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BIOGRAPHY
When I was young
I had trouble sleeping, so I would read late into the night. Anyone who
reads a lot will eventually be interesting in writing. And that’s what
happened to me. I wanted to have adventures and write about them, like my
heroes Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and Ernest Hemingway.
I have an older sister and two younger brothers. My father is an inventor
and my mother is very artistic. We moved around when I was small:
Minneapolis, New York and Indiana. When I was in second grade we moved to
Concord, Massachusetts, the home of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo
Emerson. I used to go to the public library and look at the marble statues
of these literary lions.
When I was in 8th grade we moved to Oxford, England. I was on my school's
rugby and cricket teams and learned to play soccer during lunch break. For
a week I also attended mountain climbing school in the Lake District. I
also built a raft and floated down the Thames like Huckleberry Finn.
In high school I was a rather poor student, more interesting in reading
books, playing sports and fixing old cars. I was on the soccer, tennis,
lacrosse and fencing teams. My fencing team toured the eastern seaboard
competing against college teams such as MIT, Harvard, Yale, NYU and
Rutgers.
Due to poor grades, I attended a junior college in Massachusetts. By this
time I was interested in writing but had little actual success at it. My
English papers were entertainingly written, but were poorly focused and
had many typos. However, the soccer coach recommended me to University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I went there sight unseen for two reasons: it
was the alma mater of Thomas Wolfe and they admitted me.
In the last two years of college I finally started to knuckle down and go
for grades. As a senior, I had one professor who told me my writing skills
were very weak, while another suggested I make a living as a writer. I
took the second professor’s advice.
The end of college saw the beginning of a long string of offbeat jobs. I
became a chauffeur for a rich Bostonian in her summer home on Cape Cod. I
was a room service waiter in Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel where I met Jimmy
Carter, Scoop Jackson and the actor Ben Gazara. During this time I began
to sell articles to the Christian Science Monitor. With these clips, I was
able to land a job at the City New Bureau of Chicago as a reporter.
For two years I was a police reporter, on the night shift. I covered
murders, robberies, fires, bombings, train wrecks and suicides. I began to
feel I was gathering information that I could use as a mystery writer.
When a tipster called one night about the murder of a Pulitzer
Prize-winning reporter, who broke a prison scandal, I began writing my
first novel. That, along with several others, was never finished.
One day while walking through the campus of the University of Chicago, I
met a woman named Vivian I had known at UNC. We began to see a lot of each
other, spending most of our time at the movies or talking about books.
Meanwhile, my parents moved to Denver, Colorado. Ever since I read those
adventure stories as a boy, I had dreamed of going West. When I visited my
parents for Christmas, I fell in love with the Rockies and soon moved
there with Vivian. We were married on a ranch high in the mountains
overlooking Denver.
I continued working as a police reporter, this time on the staff of The
Rocky Mountain News, a morning tabloid. I drove around the city in a car
with a police scanner and sometimes arrived at shootings before the police
and paramedics got there. More grist for the mill. I also covered at least
two dozen murder trials from beginning to end.
While I worked, my wife, Vivian, wrote screenplays. One of her scripts
caught the eye of a Hollywood agent. We decided to move to Los Angeles and
take a shot at writing for movies and TV. However, when I arrived, I
landed a job as a theater critic for The Hollywood Drama-Logue. For two
years I reviewed three plays a week. Soon, I arranged the production of my
first play, True Blues, which I also directed. This led to a writing
assignment for "Miami Vice."
My other plays were Boondoggle (produced on a double bill with Vivian's
Rat Race), Vacancy in Paradise (co-written with Vivian) and Nightside. I
also wrote for TV's "Beauty and the Beast" and "Probe." Later, I wrote
many screenplays, some of which were optioned.
In the 1990s I came full circle and wrote my first book, a how-to guide to
car buying. This led to other non-fiction books on automotive and computer
subjects. I also wrote the autobiography Candidly, Allen Funt. During this
time, we had two sons, Andrew and Tony.
Using what I learned in the Allen Funt biography, I decided to make the
jump to fiction. In 1997 Bird Dog was published, followed by Low Rider, in
1998. In 2001, The Marquis de Fraud was released. A stand-alone thriller,
with the working title Off and Running, due for publication shortly.
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