Curt Gentry, a California historian who wrote or co-wrote more than a dozen books, including a best-selling biography of J. Edgar Hoover and the true-crime classic “Helter Skelter,” about the Manson family murders, died July 10 in San Francisco. He was 83.

His brother and sole survivor, Pat Gentry, said the cause was lung cancer.

Mr. Gentry had wide-ranging interests as a historian. His works included “The Madams of San Francisco” (1964), an irreverent history of the city, and “Frame-Up: The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings” (1967), about two labor leaders convicted and later pardoned in connection with a notorious 1916 bombing in the San Francisco Bay area. He also co-wrote memoirs by American gun designer John M. Browning and U-2 spy-plane pilot Francis Gary Powers.