About Jason Starr I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, though amazingly don't speak with much of a Brooklyn accent. I didn't read much as a kid -- my major reading material consisted of the Daily Racing Form, sports magazines, and the backs of baseball cards. I wanted to be a baseball player and spent most of my time focused on that hopeless dream. I didn't really get interested in reading and writing until college at Binghamton University. My parents were shocked when I announced during my Freshman year that I wanted to be a writer (I think they expected me to work on Wall Street or something). The best class I took in college was on film noir. I saw Double Indemnity, Touch of Evil, and many other classic crime films for the first time. Although I only got a B in the class (OK, maybe I was stretching it, trying to compare Double Indemnity to MacBeth), this would have a major influence on me later on. Because my early short fiction consisted of lots of dialogue and very little description, I decided to focus on playwriting. I loved plays -- but I enjoyed reading them much more than seeing them. I loved the spare writing and great dialogue and dark themes in the works of playwrights like Beckett, Fo, Mamet, and Pinter. After graduation, I moved to Manhattan and joined several small theater groups. I had a few plays produced at Off-Off Broadway (we're talking WAY WAY off) theaters. It was very gratifying to hear my dialogue spoken aloud by actors -- kind of surreal actually. During this time, I did a lot of traveling around Europe and Mexico. This was my main MO in life actually -- work at shit telemarketing and low-level journalism and publishing jobs to earn enough money to travel for a few months, and then return to New York to start the process all over again. This got old fast. I'd been getting more and more interested in fiction writing again, particularly crime fiction. Then I bought my first Black Lizard novel, A Swell-Looking Babe by Jim Thompson, and I was hooked. The writing of the great hardboiled writers like Goodis, Cain, Chandler, Thompson, etc., reminded me of what I liked best about my favorite playwrights (and film noirs), and I decided to switch my focus to crime fiction. In my first novel, Cold Caller, about homicidal telemarketer Bill Moss, I was able to put my years of drudgery as a telemarketer, as well as my general disdain for authority, to good use. A couple of years later, I was able to become a full-time writer. In addition to writing crime novels, I write screenplays, occasionally getting hired to adapt my own work. I've been trying to write and publish at least one book a year, and I've been enjoying every minute of it.