Most journalists — myself included — have at least one story we’ve written that we swear would make an amazing book or movie.

On Good Friday 1976, then-WMAR reporter and anchor Wayne Lynch covered that story: a violent ambush of police officers in the city that left five Baltimore City Police Department officers wounded and one dead.

“It was a big, big story,” said Lynch. It’s one that now figures in his latest book, “Blood Stained Papers,” a reference both to the violence and gore that can appear in a newspaper and to literal blood.

Why? Surprise! His main characters are all vampires! But that, too, is appropriate to an image of the profession. “People accuse the media of being vampires,” said the retired journalist, who now lives in Seattle. “It was always ‘Blood-sucking reporters!’”

“Blood Stained Papers” combines two of his great loves — journalism and vampire movies, the latter of which he fell in love with as a kid while his contemporaries were digging war and action flicks.

“The key one was the original ‘Dracula’ from 1931 with Bela Lugosi, and ‘Horror of Dracula’ with Christopher Lee,” he said. He also enjoyed 1992’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” directed by Francis Ford Coppola, which I was a fan of not so much for the gothic content but because of Keanu Reeves.

“Blood Stained Papers” follows Abe, a reporter who’s been bitten by a vampire and tries desperately to save himself and the woman he loves. Anyone familiar with the original “Dracula” will recognize the names of two of his characters: Mina, his beloved, and fellow vampire-reporter Jonathan, another journalistic bloodsucker and bad guy.

So why vampire newspeople? “I’m in retirement at 75, and I just had this urge to put it all together,” he said.

Lynch, a Pittsburgh native, worked around the country before coming to WMAR in 1974, where he worked for 13 years. In his time here, he found Baltimore to not only be the place where he had his first child and bought his first home, but a city that was a unique and vibrant generator of news.

“It was a rush,” Lynch said. “When I became the crime reporter at Channel 2, I covered the mean streets. It was very gritty.”

We bonded on the phone over our love of writing about the city and about how being a reporter on deadline whose precious prose gets adjusted on the regular makes one a better author. “We get it,” he said. “We know that good writers always need an editor.”

And we always chase a good story. Lynch was working the night shift at the station on April 16, 1976, around 7 p.m. when he got a call about an active shooting. He headed out to West Lombard and South Carey streets and found that the incident was still unfolding. “I had to duck into a person’s house until it was over,” he said. “It’s funny, obviously, that self-preservation is a key.”

He and the rest of Baltimore later discovered that an emotionally distraught man named John Earl Williams had opened fire and caused a 45-minute standoff with police. Williams remains in prison.

Lynch, who covered the trial, included a similar incident in “Blood Stained Papers” but decided not to include the shooter’s name, because “I didn’t want to cause any more heartache. It stuck with me for a long time. It was the biggest breaking news story I had covered to date.”

As pivotal as it was, “I can’t in any way make that an enjoyable moment. It was a sad moment. I covered cops back in that day, and seeing them suffer that night made it very, very difficult to be objective.”

The Good Friday shootings had been part of a “terrible week” in Baltimore, Lynch said. Three days earlier, a gunman shot two members of City Council, killing one. Anyone who has ever covered crime knows that it can have long effects on you. “I’ve never forgotten it,” he said.

Lynch worked in various places after leaving Baltimore, including in Washington, D.C., and the Pacific Northwest, where he also taught writing at the University of Washington. While his creativity has now taken him into fiction, he has a soft spot for his time in the news, and in Baltimore.

“I knew literally every part of the city. I would go out on all the stories. Baltimore was a tough town,” he said. “I had the love of the myth of being a street reporter. It was a wonderful job.”

This article has been updated to correct the date of the Good Friday shooting.