Above: Philadelphia native and Deerhurst resident Chris Morkides has published two crime novels since retiring in 2021. Photo by Becca Mathias.
By Bob Yearick
In a career that spanned four decades, Chris Morkides worked in three disparate and demanding professions: journalism, law, and mental health counseling. He achieved relative success and varying degrees of satisfaction in all of them.
But now, two years into a retirement that finds him cranking out crime novels from his North Wilmington home, the native Philadelphian has discovered that writing fiction transports him to a level of happiness he never achieved in any of his previous jobs.
Morkides has self-published two books — Trust Me and Good Intentions. The protagonist in both is Philadelphia psychologist Alex Johns. In Trust Me, Johns’ daughter is kidnapped, and he joins authorities in attempting to find her and solve the crime. In Good Intentions, he dons his detective hat once again to track down the arsonist who killed his friend.
Morkides recently completed another Alex Johns novel, which should be published this spring, and he has two more manuscripts that he hopes to have ready for publication by the end of the year. The work is flowing because, he says, “it’s not like it’s work for me. I enjoy doing it; I really look forward to it.”
He follows a morning routine that primes his creative pump. First, he and his wife, Alisa, who owns the chain of Brew Ha Ha! coffee shops, sit down in her office in their Deerhurst home and have what he calls “these long talks.” Then he meditates.
Next, he sets an alarm clock “for, like, an hour,” takes out his laptop, and begins writing. “For the next hour,” Morkides says, “there’s nothing but me and that page in front of me. It’s like an hour-long meditation. I’m not trying to be profound; that’s just the way it is.”
He acknowledges that the free-flowing words created in those 60 minutes require fairly heavy editing later, “but in an hour I can usually complete a chapter. I write fast, and my chapters are short.”
Not Enough Words
Back in his college days at Penn State, Morkides says, “if someone had told me I would write a book I would’ve told them they were crazy. [I thought,] ‘I don’t have that many words in me.’”
He did like to write, however, and with his journalism degree in hand, he became a reporter for the West Chester Daily Local, then the now defunct Coatesville Record, and, eventually, The Philadelphia Inquirer, mostly covering sports.
But around 1982, he decided he wanted to “do something important” with his life, so he enrolled in Temple Law School, earning a degree in 1985. He had visions of engaging in dramatic courtroom battles and winning verdicts for the little guy.
But, handling mostly civil cases, he says, “I found out it wasn’t like L.A. Law.” He did get into the courtroom on occasion, but mostly his workday involved “boxes and boxes of depositions.”
By 1994, “I was sick of the law,” he says. “I was always watching the clock. It’s the one profession I practiced that I didn’t like.”
He returned to writing sports part-time for The Inquirer, then went full-time, then in 2001 accepted a buy-out. And that precipitated a move to his third career.
Morkides had considered majoring in psychology at Penn State, and he decided it was now time to heed that siren call. “One of Alisa’s friends was going to Immaculata University and she liked it,” he says, so in 2003 he enrolled in the master’s program in counseling psychology at the nearby Pennsylvania school. Taking classes while working as a stringer for the Associated Press, he earned his degree in 2008 and became a counselor.
The protagonist in Morkides’ two books is Philadelphia psychologist Alex Johns.
It was also during this time that he and Alisa flew to China and adopted a 17-month-old girl, a decision he calls “the best thing we’ve ever done.” Their daughter, Kina, is now a freshman at West Chester University.
Morkides enjoyed counseling, finding that he was able to help many of his clients, but seeing up to 40 each week proved challenging, so he gradually reduced his workload. In 2021, he retired, although he’s still a licensed mental health counselor.
He says he started writing what became his first novel when he began counseling part-time.
“I wanted to fill the space and I always liked writing,” he says. “I had written newspaper and magazine articles, and wanted to give something different a shot. I really didn’t have enough words in me to write a novel, but I had enough words in me to write every day. I strung enough of those days together to write a novel…and then another….and then another. I always had an idea each day where I wanted to go. I just didn’t know how I would get there.”
He published Trust Me in 2022, and Good Intentions followed the next year.
With the Alex Johns character, Morkides has adhered to the maxim, “Write what you know”: Johns’ wife owns a chain of coffee shops; the couple has an adopted Chinese daughter; Johns loves sports — especially Philadelphia teams — and he is a dedicated psychologist who treats a variety of clients. Johns also has the author’s dry wit.
Morkides has already completed the first draft of the third book in the series — working title Fouled — which features a semi-pro basketball player in Philly. Also in the works is The Bipolar President, “based very loosely,” he says, “on current events.”
Who Moved My Chi?
But he is especially optimistic about a fifth book, also in first draft stage — so much so that he has begun sending proposals to several agencies. A departure from his usual work, it’s “a self-help novelette” that runs to a little more than 100 pages. The title, Who Moved My Chi?, is a play on the 1998 best-seller Who Moved My Cheese?, which dealt with change in the workplace and in life. Chi is the vital energy that is thought to animate the body internally and is of central importance in some Eastern systems of medical treatment. Morkides says his book is about “leaving the rat race to the rats and simplifying life to get to better mental health.”
The book reflects his own approach to life. “I’m pretty big into Zen philosophy,” he says.
He adheres to the teachings of Thích Nh?t H?nh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist who died in 2022 at the age of 95. Known as “the father of mindfulness,” Nh?t H?nh sought to raise awareness of the interconnectedness of all elements in nature. His 130-plus books, including around 100 in English, have sold more than five million copies worldwide.
“I have a number of his books,” says Morkides. Nh?t H?nh’s teachings, he says, “have helped me in writing and also in life.”
Morkides follows Buddhism’s respect for all forms of life so closely that he refuses to kill spiders and other insects, or even mice. “I never had a problem killing bugs before,” he says, “but now I take them outside.”
Recently, his Zen serenity was disturbed a bit when he wrote a piece for the magazine Counseling Today. Completing it conjured legendary sportswriter Red Smith’s comment about writing his four-times-a-week column: “It’s easy. You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.”
“Writing that piece, I hated it,” Morkides says. “Writing nonfiction, especially, can be hard. I like making up stuff in my head.”?
