Jay Robert Nash is an American author of more than 70 books on myriad aspects of true crime. Among Nash's crime anthologies are Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen and Outlaws, Look For the Woman, Bloodletters and Badmen, and The Great Pictorial History of World Crime. He has also compiled his exhaustive research of criminal behaviour into a CD-ROM entitled Jay Robert Nash's True Crime Database.
Jay Robert Nash currently lives in Wilmette, Illinois and describes himself as an "entrepreneurial businessman". He is the recipient of a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award, in 1991, for his six-volume Encyclopedia of World Crime.
Nash has won Best Reference citations from the American Library Association for four of his books, including Darkest Hours. However, he has said that his books are "seeded with information to detect any unauthorized use or duplication"; the precise nature of these copyright traps may include incorrect information in otherwise factual entries, or wholly fictitious entries. Sally G. Waters, writing for the Library Journal, called Nash's work "fascinating yet flawed" and recommended that it be used only for background research, verifying the information based on the sources in Nash's bibliography. In the Journal of American History, Richard Maxwell Brown also noted the "numerous errors, omissions, inconsistencies, and anomalies" in Nash's encyclopedias. In 2008, The Library of America selected Nash’s story “The Turner-Stompanato Affair†for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.
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