Bruce Alexander Cook (1932 – November 9, 2003) was an American journalist and author who also wrote under the pseudonym Bruce Alexander, creating historical novels about a blind 18th-century Englishman and also a 20th-century Mexican-American detective.
Biography
Cook was born in 1932 in Chicago. His family moved often as a child, his father being a train dispatcher with frequent new assignments. He earned a degree in literature from Loyola University (Chicago).[1]
His first wife was Catherine Coghlan, with whom he had three children, Catherine (Katy), Bob, and Ceci. He married concert violinist Judith Aller in 1994.[1][2]
Cook's first book was a nonfiction work, The Beat Generation, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1971. A biography of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo followed in 1977, and in 2015 it was made into a film by the same name. His first novel was Chicago-based Sex Life, in 1978.
He wrote four novels featuring Los Angeles detective Antonio "Chico" Cervantes — Mexican Standoff, 1988, Rough Cut, 1990, Death as a Career Move, 1992, and Sidewalk Hilton, 1994. He also wrote a series of novels about the blind magistrate Sir John Fielding, the real-life founder of London's first police force.
His later nonfiction works were Listen to the Blues, a musical history, in 1973; Brecht in Exile, about the German writer Bertold Brecht, in 1983; and The Town That Country Built: Welcome to Branson, Missouri, in 1993.[1] His final books, published posthumously, were Young Will: The Confessions of William Shakespeare[3] and a Fielding book, Rules of Engagement, for which his widow and writer John Shannon put on the finishing touches.[4]
<books in order, according to Rehoboth Beach Public Library and Amazon.com editions available to me: [Note: page counts vary with hard or soft back editions.]>
