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Author of Drugstore Cowboy behind bars … again

His name may not be as instantly recognizable as, say, John Dillinger or Jesse James, but James Fogle seems intent on adding “career criminal” to a resumé that already includes “published novelist” among his lifetime achievements.

Fogle is the author of Drugstore Cowboy, a novel about a group of bumbling thieves in the 1970s who knock off pharmacies for drugs and money. The book was made into a 1989 movie starring Matt Dillon and directed by a then little-known Gus Van Sant. (The book, unpublished at the time Van Sant adapted it, was released in 1990.) Fogle was unable to attend the film’s premiere because he was in prison. The New York Times reported last week that the sometime author is back in the hoosegow after being arrested for armed robbery in Seattle.

The novelist, now 73, was ordered held in $500,000 bail here on Thursday, two days after the police say he and another man, both armed, tried to steal narcotics from a pharmacy in the Seattle suburbs, binding employees’ hands with plastic ties and locking them in a storeroom.

Mr. Fogle, hooded and wearing a pink bandana over his face while holding trash cans filled with drugs in both hands, was arrested as he walked out the back door of the Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy on a busy street in Redmond, Wash., about 9 p.m. on Tuesday, the police said. He and another man, Shannon Benn, 45, surrendered quietly.

“We didn’t think it was anybody special,” said Jim Bove, a spokesman for the Redmond police.

Court records show that Fogle has been busy in the two decades since the movie’s release, racking up a robust list of arrests and prison terms in Washington and Oregon, as well as being a key suspect in a series of drugstore robberies profiled on America’s Most Wanted.

There is no indication that Fogle will use his time behind bars to pen a sequel to Drugstore Cowboy.

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