Born in 1945 on an army base in Tampa, Florida, John grew up in Manhattan Beach, California.  In 1963, he graduated from Mira Costa High School, where he had begun to dabble in writing and was captain of the varsity wrestling team.  At age 19, he began writing for his local newspaper, the South Bay Daily Breeze, as a stringer covering sports.  In 1968, he earned a degree in journalism at San Diego State, where he was an award-winning columnist and managing editor of the campus newspaper, the Daily Aztec, and also the wrestling team captain.

    In 1969, at age 24, after staff writing for several newspapers and freelancing for a number of magazines, John founded Easy Reader, a twice-monthly, "underground" newspaper in Hermosa Beach, California, where it is still being published today as a weekly, under editor and publisher Kevin Cody.  After handing Easy Reader over to Cody in 1971 for no money and with no strings attached, John freelanced full-time for many years.  His byline appeared in more than a dozen major newspapers and many magazines, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, Surfer, TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, the Advocate, and Writer's Digest, where John filed a regular column about writing for fifteen years.  John has also written hundreds of pieces for the Los Angeles Times, writing for various sections.  In the mid-1980s, he joined the LAT staff as an assistant editor, winning a Los Angeles Press Club Award for excellence in reporting on media.  Most recently, John has become a contributor to West, the new LAT Sunday magazine.

    In 1991, John moved from print journalism into television, first for Fox Entertainment News, where he served as a news editor, and later as a writer or supervising writer for numerous fact-based programs that aired on Fox, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, and Court TV.  Among the regular series John wrote are Code 3 (1993-95) on Fox and Anatomy of Crime (1999-2001) and Video Justice (2005 and continuing) on Court TV.  All three series are produced by Langley Productions, the company that also produces the long-running Fox documentary series, COPS.  Other programs John has written for include Rivals, Mysterious Worlds, Police Beat, Now See This, and Hollywood's Greatest Stunts.

    In 1993, John's first nonfiction book, The Complete Guide to Magazine Article Writing, was published, followed by Inside Hollywood in 1997, both from Writer's Digest Books.

    In 1996, John's first novel, Simple Justice, was published by Doubleday, the first in a four-book deal.  Simple Justice launched the Benjamin Justice mystery series and won the Edgar for best first novel.  Other novels in the series (currently published by St. Martin's Minotaur), followed: Revision of Justice (1997), Justice at Risk (1999), The Limits of Justice (20001), Blind Eye (2003), Moth and Flame (2004), Rhapsody in Blood (2006), and Spider Season (to be published in 2008).  When St. Martin's assumed publication of the Justice mysteries with the fifth book, Blind Eye, the publisher decided for marketing reasons to drop the word Justice from the titles.  In addition to the Edgar, the Benjamin Justice series has won three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men's mystery, awarded by the Lambda Literary Foundation.

    John has also written two mysteries in the Philip Damon series with bandleader Peter Duchin, both for Berkley Prime Crime: Blue Moon (2002) and Good Morning, Heartache (2003).

    John's short stories have appeared in the legendary Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and the Blithe House Quarterly, a literary e-zine.

    John has also sold or sold options on several original screenplays, to producers Don Ohlmeyer, Mike Farrell and Marvin Minoff, and John Langley.  None have been produced.

    John has served on the board of the Southern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America, which honored him with its distinguished service award in 2004; has been active as a member of Sisters in Crime; served as a mentor in Pen USA's Emerging Voices program for young writers; has served for several years on the planning committee of the West Hollywood Book Fair; and have been an instructor since 1980 with the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.

    John currently lives in West Hollywood, California, where his Benjamin Justice mystery novels are set.