Novelist and journalist Mark Olshaker was born in Washington, D.C., on February 28, 1951. He graduated from George Washington University in 1972. Olshaker was a special correspondent for the St. Louis Dispatch in the 1970s. Although best known for his collaborations with former FBI profiler and world-renowned criminal psychologist John Douglas (beginning with Mindhunter), he also written Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the World, and The Edge. As a filmmaker, he was the writer and director of Discovering Hamlet (1990), a behind-the-scenes documentary of Kenneth Branagh's first theatrical encounter with the character he would eventually bring to the big screen.