Like many crime novelists, Gerry Boyle began his writing career in newspapers--a place he calls the best training ground ever. After attending Colby College, he knocked around at various jobs, including stints as a roofer, a postman, and a manuscript reader at a big New York publisher. He began his newspaper career in the paper mill town of Rumford, Maine. There was a lot of small-town crime in Rumford and Gerry would later mine his Rumford time for his first novel, Deadline. After a few months he moved on to the Morning Sentinel in Waterville, where editors gave him a thrice-weekly column. He wrote about the stuff he saw in police stations, courtrooms, and in the towns and cities of Maine. All the while he was also typing away on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter writing Deadline, which came out in 1993.