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Joseph Michael Jahn is an American journalist, author and memoirist.
He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised in Sayville, New York. He moved to New York City in 1966 and was educated at Dowling College, Adelphi University, and Columbia University. He spent the first decade of his career covering cultural issues, mainly by becoming, in 1968, the first full-time rock journalist of The New York Times and the first full-time rock writer for any major daily newspaper. According to the Times metropolitan editor Arthur Gelb, he hired Jahn specifically to inaugurate the newspaper's coverage of rock music. One of his first assignments was to cover the Woodstock Festival.
Jahn wrote more than 200 reviews of performances by rock bands and individual folk and blues artists for the New York Times between 1968 and 1971. He also wrote a column syndicated by North American Newspaper Alliance, 1967-1970, and The New York Times, 1970-1973. Jahn wrote several works of nonfiction before the mid-1970s, when he switched to writing mystery/suspense fiction, eventually publishing about 50 novels and movie/TV adaptations, under his own name and several pen names. His first mystery novel, The Quark Maneuver, published by Ballantine in 1977, won an Edgar Award in 1978.
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