Friday, October 16, 2020

The Case Of The Vanishing Blonde And Other True Crime Stories: My Washington Times 'On Crime' Column On Veteran Reporter And Author Mark Bowden

 The Washington Times ran my On Crime column on Mark Bowden (seen in the below photo) and his new collection of true crime stories. 

Mark Bowden is perhaps best known for his book “Black Hawk Down” and his other books about the American military, such as “Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam,” and “Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam.” But in his latest book, “The Case of the Vanishing Blonde and Other True Crime Stories,” he returns to his roots as a crime reporter.    


Mr. Bowden, who received a lifetime achievement award from the International Thriller Writers organization, offers six true crime stories he had written previously for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Vanity Fair and Air Mail. The stories range from a case of a campus rape at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, to three stories involving cold cases investigated by a Long Island private detective named Ken Brennan, as well as a fascinating case of a Los Angeles Police Department investigation into a 26-year-old murder that leads to one of their own.

 

“Newspaper reporting hones an appetite for crime,” Mr. Bowden writes in the introduction to the book. “When I wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, back in its heyday, when it had reporters based all over the region, nation, and the world, we reporters competed vigorously for the paper’s limited news hole. You learned fast that a good crime yarn was a shortcut to page one.”

 


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