John Pomfret

Good journalism, I think, represents life and if you try to organize something too neatly it usually blows up in your face and doesn't really happen the way you want it to.

The work is a calling. It demands that type of obsession.

I went back to the States and started at a small newspaper in Riverside County, California, covering the police; I was making $280 a week covering the police.

To make a coverage decision, doesn't one have to make a medical judgment?

My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

Most detective story readers are an educated audience and know there are only a certain number of plots. The interest lies in what the writer does with them.