Ex-New York Times Reporter's Deadly Roman a Clef
John Darnton's Mystery Spikes Despised Editor -- in Fiction
Aug 4, 2008
Mysteries are not always written from real life, but Black and White and Dead All Over (Knopf, $24.95) certainly is. By John Darnton, author of best sellers Neanderthal and The Darwin Conspiracy, it's about a newspaper extremely reminiscent of The New York Times, called the Globe, where a hated editor is found dead in the newsroom. An old-fashioned editor's spike (once used to impale articles written but then killed) has been plunged into his chest..
Readers who are familiar with the Times will have no trouble identifying some figures. There is Jimmy Pomegranate, a stand-in for the late R. W. "Johnny" Apple Jr., as legendary for his epicurean appetite as for his dispatches. A reporter who has become a Pentecostal Christian, called Slim Jim Cutler, shares some traits with former Timesman McCandlish "Long John" Phillips. And there is a former executive editor called Max Schwartzbaum who has been put out to pasture as a columnist, who could be based on the late A.M. Rosenthal.
Satire of Contemporary Print Journalism
Darnton presents a mordant and amusing satire on life at a newspaper these days. Gone is the romance of the "Front Page," for those who remember the movie with Jack Lemmon and Walter Mathau, and an earlier film based on the same play, "His Girl Friday" with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant.
No reporters with cigarettes burning on the edge of their desks sit at battered manual typewriters pecking out articles on deadline on real paper and bellowing "copy" to call copy boys or girls to collect each "take." Instead, the newsroom, with near-silent computers and no-smoking rules, is so quiet it's like an "insurance office," in the words of one old-timer.
Rupert Murdoch-like Character
A takeover of the paper is threatened by a rival publisher named Lester Moloch. Unlike Australian Rupert Murdoch, owner of the New York Post, Moloch is a New Zealander.
The denizens of the newsroom congregate at a bar Darnton calls Slough’s, a dingy joint resembling Gough’s, a now-gone watering hole on West 43d Street in Manhattan opposite the former Times office building.
The plot suggests that the dead editor has made so many enemies that almost anyone, including the publisher, could be suspected of the killing. As a former Times reporter myself, I have ideas about the model for the victim and other characters, However, without two sources to quote, I would be doing a disservice to the profession to reveal them. It doesn’t matter. Black, White and Dead All Over is a funny must-read for followers of mysteries and newspapers alike.
