Chicago author Jay Robert Nash, who wrote about 70 books, was a literary fireball. He also was one of the cast of characters who held court in the 1970s with newspaper reporters and other writers at bars like O’Rourke’s, Riccardo’s and the Old Town Ale House.
In 1972, Chicago 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.”
Mr. Nash died April 22 from cancer. He was 86.
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 had an encyclopedic brain jammed with information on American crime and cinema. And he’d scribble notecards that filled the cabinets at his North Side townhouse and helped fill the pages of encyclopedic volumes he wrote. He also wrote books on eccentric celebrities, disasters, lawmen and 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 lookalike 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 wrote, the decision was made to cover it up and go with the good press that came from taking the country’s No. 1 criminal off the streets.
Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, a friend and admirer, recalled in a blog post that Mr. Nash had told him 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,” Ebert wrote. “You heard a lot of stories in O’Rourke’s.”
Mr. Nash 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 legendary Chicago con man Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil. One fan of that book was Johnny Carson, who had Mr. Nash on his show in 1976.
His 1978 book “Among the Missing” compiled bizarre cases of missing persons.
In the 1980s, Mr. Nash published a multivolume “Motion Picture Guide” that offered detailed information on more than 25,000 films. For that, 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 was born Nov. 26, 1937, in Indianapolis, and grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. His mother Jerri Lynne Nash was a singer and owned a nightclub. His father Jay Robert Nash II, a newspaperman, was killed in World War II.
Mr. Nash attended Marquette University before serving in Army intelligence in Europe.
According to his wife Judy Nash, he then attended the University of Paris and ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.
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 flamboyant, assertive and occasionally pugnacious. But, at his core, he was kindhearted and a real softy, according to his wife. Judy Nash pointed to the financial assistance he regularly offered Eddie Balchowsky, an artist who lost a hand in the Spanish Civil War and lived on Chicago streets. Balchowsky insisted on repaying him with art, some that adorns the walls of the Nashes’ home.
“Jay was probably the last notable writer of that particular era,” said Marc Davis, a friend and author.
Mr. Nash’s “Dictionary of Crime: Criminal Justice, Criminology, & Law Enforcement,” published in 1992, included thousands of underworld terms, like “choir boy” (a thief’s trainee) and “dancing” (the last few days of a prison sentence).
But the Internet cut into demand for his encyclopedic volumes.
“Now, you can just hop on a computer,” Judy Nash said. “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.”
Mr. Nash is also survived by his daughter Andrea Nash, son Jay Robert Nash IV and a grandson. His son Lee Travis Nash preceded him in death.
Services have been held.
