Darcy O’Brien; Author of ‘True Crime’ Books

Darcy O’Brien, 59, author of best-selling “true crime” books, including one about Los Angeles’ Hillside Strangler case. The son of actors George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill, O’Brien grew up in Hollywood surrounded by entertainment luminaries including John Wayne and John Ford. O’Brien fictionalized those days in “A Way of Life, Like Any Other,” which won the P.E.N. Ernest Hemingway Award for best first novel in 1978. Last year, O’Brien won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for nonfiction for “Power to Hurt,” which is about a small-town judge in Tennessee. The writer had recently completed “The Hidden Pope,” a book about the friendship of Pope John Paul II and a Polish Jew that helped foster the 1994 Vatican recognition of Israel. After learning that his Princeton roommate, now California Chief Justice Ronald M. George, would preside over the Hillside Strangler trial, O’Brien decided to write about that case. The 1985 book, “Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers,” was adapted into a television miniseries starring Richard Crenna. O’Brien, educated at Princeton, Cambridge and UC Berkeley, taught English at Pomona College in Claremont and at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. On Monday in Tulsa of a heart attack.