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Writer/producer David Black came to television after establishing himself as a successful novelist and journalist. As a journalist in the 1970s and 1980s, Black wrote articles exposing secret police activities in Haiti, white slavery rings in the United States, and totalitarian therapy groups, while his book The Plague Years was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Concurrently, in the field of mystery writing, his factual book Murder at the Met was nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award, and he subsequently received two more nominations, for two episodes of Law & Order ("Happily Ever After" and "Carrier") while his script for the episode "Nullification" earned a Certificate of Merit from the American Bar Association. David Black began writing for television on the series Hill Street Blues, and later was a writer and producer on The Cosby Mysteries, where he kept the quality of the series' scripts extremely high, even in the face of interference on the broadcast side. His involvement with Law & Order, as a writer and producer, and later as a consulting producer, coincided with what are usually regarded as the best years of the long-running series. His television movie scripts have included Legacy of Lies (starring Martin Landau and Eli Wallach), which won the Writers Foundation of America Gold Medal for Excellence in Writing; and The Confession (starring Alec Baldwin, Ben Kingsley, and Amy Irving), which won him a Writers' Guild of America Award for Best Television Movie of the Year Adaptation. In 2000, Black became a producer and writer on Sidney Lumet's cable television series 100 Center Street.