He also compiled his exhaustive research of criminal behaviour into a CD-ROM entitled Jay Robert Nash's True Crime Database.
While Nash's books won a number of "Best Reference" citations from the American Library Association, his works were also criticized for including misinformation or wrong data.
Nash's father was a newspaperman who died fighting in the Pacific during World War II while his mother was a cabaret singer in her youth.
Pugnacious, diminutive, and dapper in the attire of a 1920s gangster, his heroic fantasies have made him a Chicago legend — especially among the patrons of his favorite saloons.
In 2008, The Library of America selected Nash's story "The Turner-Stompanato Affair" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.
"[4] Richard Maxwell Brown, writing in the Journal of American History, noted that one of Nash's books contained "numerous errors, omissions, inconsistencies, and anomalies.