From Publishers Weekly online, 07-13-07:

   Edwin McDowell, whose 26-year career as a reporter with the New York Times included a number of years covering book publishing, died Tuesday at his home in Bronxville, N.Y. He was 72. McDowell joined the Times in 1978 after working at several different newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal. McDowell was also the author of three novels and in 1964 wrote Barry Goldwater: Portrait of an Arizonian.

   From Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

      McDOWELL, EDWIN (Stewart) (1935-2007)
         * The Lost World (St. Martin’s, 1988, hc) [New York City, NY]

      Book description:

   “The darker side of New York City comes to vivid life in this troubling yet touching story of a relationship between two very unlikely people and how this relationship changes their lives. New York ‘Free Press’ newspaperman Alex Shaw covers Times Square as his beat. And young Leonardo Ruis prowls the streets there trying to survive amid the drugs, danger, and decadence. After a violent first encounter, where Leonardo and his gang mug Alex, they both discover a mutual interest and a way to help each other. As their relationship develops, the reader is confronted with the horrors of street life in New York City.”

      Review excerpts:

New York Times: “Edwin McDowell, who covers publishing for The New York Times, has taken a look at what he calls ‘the lost world’ and has built his fiction upon a stock of horrified observation of the dopers, muggers and losers who scurry among the blank new constructions and such isolated monuments as the Harvard Club. […]

   “In his third novel Mr. McDowell is aiming more for a Frank Norris documentary, sometimes irately sociologizing ‘the whole panoply of pathologies,’ rather than a William S. Burroughs hallucinatory celebration. Though the madness appalls him, occasionally there are flashes of ironic invention, as when he evokes a mugger’s parrot, trained to say on command, ‘Give me all your money!’

   “In the end, the writer ties it all up but doesn’t blink. The lost boy is not found, the wild boy is not saved and Alex Shaw and his Jill are hurtling through Times Square in a cab, sending a jaywalker scrambling. This, of course, is not an invented irony. And come to think of it, probably the mugger’s parrot isn’t, either.”

Publishers Weekly: “Grittily realistic local color adds credibility and interest to this well constructed, suspenseful tale. Alex Shaw, like the author (To Keep Our Honor Clean) a New York journalist, covers the Times Square area, and one day is approached by a young hoodlum nicknamed ‘Dingo,’ teenage son of an aging hooker, who lives on the streets. […] What he learns from Dingo about respectable businessmen who prey on the bodies of young boys and girls may not be news to the reader, nor is McDowell’s theory, promulgated through Alex, of intentional neglect by real-estate moguls eager to make bucks once the area becomes completely desolate. But his mix of scrofulous lowlifes and crusty journalists is authentic, and the novel is suspenseful, funny and sometimes surprisingly tender.”