I'm a 63-year-old novice at mystery writing. My first nine novels were what I guess you'd call literary fiction. I had a fair amount of success (at least critically), but when I was asked to write a short story for Richmond Noir, part of the Akashic series of detective noir stories, I stumbled across this first-person voice, the hard-living, smart-ass night cops reporter at a metro daily, that I thought I could ride for a novel or three.
