Jimmy Olsen was born in Hoffman, Minnesota, in 1946, and began his writing career after returning in 1967, from two tours in Vietnam. Prior to graduating from St. Cloud State College with degrees in English and Journalism he published his first story after surviving a hair-raising scuba experience working on a dam construction project across the Mississippi River. 

The author on his dive boat.
Jimmy aboard his dive boat -- 1989

Sent by parishioners at Bethel Lutheran 
Church in Hoffman, Minnesota, 
Jimmy distributes clothing and toys 
to Vietnamese refugees.

During the 1970s Olsen taught English and Journalism at the Carol Morgan School in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He founded the island’s first dive shop and certified the first Dominican divers. Off-shore in the Caribbean, he earned extra money as a commercial diver maintaining a pumping station for Shell Oil. During these years he wrote numerous adventure stories, including the beginning of a yet unfinished novel about his search and discovery of the French Man-O-War Imperial, sunk in a battle with the British Fleet in 1806.


1974 photo of Jimmy near the anchor ring 
of the Imperial shortly after its discovery.

Olsen returned to the United States in 1977, to complete his MA at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. After graduation he took a job as a reporter/photographer with the Athens News Courier. His stories condemning the Ku Klux Klan in 1978, resulted in death threats and later physical confrontation with KKK Grand Wizard bodyguards. (click here for additional photos about the Klan). He continued to work as a reporter and editor for newspapers in Alabama and Minnesota until 1983, when he returned to the diving business full time. (for NASA diving photos, click here)


Leaving harbor in South Florida.
Jimmy examines a lobster trap in the South Atlantic Gulf Stream


He began writing fiction seriously in 1990, and since then has published short stories and the novel Things In Ditches, (2000). His new novel is  The Poison Makers.

Critics have credited Jimmy Olsen for bringing to his work a natural humor, quirky and believable characters, a revitalization of the mystery genre with lively settings and people more common to mainstream fiction. Olsen in married with three children and five grandchildren. He lives in Minnesota.

For additional bio pictures, click here.