Black and White and Dead All Over [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

I just finished reading John Darnton's latest novel, "Black and White and Dead All Over", and I can't get the smile off of my face. This satire/allegory is completely unlike Darnton's other books - all sci-fi adventures. In this one Darnton shares his intimate knowledge of newspapers -- gleaned from 40 years of experience as a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the New York Times - to create a hysterical murder mystery set in a big city newspaper. (Could it, in fact, be the Times?)
Darnton clearly knows where all the bodies are buried in the news business. No one escapes his knife; from news editors to reporters to headline writers to bloggers. In the end Darnton does to newspapers what Carl Hiassen does to the State of Florida. On many occasions I laughed out loud. The book moves like wildfire and is a joy to read.

"Dark Days at Newspaper" is a headline that could run on the front page of almost any daily paper in America. Advertising, circulation and relevance are heading downward, and with rounds of layoffs and spending cuts, the cranky, daylight-deprived souls who toil away in newspaper offices are understandably gloomy. The blogosphere churns around the clock with portrayals of newspapers as conservative and out of touch, while feeding like maggots on the content those newspapers provide. Right-wing radio bashes newspapers as too liberal. Far worse than all the criticism is the cold reality that there is simply no stopping the technological and generational shift from print to digital in the news business. The old model -- printing news and advertising on large pages of disposable paper -- is sinking steadily toward the basement.

So the dark underground caverns of a prestigious New York newspaper are the right setting for the murder at the outset of "Black and White and Dead All Over" by John Darnton, the author of biology-fiction thrillers Neanderthal and The Darwin Conspiracy. A 30-year veteran of the New York Times, Darnton delivers a knowing, insider's portrait of the newspaper with great sympathy and humor, and successfully captures the intense human drama and daunting business imperatives in the world of newspapering. A sense of impending doom hovers over the enterprise, a sense that its greatness is slipping away.

"Black and White" is really a novel about the Times, thinly disguised as a murder mystery. What elevates it to the top of any beach-reading pile is its dead-on depiction of the idiosyncratic life of a big-time newsroom, way more chaotic and disorganized than outsiders can imagine. The adolescent jockeying between ambitious editors, the unpredictable twists of a news-driven day, the rush of deadline pressure, the bickering over how to package incomplete information, the prevalent workaholism and utter abandonment of personal lives, the nightly repairing to a neighborhood bar: These are all elements of an exhausting daily odyssey that yields a remarkably readable, authoritative-sounding version of world events. Newspaper people are romantic and nostalgic about their craft, with its flashes of brilliance and its glaring shortcomings, and with the wry world-weariness that only the brethren can fully appreciate.

The plot of "Black and White" is engrossing from the get-go. The first murder victim is a much-hated editor who supervised the newspaper's standards of word choice, and who personifies the tyrannical, pretentious side of the Times. (The inside joke here is that the victim, Theodore Ratnoff, is portrayed as a tall and handsome strapping blond, while the real editor of standards, Allan Siegal, was short and heroically rotund.) His body is discovered with a telling item stuck into his chest: a newspaper spike, the symbol of days gone by, when an editor rejecting copy would spike it on a metal spire atop one's desk. The smart-alecky reporter assigned to cover the crime teams up with a dark and attractive (if implausibly aristocratic) female police detective. In their relationship, Darnton skillfully plays with the touchy alliance/competition/mistrust between reporters and cops, mirroring the larger association between the media and government. Surveying the thicket of potential murderers, Darnton can offer a kaleidoscopic view of the characters who populate the newspaper. ("Any suspects?" the editor is asked. He answers: "Let's see. How many people are in editorial? I'd say about twelve hundred.")

The publisher (modeled on the current Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger) frets about the stock price and drags senior staff to time-wasting group retreats. "Thinking was not his forte, but he had a certain cunning," writes Darnton. The executive editor (modeled on the current executive editor, Bill Keller) is too shy to talk to his staff and constantly reminisces about his days as a foreign correspondent in Russia and Africa. The reporter without a moral compass (Judith Miller, of WMD fame) gets caught plagiarizing Tolstoy. There is even a hard-driving and swashbuckling rival publisher named Lester Moloch (modeled on Rupert Murdoch). There are countless reporters and editors with their own bizarre tics or traits. The murder was clearly a clever inside job. More, I will not give away.

Darnton relies on gentle satire to evoke the many ironies in newspapering and even his seemingly throwaway descriptions of news situations ring utterly true. The ancient pressroom at City Hall looks like "a crowded Mayan ruin littered with the detritus of tourists." The relentless questions rained on a journalist writing a page-one story on deadline is an experience "like getting nibbled to death by ducks."

Darnton, a talented correspondent and editor, excelled at the Times but never won promotion to the highest ranks, allowing him a bitingly accurate perspective on how things really work at the paper. Only now, after his recent retirement, could he write what amounts to a tell-all about the newspaper he clearly loved and gave much of his life to. His novel may lose him a few friends, but it will win him many new admirers.

The New York Globe is mired in the current economic doldrums of big city newspapers nationwide, a growing internet threatening its very existence, a hotbed of internal politics and petty competitions. Everyone is shocked by the brutal murder of a tyrannical editor, Theodore S Ratnoff. An acerbic, demanding taskmaster with few words of praise, Ratnoff is found with an editor's kill spike embedded in his chest. Jude Hurley is given the story- a make-it-or-break-it assignment, considering the pressures involved. Most likely, Ratnoff's murder is an inside job; the detective on the case, Priscilla Bollingsworth, has an equally enormous task ahead. There are far too many people on her growing list of suspects. Ratnoff has not been a popular editor. Even Jude is staggered by the number of potential villains, a list that includes virtually every link in the chain, from reporters to the most powerful members of the Board of Directors.

Over the course of the investigation, while Jude confers with Bollingsworth, each seeking relevant information from the other, Jude stumbles over a potpourri of scandalous events: a plagiarizing reporter with a formerly pristine reputation; an autocratic head of security who has no problem threatening anyone who challenges his methods; a gossip columnist hiding a romantic liaison who becomes a second victim; and an old-time reporter who appears to be the source of incriminating fingerprints and notes from the killer. Scrambling to pull together the pieces of an intriguing mystery that actually began with the founding of the Globe years earlier, Jude uncovers a number of troubling facts, not the least of which is that he is being followed, the threat increasing the closer he gets to the truth.

Darnton, a journalist, is clearly in his element in this novel, dissecting the behind-the-scenes petty dramas and jockeying for power that enliven the newspaper business from the presses to the rarified offices of the publisher and his fellow board members. The old days and the old ways wrestle for ascendancy, the great journalistic monolith courageously fighting its adaptation to technological advances, clinging to street-wise reporting methods that have so defined journalism. The author perfectly captures the crazed pre-press activity and the sudden vacuum that follows until the next deadline, hard core reporters resisting the new trends toward Lifestyle and Entertainment skewed to a younger demographic. With just the faintest touch of romantic involvement, Darnton sticks to the point; Jude is the hero of the hour, ink as rich as blood in his veins, a dedicated journalist who has a vested interest in keeping the Globe competitive and relevant. Welcome to the world of deadlines, internal politics and a murderer who almost stops the presses. Luan Gaines/ 2008.