Hal Glatzer

I was born in 1946, and grew up in Manhattan, so I have my own memories of riding the Third Avenue El, of watching the Giants at the Polo Grounds, eating in old-fashioned seafood and chophouses . . . in short, of New York in its 20th Century heyday. Fascinated by science books (I still subscribe to Scientific American magazine) I went to the Bronx High School of Science, but I soon discovered that I had no head for math, and consequently no chance of becoming a scientist. In 1967 I graduated from Syracuse University, in upstate New York, and shortly afterward, moved to Hawaii, where I became a newspaper and television reporter. By the late 1970s, my old love of science led me to create a beat covering the then-new technologies of computers and telecommunications. I moved back to the mainland in 1980, and have made my living as a journalist in the computer trade press ever since. I write the Katy Green mysteries in the first person, in Katy's "voice." My technique for doing this is to think of them as having been written by someone else, a woman called Hannah Dobryn, who is writing in the years just after WWII, when the pre-war years were still a fresh memory. This enables me to keep the setting in mind, and frees me to imagine how a woman of Katy's generation would write.