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Joseph Michael Jahn (born August 4, 1943) is an American author and critic.

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.Using the byline Mike Jahn, in 1968 he became the first 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. Jahn also wrote a column syndicated by North American Newspaper Alliance, 1967-1970, and The New York Times, 1970-1973. Jahn wrote the first book about The Doors, "Jim Morrison and the Doors: An Unauthorized Book" and was mentioned by name in the Rolling Stone obituary of Morrison.

In the mid-1970s, Jahn switched to writing mystery/suspense fiction, eventually publishing about 50 novels and movie and TV adaptations, mostly using the byline Michael Jahn. His first mystery novel, "The Quark Maneuver", published by Ballantine in 1977, won an Edgar Award in 1978. In 1982 he began the series "The Bill Donovan Mysteries" with "Night Rituals. By 2003 he had published nine novels in the series, the last being "Murder in Coney Island". The 10th book in the series, "Donovan & Son," was published by Five Star (Gale Centage) in 2008. He has stopped writing fiction in order to concentrate on writing a memoir of his career and that of his newspaperman father.

Jahn's original manuscripts and papers are in the Michael Jahn Collection at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Columbia University. The collection was established in 1984.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Michael Jahn", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0