Denis learned from his older brother Pete Hamill who would phone in stories from around the world to Denis, who would type them up, and then call the New York Post. A copy boy would come and pick up the copy. The next morning, there it was, in the paper. Denis learned about forming an opinion based on look-see reporting, active verbs, concrete nouns, and hard deadlines during his apprentice to one of New York City’s most lauded and beloved daily newspaper columnists.

You don’t get to be a newspaper columnist unless you have something to say – a viewpoint- that reaches and touches the readers of the paper. At times your columns are inflammatory to some, beloved by others and sometimes they are saved by the readers because what you’ve written is so clear, so true, so authentic to their lives that reading the columns makes them feel you not only know them but are OF them.

“This is the kid who made my Mom and me laugh till our sides split with his outlandish, hand-written ‘Denis stories’ as a young kid,” writes Kathleen Hamill Fischetti, the only sister among six Hamill brothers.

So, what else could Denis do but continue to write stories. His novels celebrate New York, its eccentricities, and its tough exterior along with the people who make it that way, many of whom would give you the shirts off their backs, while others were at the same time stealing those shirts.

For everyone who knows at least one New Yorker who could best be described as a “character”, Denis has created many more, and you’ll find them in his funny, sad, often outrageous, sometimes gruesome, other times seductive, novels of which there are now ten, and counting.

When your mom works as the cashier at the RKO Prospect in Park Slope, just a few blocks away from the railroad flat that your five brothers and one sister call home, you spend a lot of time at the movies. How great is that for a kid who was already writing outlandish “Denis stories?” Denis viewed the forty-foot images on the screen and found a new way his stories could be told. He majored in film in college, entered the newspaper business and saw his first screenplay collaboration with his brother John, the cult classic “Turk 182!” on the big screen in 1985. Denis has written several more films, with two screenplays in development and four movies written and/or written and produced by Denis that you can rent, stream, or watch on demand.

Covering scores of celebrated trials for daily newspapers in the courtrooms of New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, and rubbing elbows with cops, DAs, defense lawyers, and criminals which also fueled his novels could only lead to one thing: A seat in the Writers Room of television’s longest running series: “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.”

Show Runner Warren Leight hired Denis Hamill to start writing for SVU in 2019 and Denis hopes to return for Season 23.