Tom Bethany tracks the murders of an Oregon environmental leader. "A Travis McGee for the 90s"Publisher's Weekly"A great hero in an excellent series"Booklist"Ranks with Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain and Ross Thomas as a high-voltage storyteller, and that is exalted company"Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times
What a man was passionate about at the age of 12 is probably what he should make his life's work. I was chasing frogs and snakes and other small animals in the outdoors, but at the same time I was addicted to reading and wound up making the wrong choice.
I became a reporter, columnist and editor for the old Washington Daily News and for the Washington Post. Following that I free-lanced for the Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, Holiday, the Nation, Penthouse, Oui, Esquire, and the Readers Digest.
In 1966 I joined the U.S. Information Agency, serving in Casablanca before becoming press attache in our Laos embassy during the war. I resigned over there and went back to free-lance reporting, in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.
On returning to the United States in 1972, I wrote two volumes of the Time-Life Books wilderness series. In 1976 I joined the Carter campaign, ending up as a White House speechwriter and later chief of public affairs for the Federal Aviation Administration.
When Reagan fired us all, I wrote my first novel, "The Bombing Officer," and spent five years teaching writing at Harvard. There I began the Tom Bethany mystery series, which I may yet revive.
I recent years I've been blogging at http://badattitudes.com/MT/ on politics, culture, and whatever else catches my interest. And lately, having at last become old enough to figure out what actually matters, I have been running around in the woods again. This is in pursuit of a book on the community of herpetology -- humans and reptiles both -- in the United States.
Ideas, leads, anecdotes, suggestions, and pictures are all welcome and may be sent to my gmail account. To the left of the ampersand, type: jerome.doolittle
