James Owen (born 1969) is a British historian and journalist.
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Owen was born in Holland Park, London, and was educated at Eton College and University College, Oxford. After a brief period as a barrister, he worked for The Daily Telegraph newspaper as a journalist from 1995 until 2001. In 2004, with Guy Walters, he edited The Voice of War, an anthology of World War II memoirs, diaries and letters.
In 2005, he published A Serpent in Eden, an investigation of the unsolved murder in The Bahamas in 1943 of Sir Harry Oakes. Shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction, this was filmed as a drama documentary, entitled Murder in Paradise,[1] for the UK's Channel 4 and broadcast in December 2006. That year, Owen also published Nuremberg: Evil On Trial, a re-examination on its 60th anniversary of the case conducted against the leading Nazis after the Second World War.
His most recent publication, in 2010, is Danger UXB, which tells the story of the early days of Bomb Disposal during the Battle of Britain and The Blitz through the experiences of many of those involved in the work, including Bertram Stuart Trevelyan Archer and Charles Howard, 20th Earl of Suffolk.[2]
Many of Owen's books seek to overturn long-held ideas and conventional wisdom by favouring the forensic examination of primary sources over reliance on secondary ones. A Serpent in Eden rebuts the theory advanced by other writers[3] that the Duke of Windsor attempted to influence the outcome of the investigation into the murder of Sir Harry Oakes. Of Nuremberg: Evil On Trial, Marcel Berlins wrote that Owen had showed that it was not the fair and just trial usually claimed,[4] while in Danger UXB Owen cast doubt on the supposed circumstances surrounding the saving of St Paul's Cathedral by Robert Davies (GC) and the subsequent award to him of the first George Cross an idea first put forward in [5] Danger UXB: by MJ Jappy (Channel 4 Books 2001) .[6]
Owen is a trustee of the London Library.