Jay Robert Nash wrote more than 70 books in his lifetime on topics from crime to eccentric celebrities and beyond.
Sun-Times File
Chicago author Jay Robert Nash, who penned about 70 books, was a literary fireball and part of the cast of characters who held court in the 1970s with newspapermen and other writers at bars like O’Rourke’s, Riccardo’s and the Old Town Ale House.
In 1972, Sun-Times columnist Tom Fitzpatrick said of Mr. Nash: “If someone were to ask me to sit down and try to recall the most unforgettable character I’ve ever met, I’d have to start with Jay Robert Nash. Jay Robert Nash, 5 foot 6 inches of mustachioed dynamite….author, editor, raconteur, adventurer, bon vivant and journalist. The very mention of his name sends tremors of expectation down my spine.”
With a voice sometimes infused with the quick staccato notes of a James Cagney gangster, Mr. Nash could tell a story, even if he was occasionally met with incredulity or accused of veering toward sensationalism.
He supplemented an encyclopedic brain jammed with information on American crime and cinema with notes scribbled on note cards that filled many cabinets of his North Side townhouse — information filled the pages of multiple encyclopedic volumes that he published on the subject matter.
He also wrote books on eccentric celebrities, disasters, lawmen, not to mention his works of fiction and poetry.
Mr. Nash’s first book delved into conspiracy.
“Dillinger Dead or Alive?” was published in 1970 and asserted that the notorious bank robber John Dillinger orchestrated a look alike to be killed in front of the Biograph Theater in 1934, allowing him to lead a long life of anonymity on the West Coast. When the FBI realized what happened, he claimed, the decision was made to cover it up and go with the good press that came from taking the country’s number one criminal off the street.
Mr. Nash, who interviewed several characters in the gangster’s orbit, held a book release party at the Biograph and sought to bolster his claims years later with the publication of “Dillinger Dossier.”
Mr. Nash died April 22 from cancer. He was 86.
Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, a friend and admirer, said of eccentrics like Mr. Nash: “In a boring old world, such people are to be prized.”
Ebert also recalled on a blog post how Mr. Nash recounted to him how he once had a face-to-face encounter with an elderly Dillinger at an Arizona retirement home.
“We didn’t believe Nash was serious, but he never, ever, admitted he was not. You heard a lot of stories in O’Rourke’s,” he wrote.
In 1972 Mr. Nash delivered a critical study of FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover in “Citizen Hoover.”
He found financial success in 1973 with “Bloodletters and Badmen,” an encyclopedia of American criminals.
His book “Hustlers and Con Men” detailed leaders of the deceitful craft, including Chicago legend Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil. The book found a fan in Johnny Carson, who had Mr. Nash on his show in 1976. Mr. Nash unsuccessfully pitched Carson to star in a screenplay he wrote on Weil.
His 1978 book “Among the Missing” compiled bizarre cases of missing persons.
In the 1980s, Mr. Nash published a multi-volume “Motion Picture Guide” that offered detailed information for movie buffs on more than 25,000 films. To complete the project he hired a research staff and partnered with Stanley Ross, a screenplay writer who helped create the `Batman’ and `Columbo’ series for television.
Mr. Nash’s name appeared in the Sun-Times dozens of times, in profiles, book reviews and as a subject of interest whose exploits were followed by several columnists.
Mr. Nash was born Nov. 26, 1937, in Indianapolis, and grew up in Green Bay, Wis. His mother, Jerri Lynne Nash, was a singer who owned a nightclub. His father, Jay Robert Nash II, a newspaperman, was killed in World War II. His mother later married Jack Klein.
Mr. Nash attended Marquette University before serving in the United States Army in an intelligence position in Europe.
According to his wife, Judy Nash, he then attended the University of Paris, and ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.
Upon returning to the United States, he spent a year in New York “trying to write the great American novel like everybody else” before returning to the Midwest and briefly reviving the the Literary Times, a magazine founded by legendary journalist Ben Hecht, Mr. Nash told Sun-Times columnist Bob Herguth in 1987.
He moved to Chicago in 1962, became an editor of Chicagoland magazine, met Mike Royko, Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren and others and became part of the city’s literary scene. (He moved to Wilmette in 1987.)
Mr. Nash could be a flamboyant, assertive, and occasionally pugnacious, presence, as some of the city’s writers who tippled together back in the day could be — but he was a kindhearted person and softy at his core, his wife said.
Judy Nash pointed to the financial assistance he regularly offered Eddie Balchowsky, an artist who lost his hand in the Spanish Civil War and lived on the streets of Chicago.
Balchowsky insisted on repaying him with art, some of which adorns the walls of Nash’s home.
“Jay was probably the last notable writer of that particular era,” said friend and author Marc Davis.
His “Dictionary of Crime: Criminal Justice, Criminology, & Law Enforcement” was published in 1992 and included thousands of definitions unique to the underworld world, like “choir boy” (a thief’s trainee) and “dancing” (the last few days of a prison sentence).
Computers and the Internet threw a wrench in how Mr. Nash made a living, his wife said.
“Computers changed everything with Jay’s type of writing. Now you can just hop on a computer. You don’t need a reference book. But he resisted. He was an old-fashioned type of guy till the end. ‘People need books. You need to hold it in your hands,’ he’d say,” his wife recalled.
Mr. Nash is survived by daughter Andrea Nash and son Jay Robert Nash IV and one grandson. His son Lee Travis Nash preceded him in death.
Services have been held.