Another Good One Gone

The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura notes the passing yesterday of Robert Rosenberg, an Israeli journalist who had also composed four well-regarded detective novels.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Rosenberg had worked for the United Press International news agency in Tel Aviv and been a reporter with The Jerusalem Post, but also served as Israel correspondent for Time magazine and, subsequently, for U.S. News and World Report. After freelancing for Playboy, Penthouse, Reader’s Digest, and other noteworthy publications, in 1995 he founded Ariga, a Web-based “source of news from Israel, emphasizing the peace process, but also including poetry, painting and other subjects of interest ...” A year later, he saw published his non-fiction book Secret Soldier, “the autobiography of Muki Betser, the man [former Prime Minister] Ehud Barak called Israel’s greatest commando.”

On top of his other literary and journalistic labors, Rosenberg managed to pen a quartet of novels featuring Jerusalem detective Avram Cohen: Crimes of the City (a New York Times Notable Thriller of 1991), The Cutting Room (1993), House of Guilt (1996), and An Accidental Murder. The Thrilling Detective Web Site describes Cohen as “Israel’s most hard-boiled detective ... [O]nce one of that country’s top cops and a high-ranking police official, [he] is forced into retirement, and subsequently finds himself put in the position of investigation privately. ‘True, he doesn’t hang out a shingle or call himself a P.I.,’ admits his creator, Robert Rosenberg, ‘but he definitely behaves like one.’”

The author was only 54 years old at the time he died from cancer in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.