This year, I’ve had a chance to interview several former journalists and editors that I become successful, award-winning mystery writers. It’s fun to compare notes and talk about their craft.
Rich Zahradnik is the Shamus Award-winning author of the popular Coleridge Taylor Mystery series. He spent over 30 years, working as a reporter and editor in all major news media, including online, newspaper, broadcast, magazine and wire services. He held editorial positions at CNN, Bloomberg News, Fox Business Network and The Hollywood Reporter.
He shared that he is most memorable story was when President Ronald Reagan was shot while Rich was a student at George Washington University.
He said, “My college paper got access to the ad-hoc briefing room when they were briefing on him when he was being operated on. So, at 19, I sometimes joke I peaked.”
Early in his career, he and two partners owned a weekly newspaper for the city of Peekskill in Westchester County, New York.
“We were dealing with—this was in 1987—an African-American young man who was shot by a police officer… luckily it was only in the leg, but there were conflicting stories about what happened,” said Zahradnik. “That one stands out because it got a state press association award.”
His favorite interview was one that didn’t make it into print. At a HBO event, he was seated next to Ray Bradbury.
“I had been a fan of his since high school,” he said. “I spent an hour being an awful fan-boy, and then we spend the next four hours talking about writing. It’s the best interview I ever did without ever getting a story out of it because there was no business line in it. I couldn’t do anything for my publication, but it was just a great time.”
Zahradnik’s protagonist is a New York City reporter, Coleridge Taylor, in the mid-1970s.
“Journalism was over the period from the ’50s to the ’70s, professionalizing,” he explained. “Before the ’50s, most people who went to work at newspapers went straight out of high school, if they finished high school at all, and they’d be a copy boy and they work their way up.”
He continued, “By the mid-’70s, it was changing. There still was that one route, but people were going to journalism school because of Woodward and Bernstein. In fact, there was a flood of people going to the journalism school.”
Taylor is a reporter from Queens that didn’t take the college route, so he has a chip on his shoulder.
“He is obsessed with finding out what happened and why,” said Zahradnik. “He is a crime reporter. In the first book, he’s a crime reporter who’s been demoted to obituaries, that’s why it’s called Last Words. He has to find a way off of obit’s desk.”
Last Words has a great first sentence: “The dead sitting on his desk could wait.”
He explains how he came up with it in the podcast:
Visit his web site RichZahradnik.com to read more. To check out all the “And the Murder Began” podcasts, visit Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Audible or Podomatic