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Read MoreAbout Paul
I’ve been writing about the history of the American Southwest for a dozen years, specifically efforts to secure law, order, and justice along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during times of economic dislocation, political corruption, and criminal violence. My first book, Salt Warriors: Insurgency on the Rio Grande, relates how the corruption of law and politics and the legal theft of economic resources in El Paso led Tejano citizen soldiers to take up arms against Texas Rangers, Buffalo Soldiers, and a posse of outlaws and mercenaries. Salt Warriors won the Robert A. Calvert Book Prize (2007) and was named a Southwest Book of the Year for 2008. While digging through the archives at the Arizona Historical Society, I came across newspaper accounts of an extraordinary crime, the kidnapping of June Robles of Tucson in 1934. That story led me to the wider history of the FBI’s War on Kidnapping, an element of FDR’s 1930s War on Crime, waged by the Justice Department’s Attorney General Homer S. Cummings and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In Public Enemies, Bryan Burrough’s fast-paced masterpiece on the War on Crime, the author brings to life the early FBI’s 1930s war on the violent bank robbers and ransom kidnappers. He focuses on Hoover’s campaign to end the bloody careers of Dillinger, Nelson, Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, Kelly, and the Barker-Karpis gang. While Burrough touches on ransom kidnappings, he necessarily leaves out the wave of child kidnappings that took place in the 1930s. My current project focuses on the early FBI’s efforts to end ransom kidnappings, the dedication to duty of Hoover’s special agents in the field, the “G-men,” and the price of failure when a crime can’t be solved. The unsolved 1934 kidnapping of June Robles is the vehicle for telling that story. My first blog posts provided some background, dealing with major crimes that occurred before the so-called “Crime of the Century,” the Lindbergh baby kidnap/murder that led to federal legislation and FBI involvement. The book project is tentatively titled, The Girl in the Iron Box: Devotion to Duty & the Price of Failure in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The website also contains some photos my father took of fellow flyers in the famous 19th Bombardment Group and an article on Wyatt Earp’s nemesis, Curly Bill Brocius. Enjoy. I look forward to your...
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Read MoreSalt Warriors
Winner of the 2007 Robert A. Calvert Book Prize Winner of a Southwest Book Award for 2008, Border Regional Library Association Honorable Mention, 2009 Tejano Book Prize, Tejano Genealogy Society of Austin Finalist for 2009 Wild West History Association Book Award Published by Texas A&M University Press, 2008 “The author elegantly navigates the shaky alliances, the deep enmities, the hubris of some and the courage of others in the struggle over control and use of the salt lakes near El Paso. The Salt War ranks with the Lincoln County War in its drama and complexity, and in its evidence of a troubled American past with issues that reverberate into the 21st century. This is an authoritative and important work by a gifted scholar.” —Paula Mitchell Marks, author of To Die in the West “No previous work on the Salt War has mined such a quarry of primary sources, explicated the political power plays (involving both Tejanos and Anglos) in the conflict with such clarity, interpreted the insurgency of those relying on the salt lakes so incisively, and chronicled the aftermath that the episode had on the common people of the El Paso Valley so skillfully. The book is destined to become the definitive treatment of the subject.” —Arnoldo De León, author of Mexican-Americans in Texas: A Brief History “… an exceptionally well researched piece of scholarship that goes way beyond what has previously been written. It is obvious from the first page that Cool has made great efforts to uncover every piece of evidence that might in any way shed any new facts on his dramatic but bloody event.” —Jerry Thompson, author of Cortina: Civil War to the Bloody End “The so-called El Paso Salt War of 1877 undoubtedly ranks among th least known conflicts of the late 19th century. Paul Cool’s account is a fascinating study of an insurgency, with a cast of characters including laborers, land barons, corrupt politicians, lawmen of questionable backgrounds, the national press, the Texas governor, the Texas Rangers, President Rutherford B. Hayes, and last but not least, the United States Army. Among the civilian participants in this tragic events were Anglos, Mexican-Americans, and Mexicans. Many of the soldiers were African Americans…. The author unravels the incredibly tangled web of villains, heroes, and the not-so-heroic…. Salt Warriors is a well-researched and competently written work, with photographs of many participants, maps, and an extensive and useful bibliography. —Lt. Col. G. Alan Knight, US Army (ret.), in the Journal of American’s Military Past...
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Read MoreCurrent Project: The Robles Kidnapping Investigation
At the height of the Depression-era War on Crime, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI G-men,Tucson and Pima County lawmen,and outraged citizens hunt the men who abducted a six-year-old child. The 1934 ransom kidnapping of June Robles created a nationwide sensation, rivaling the Lindbergh case in itstangled puzzle of mishandled evidence, disputed forensics, conflicting eyewitnesses, dodgy tipsters, large cast of suspicious characters, and media frenzy. When court records were sealed, the dramatic events were left to recycled newspaper articles, folk music, dramatic theater, and 75 years of rumor built upon rumor. Using newly discovered documents, Paul Cool will reveal the 3-year search for the truth behind a mysterious crime that once transfixed...
Most Recent Articles
If you read only one book about Churchill
THE CHURCHILL FACTOR by Boris Johnson (Riverhead Books, NY, 2014) Mayor of London Boris Johnson, like Churchill a journalist, historian, and rogue elephant of a Tory politician, has produced a wonderfully chatty book on Sir Winston Churchill. Not a cradle-to-grave biography, it’s instead an illuminating study of what it was that made Churchill different. Not just different from every other British politician or world statesman of the 20th century (and beyond), but the only man who could have saved...
Read MoreMy thanks to True West Magazine
I just received my copy of the December 2014 issue of True West magazine, which includes — on page 58 — an author profile of yours truly and my recommendations for five books on conflict, greed, and corruption on the Western frontier. (I had not yet finished reading Larry Ball’s TOM HORN bio and would certainly have added that!) The piece is the result of an entertaining — I know I was thoroughly entertained — and wide-ranging 90-minute interview conducted...
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Finally! Sent book proposal off to a publisher
After five years with this project, The Mystery of the Iron Box, the story behind the 1934 ransom kidnapping of June Robles of Tucson, the book proposal is off to a university press for consideration. If all goes well, it will probably take about two years for publication, the academic hoops being what they are. Now to turn to the next project, whatever that may be. Each presents hurdles… another 1934 kidnapping that involves copying 15,000 pages of FBI...
Read MoreChanneling Elvis: How Television Saved the King of Rock ‘n Roll, by Allen J. Wiener
Earlier this year, author Allen J. Wiener asked me to read his manuscript on Elvis Presley’s television career, and to provide a cover blurb if I liked the book. I am neither an authority on Elvis nor on television history, but I said, “sure.” I was not only a fan of Elvis’s music, but, as a college disc jockey during the 60s and 70s, I played his music, even when his better songs of the period (e.g., the Jerry...
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The books that might sit on YOUR 1st Ed. shelf: Collecting 1st Eds on Wyatt Earp and Tombstone
As I have written, I am much more a book aggregator than book collector. I have gone looking for very few first editions; and I’ve never gone looking for signed copies. Consequently, there are very few books that I have paid hundreds for, none that I’ve approached $1,000. The most expensive was a privately bound, limited edition 10-volume set of scripts for the 77 (I think is the number) Tombstone episodes of THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF WYATT EARP....
Read MoreSee “Publications and Talks” page for new works so far in 2014
The “Publications and Talks” page now includes listings for upcoming article on the Arizona Cow-Boys in the Wild West History Association Journal, and new book reviews of some must-have books: on Lynn Bailey’s “The ‘Unwashed Crowd'” (WWHA Journal), with much new material on the origins of the Arizona Cow-Boys, and “A Lawless Breed,” the new John Wesley Hardin bio by Chuck Parsons and Norman Wayne Brown (Journal of Arizona History). More articles and reviews on the way, plus am...
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The books that… fill my Churchill shelf. PART 3: History of the English-Speaking Peoples
Churchill, The History of the English Speaking Peoples (hereinafter HESP), (my copy is the American edition, Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1962 reprint; first published 1956-1958). Volumes I-IV: The Birth of Britain; The New World; The Age of Revolutions; The Great Democracies. The four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, begun by Churchill before the Secord World War, is the last book he completed and published. It’s a highly personal view of British and American history (with very little on the...
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