Even though he retired as history teacher at Troy Buchanan High School years ago, Raymond Edge was still looking for something to do.

The Montgomery City resident had a passion for history and research. So he became an author, completing a three-book archeological fiction series based on Mississippi River sites and artifacts. He also wrote a Christmas-related book.

On Dec. 10, Edge shared his work at a one-hour presentation at the Montgomery City Public Library. His books are titled, Last Witch of Cahokia, Witches of Cahokia, Flight of the Piasa and S-Memoir of an Iconic Gentleman. He signed his books after the event.

The Last Witch of Cahokia, Witches of Cahokia and Flight of the Piasa are historical novels that are centered on Cahokia Mounds – an historic site just minutes east of St. Louis – and the Piasa Bird monument – which is located in Alton, Ill., just north of St. Louis.

The Piasa (pronounced pie-a-saw) Bird monument has a mural of the Piasa Bird, which was a mythical man-eating creature.

“If you go to Alton and take the River Road, you’ll see an amazing roadside attraction,” Edge said. “It is 16 feet across with a big scaly tail, wings, face of a demon, fangs and antlers. It is bizarre. The cool thing about it in 1673, Marquette came down the river and he saw that painting. It was there in the 1600s.”

Cahokia Mounds was the site of a Native American city. It is a National Historical Landmark.

“In about 1200, that was a centrally planned city,” Edge said. “They dominated trade from the Great Lakes to the Rockies and from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast. They were larger than London and Paris at the same time.”

Flight of the Piasa was the first book in the archeological fiction series to be published in 2007. Two years later, Witches of Cahokia was published in 2009. Last Witch of Cahokia was published in 2013. All three books followed Daniel French, an archeology major from Southern Illinois University.

“It’s a very different kind of fun writing for me anyway and maybe confusing to other people,” Edge said. “All of the stories are true stories.”

S-Memoir of An Iconic Gentleman, published in 2019, is a first-person account of the life of Nicholas of Patera, who was born in 270 AD and later became known as Santa Claus.

Before presenting his books, Edge shared his beginnings during the presentation. A native of California, Edge wanted to be a U.S. history teacher when he was in high school. After graduating from high school, he entered the military.

“When I graduated, I absolutely had no life skills that needed to be used,” Edge said. “So I couldn’t work and go to school. My family was poor as dirt, so they couldn’t help me. The end result of that was I went into the military in order to get educational benefits, so I went into the United States Coast Guard.”

Edge, who married his wife Marilyn in the 1960s, later became a hospital corpsman. He worked full-time and went to school full-time. After getting a Doctorate’s degree, Edge got a job as director of respiratory care at the LSU Medical Center in Louisiana. Then, he worked as an associate dean at a college in Michigan and a dean at a school in Missouri.

Edge said he didn’t enjoy working as a college administrator.

“The only thing I really liked was research and I wrote textbooks and things in that nature,” Edge said.

After retiring from the college administration, he got a job teaching U.S. history at Troy Buchanan High School. He got a standard teaching credential from California a long time ago.

“That was absolutely the most fun job I ever had,” Edge said.

After retiring from Troy Buchanan, Edge began concentrating on being a novelist.

“There were some interesting archeological sites on the Mississippi River and I thought they were kind of cool,” Edge said. “That meant I could research. That’s where I began to write historical novels.”