to support his wife and four children—one of them my mother. He loved to tell stories about life in Ireland, especially about the wandering gypsies he called the Traveling People. They were known as “Tinkers” and bartered pots and pans out of their horse drawn wagons along the dusty village byways.

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Gramps liked to talk about the sea and the old sailing ships that brought the Irish from their blighted potato fields to the hard cobble streets of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. There, they worked as day laborers on construction gangs, or, if they knew the right people, they got on with the fire department or the police force. Work was hard to find, especially for the Irish. Every one of them knew that a want ad ending with “INNA” meant “Irish Need Not Apply.”

Gramps worked with a blacksmith in the old country but never completed his apprenticeship. He was only sixteen when he left to find work as a blacksmith in America. Horses pulling trolleys and streetcars, clopping on cobblestones went through horseshoes with regularity and Gramps kept them shod. The horses didn’t mind that he was Irish.

By the time I got to know him, his black hair was shot with solid streaks of white, his full mustache stained yellow from cheap cigars. No one could make a muscle as big as his, and no one could tell stories with the passion and heroism of Pat McGuiness. He’d been born in the west of Ireland and never knew for sure exactly when, but he knew where: a rocky farm near in County Sligo. Cabbage, boiled with carrots for supper every night, with a joint of skinny lamb on an occasional Sunday, contributed to Gramps’ dream of a better life in America.

His father scratched off a meager living on land ruined by the potato famine of the 1880s. It was not enough to provide for a family with eight kids, let alone give them a future. One by one they left for the promise of America. They sailed away in tall ships from the Port of Cobh, Ireland, for a place called Boston. Of the eight, only six of the McGuiness brothers and sisters arrived in America. Gramps’ two youngest sisters were lost in a storm along with one hundred twenty other Irish souls off Nova Scotia.

In his Boston neighborhood Gramps met other Irishmen and joined their club, the AOH, the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Eventually, Gramps met Mary Elizabeth O’Rourke, recently arrived from Drumshanbo, a small village not thirty miles away from his family farm.

Gramps dreamed of returning to Ireland one day but never did. When word came that his mother had died he was determined to go back and see his father. A few years later a letter came from his cousin in Ballinamore. Gramps didn’t have to open it to know that he’d missed that chance too.

The captivating stories began before I started kindergarten. Stories of Irish women who chewed gum or smoked cigarettes, and, as a consequence, were left in the crossroads after dark to be tormented by banshees, were meant to be a warning. He told tall tales about mean school masters who whipped students with a blackthorn cane. Gramps said when he was whipped it was unfair because he never did anything wrong. His eyes twinkled mischievously when he told stories about girls who came to run their hands through his wavy hair when he was a lad.

My favorite stories were about the leprechauns. “Tell me again about the wee people,” I’d say.

“Well, I’ve hardly ever talked to them meself, but I’ve seen them, often in the shining of an October moon. They come out from under the shamrocks to taste the drops of rain gathered on the grass and in the crooks of the clover. The wee ones liked to play tricks on people and would leave a t’penny piece at the side of the path. They waited until a passerby come along, looking around in all directions to see if anyone was watchin’. Just as the citizen bent down to pick up the money, the wee ones would swoop in, grab the coin, and run under a sprig of grass too fast for the poor fellow to see anything but a little green wave in the clover. Then they’d laugh and laugh in tones too high to be heard by mortal men.”

My grandfather had a lifelong malady which came to be called the Irish virus. He loved the drink. It only took one and he was off. He called it many things: “John Barleycorn, drop of the dew, holy water, jug o’punch, whiskey o’, and one drink’s never enough.”

The curse of “the drink” often came close to ending his marriage, but Catholics stayed together. My grandmother struggled with the problem, as her mother had before her. They knew that their husbands got drunk whenever they drank and endured long periods of sobering up. The “troubles” they called it and said I’d be doomed as well. Not me. In my mind I said never.

Gramps’ nights of rough and rowdy drunkenness were followed by weeks of enforced abstinence and rigorous policing. Recovering from bouts with John Barleycorn also meant nursing wounds from fights with bar keepers, Publicans, as they were known, and the Garda, Gaelic for cops.

My grandfather said a couple of pints made him stronger. My grandmother said it made him smaller and slower, but Gramps never believed in anything that would constrain the quite reasonable downing of a pint of Irish whiskey, or maybe two. At five-feet-eight, he was strong for his frame. His bulldog determination got stronger as the night and the pints went on. After two or three, he felt six feet tall and knew he looked like the “strong man” Charles Atlas.

Mulligan’s Combination Bar and Grill was the centerpiece of the wild side of Irish life in our neighborhood. Sometimes, Gramps took me with him and I loved it. Women were invited on Sunday afternoons, scarcely seen the rest of the week. Men lined the bar two and three deep, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights, Gramps’ favorite time to sneak out for a quick pint.

By the time one pint became six or seven, my fiesty grandfather would begin to assess the crowd. Marching up and down behind the men at the bar he would choose the biggest of the lot. Then with a leap, he would slap his victim on the head and stand back proudly, hands on his hips. The man would turn around, face red as fire, ready to fight.

“Do ye know who I am?” Gramps would challenge. “Well, I’m Paddy McGuiness and I live in Dewey Street and Dewey Street is the toughest street in the city and the further up you go the tougher it gets and I live in the last house.”

Another leap and a hard right to the jaw of this chosen victim with a sideways kick to the crotch of the man next to him for good measure, and he had their attention. In no time at all, two of the biggest men in the house began to pummel little Paddy McGuiness.

This could not be tolerated according to the see-saw moral code of the likes of those who frequented Irish saloons. Two against one was more than a fellow could stand to watch.

“Oh, did you see what that blaggard just did to poor Pat?” one would say to another.

“Tsk. Tsk. And him just after havin’ a pint. Let’s help him out now, Mickey, shall we?”

Within moments, Gramps got help from one or two, which drew in three or four, just to even things out.

The Paddy Wagon was always parked nearby. The cops knew it would be needed sooner or later. By the time it screeched to a stop in front of Mulligan’s, there would be fifteen to twenty men fully engaged in a brawl. The cops would march them out and haul the lot of them off to the lock up downtown.

Grandmother always asked me to go with her to the jailhouse to see the example of Gramps locked up for drinking and fighting at Mulligan’s. Waiting by the door, I would hear Gramps pleading with the bailiff to let him stay in the tank for just a few more days. But the bailiff had no mercy and always released him to the care of his wife with a proper send-off. “Arragh, Pat, ye’ve learned yer lesson now, haven’t ya? Sure and won’t you be welcome into the loving arms of your dear Mary Elizabeth,” the bailiff would say as he pushed him out the door.

No sooner would Gramps step over the threshold than Grandmother would begin her saintly litany.

“Come here to me, Pat, you scoundrel. Spending the money from me table, taking bread out of the mouths of our children and today being Sunday acting like a Protestant, you scalawag. Come with me, I’ll see to your troubles and you’ll not go out alone to a wake or a dance or a hullabaloo without me breaking both of your scrawny legs and Tim Murphy’s too if he ever again sticks his ugly puss in me door looking for the likes of you. You’ll not go to Hibernians’ Hall or Mulligan’s, you blaggard, and I’ll speak to Mayor O’Brien about banning you from the parades and the cemetery where I know Thomas Kennedy keeps a bottle or two shoved under his poor wife’s tombstone.”

She took a breath, but she wasn’t finished. “Glory be to God, Pat, you’re a curse and I’ll deal with you in the coal cellar where you’ve got bottles hidden. I’ve thrown out me vanilla extract which was meant for me cakes and step lively so we don’t have to wait for a streetcar.”

Gramps would look back lovingly at the jailhouse door, but it was no use. The iron will of Mary Elizabeth would put him into solitary confinement at home with bread and water for several days until a few well-timed winks would bring a forgiving smile to her face, and the cycle would begin again.


“Next Town” by David Paul Collins

When spring came, Jack and his best friend, Bernie Flynn, decided to explore their world. They skipped school, hitched a ride to the next town where skinny trees, held up by green sticks stuck in square plots, lined every street. Posters of red-cheeked waitresses in skimpy uniforms, balancing milkshakes and burgers on a tray, plastered the windows of the soda fountain.

The hardware store with strange tin things was next to a shop advertising second-hand dresses. The Five and Ten Cent store would open at ten o’clock, read a sign on the door. A stone steeple church with climbing green ivy walls was the focal point of Main Street. The old granite library got a quick visit. It  smelled moldy, looked dreary, but was the source of the spy novels and thrillers Jack’s dad liked to read. Jack was particularly intrigued by a book about a Boston cop who knew secrets only detectives and spies would know.

Secrets were fun.

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Townspeople glanced curiously at the two small-town boys skipping down the street but Jack didn’t care. He felt the sun warming his back, urging him forward to see and feel everything the world had to offer, even though it was  only the next town.

“Where’s the train depot?” he asked a cobbler straddling a workbench inside the door of his shop. He smoothed his tan leather apron and stepped into a sunny spot under a pair of bronze horseshoes nailed to the wooden doorframe.

“Goin’ somewhere, kid? Takin’ a train?”

“Sure, Mister. Maybe not today, but I’m sure gonna’ take one soon. Is it far to the depot?”

“Other side of the street, go down two blocks, you’ll see a sign. It’s up a flight of stairs where trains cross over Elm Street. My son took it last week, went to military intelligence school in Washington.”

“Aw, your son must be really brave.”

“He’s brave all right, but he could get killed in some far off lonely place. He’d be better off as a private in the army. Might’ve got stationed up at Fort Devens so’s he’d be back here for church and Sunday dinners.” The cobbler turned back to his work.

“I’m goin’ back to the hardware store,” Bernie said.​

In the afternoon sunshine, young Jack felt it, a new sensation, a stirring, about where his belly button hid. A knowing kind of feeling, imagining himself traveling to faraway places, maybe to an even bigger town.

Along the side of the Elm Street Bridge, loose gravel slipped under Jack’s feet as he climbed a worn path up to the train station. The first sign he saw read Platform One. He wondered why it was called platform one, it was the only platform and there was only one track. A few people in the small crowd held suitcases, others had armfuls of bawling kids. One smiling guy held a bunch of flowers.

The faded red station master’s house was just big enough for the old man’s desk and the ticket-seller sitting behind a brown wicker grill. Jack watched the station master walk out of his office, don a blue hard bill cap then grab a wagon yoke loaded with bags. The ticket-taker helped push it to a spot where the bags could be tossed on the train.

Then Jack heard it, a loud whistle announcing a roaring power smoking up from the valley to the little knob of the town on the crown of the hill. He could almost feel the power and strength of the engine when he saw white smoke puffing out of its soot-black stack. He felt his excitement build, overjoyed that just by chance, he had made it for the arrival of an iron giant.

He ran up to help push the baggage wagon as if he was one of the railroad company’s team. Another whistle, the train was coming. He wished it was coming for him. “Someday,” he said to himself, it would. He’d jump aboard and head out of town, learn how to be a detective, maybe even become a spy.

“Thanks for your help, sonny, now run along,” ordered the station master.

“Okay, mister, but where’s this train coming from?”

“New York.”

“Wow. And where is it going?”

“New York, Sonny. This here’s the end of the line.”

“No it isn’t. It’s the beginning.”


Contact

“For any inquiries, questions, or fan mail you may have you can reach me, David Paul Collins, here!”