Q) What do you write and why?
A) I enjoy writing and have the time. With fiction, the pleasure comes from capturing in word what my imagination creates.
I’ve published two novels in the mystery genre. My protagonist in each book is Matt Kinler and I have more storylines for him rattling around in my head.
Non-fiction I write out of necessity. This includes documents I prepare in my work as a volunteer. Other non-fiction writing relates to marketing my books.
Q) When/how/why did you start writing mystery novels? Have you done other writing?
A) As an agent with the FBI, mysteries and how to solve them is what I did for almost twenty-five years. After the FBI, I continued to work as an investigator with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, as a private investigator and now I volunteer my time as a cold case detective for my local sheriff’s office. Seems I’ve been an investigator most of my adult life. That’s “what I know.”
I started writing long fiction in the mid-1990s in a six-hundred square foot cabin in Olive Cove, EtolinIsland in southeast Alaska. My wife accompanied me on a great adventure in 1993. We moved into a ten by thirteen foot wall tent in Olive Cove to homestead seventeen miles from nowhere. Before that time, I hadn’t built anything but a fence and a shelter for firewood. I had to read my carpentry books by candlelight and the next day I’d put into practice what I learned. Long story and an experience of a lifetime.
Once the cabin was built, I became an avid reader. A good hobby to have when you live in a rainforest at a latitude of long winters. Every two weeks, we’d travel to the nearest town, do laundry, get mail, do our subsistence hunting in the grocery store and check out as many library books as we could safely carry in our skiff.
Reading awoke in me a desire to create my own stories and learn to become skilled in writing fiction. I taught myself carpentry from books so I decided I could learn to write fiction from books. Simple, right?
Q) How did you decide on a pen name? Especially one so appropriate to your genre’?
A) When I prepared to publish my first novel, Pure Evil, I had been a volunteer detective for my county sheriff’s office for a relatively short time. The setting for the story is in my county and a few characters are fictional deputies. Many readers in Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley would recognize locations and surroundings similar to those described in my book. I wanted to avoid creating a circumstance which might cause the sheriff’s department any embarrassment from my true name association.
Taken from the old saying, “along came Johnny Law,” I created John Lawe After checking write and copyrights and Google, I found the name was not widely used. Voila