Bankrate: Did you have tough times financially getting started as a reporter?

Buchanan: It wasn't easy but somehow I did it. I got by on very little but I never really felt that poor. I think I was making $60 a week at The Miami Beach Sun, and when I started at The Herald, I interviewed and they offered me the job and at the end of the interview, my editor said, "Haven't you forgotten something?" I said what? He said, "You never asked me about the salary." I didn't care, I just needed a job because the paper I was at was folding, and I knew that it had to pay better than The Miami Beach Sun. I think it was $180 a week. My first apartment here was a tiny efficiency on a little canal on Miami Beach, and I think I paid $75 a month, and that included all utilities. I worked long hours and I didn't have a lot of time to cook, so I could come home and make Mrs. Paul's eggplant parmesan or Stouffer's noodles romanoff. I lived on that stuff.

Bankrate: You seemed to thrive on the pace of journalism.

Buchanan: I loved every minute of it. There is something noble and exciting about going out every day seeking the truth, because there is nobody on earth who can get more done than a good reporter. A good reporter out there could be a victim's best friend, could be the difference between justice and an unsolved case. You can get the public in an uproar and then there would have to be results or the switchboard would light up like a Christmas tree at the state attorney's office. You could stir up so much stuff in the cause of justice and good things. One good story in the paper can cut through red tape like a razor blade. You can find missing people, reunite loved ones, solve murders. And just being up there was so stimulating because it was like Shakespeare in the raw out on the police beat. Every day out there on the street you would run into Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear and Othello, and sometimes all of them on the same day.

Bankrate: Did you have misgivings about leaving that life to write novels?

Buchanan: Yeah, but it was what I've always wanted to do since I was 4 years old. Journalism had never occurred to me, although I loved reading newspapers, I just devoured them. Hemingway once said that anyone who wants to write novels should work first for a daily newspaper, but never for more than 18 months. Of course, I stayed a lot longer than that, and while I loved every moment, I love novels even more. It's a constant source of joy because all writers want to be tidy, they want to wrap up the loose ends and resolve all the perplexing mysteries. But in real life, in journalism, that doesn't happen -- you have murders that go unsolved, corpses that remain unidentified and missing people who are lost forever. They still haunt my dreams. Awakened from sleeping late at night, I sit out on my dock and think about these cases and what might have happened. Sometimes I will base a situation in a novel on one of those old unsolved cases that still haunt me; I fictionalize it and in the end I solve it. After I resolve them in a novel, they haunt me less.