In his introduction to Travels with Dr. Death and Other Unusual Investigations (1991) Ron Rosenbaum tells how he amused himself in "the uneventful suburb of my childhood" by reading cartons of Hardy Boy detective mysteries. Having adventures and solving mysteries like the Hardy Boys, he writes after becoming one of the most prolific and well-respected magazine writers in America, "is what I thought a life in journalism would be about. Instead, while I found myself having more than my fill of adventures, the mysteries I was most attracted to rarely got solved." Rosenbaum turns his subjects into what Thomas Powers calls "a poetry of doubt." In explicating that doubt, Rosenbaum, Powers says, has become "one of the few distinctive voices of modern literary journalism."

Rosenbaum was born in Manhattan on 27 November 1946, the son of Henry Rosenbaum (1915-1990), a purchasing agent, and Evelyn Rosenbaum, a high-school teacher. He has one...