Arts Alive! podcast: Paul Wilborn, novelist

Paul Wilborn joins us in the Arts Alive! studio today to talk about his new novel, The Everlasting Life of Charlie Wall, published by St. Petersburg Press.

The Palladium theater’s executive director has for years been something of a triple threat – he’s also a singer and a piano player, and a former journalist who enjoys the challenge of writing fiction.

In the case of The Everlasting Life of Charlie Wall, it’s fiction (in that it’s a made-up story) about a real-life historical figure (notorious Tampa mobster Wall ran a cornucopia of illegal rackets in untamed Ybor City in the 1930s and ‘40s).

Wilborn’s second novel (following 2022’s Florida Hustle) is lighthearted and comedic.

Until it gets serious.

“People forget that Tampa had open gambling and open houses of prostitution, on Franklin Street in downtown,” Wilborn says. “In Ybor City, you could just walk in and all that stuff was there – and the cops looked the other way.”

Although his process involved deep research into the area’s lawless past, Wilborn fabricated a narrative set in 1985, in which the octogenarian ex-outlaw desperately wants to believe the world hasn’t forgotten about him or his long-ago exploits.

He re-creates the atmosphere of the mid-century era, from the working stiffs to the upper class and the men (like Charlie Wall and the Trafficante crime family) who preyed upon them all.

In Wilborn’s book, Wall (who was actually murdered in 1955) is an eccentric, intelligent old crook whose heart, while definitely not made of gold, is not as black as history has painted.

Click on the arrow to listen to the conversation.