McKinty's stock rises; analysts say buy

The Wall Street Journal profiles Detectives Beyond Borders favorite Adrian McKinty on the occasion of the U.S. release of I Hear the Sirens in the Street, a novel as good at its title.

The article also invokes McKinty's "Dead" trilogy: Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard, and The Bloomsday Dead, the books that got me reading McKinty.

Not many newspapers devote space to crime fiction these days, so props to the folks at the Wall Street Journal. Something is happening, and you know what it is, Mr. Dow-Jones.

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McKinty's novel The Cold Cold Ground recently won a 2013 Spinetingler Award for best novel. That's a worthy feat; those Spinetingler folks and the people who follow them are some of the sharper and more discerning minds in the crime community. And hey, we Spinetingler winners have to stick together.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

False Negative: Where the hell is my newspaper?

I like get a malicious kick out of am scandalized that Joseph Koenig's False Negative has a protagonist who works for the Atlantic City Press and that it  mentions the Philadelphia Bulletin plus at least two newspapers from the Jersey Shore without, however, mentioning  the newspaper I work for. The omission may accurately reflect the time in which the novel is set (the 1950s, possibly though not definitely 1953, if it matters), but I and several colleagues enjoyed it nonetheless.

I'm not sure Koenig ever worked for newspapers, but he writes convincingly about writing, whether for newspapers, novels, or true-crime pulp magazines, and I may be back with more on the novel.

In the meantime, here's an excerpt from False Negative of the Hard Case Crime Web site. False Negative is a newly published book, the first new novel in two decades from the author, who made a splash in crime fiction in the 1980s before dropping from sight. This 2005 article by Sara Weinman makes Koenig out to be a bit of a shit but therefore an interesting character.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Man Without Qualities visits a newspaper

After an excursion into crime fiction in the mild forms of Derek Raymond, Garbhan Downey, and Charlie Stella, I'm back with more from The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, if you prefer the original German), by my man Robert Musil.

Unlike some of the bits I've quoted from this supremely entertaining novel, these latest have nothing to do with crime fiction. One, however, does contain some telling and entertaining reflections on newspapers (and, by extension, media that did not exist when Musil worked on the novel from 1930 to 1942):

"`His Grace believes that we must take our direction from the land and the times,' he explained gravely. `Believe me, it comes naturally of owning land.'"

and

"If he were alive today, Plato—to take him as an example, because along with about a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived—would certainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out for its content of reason and reality. [ed. note: Ha!] ... The moment his return has ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little piece on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section..." 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Does getting it right matter? Not at the New York Times

A story in the New York Times in July said Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant football coach at Pennsylvania State University, "was convicted last month of being a serial pedophile."

That, of course, is arguably wrong, pedophilia being a psychiatric condition or psychological tendency, not an act. You wouldn't call someone found guilty of stealing from a store a convicted kleptomaniac, would you?

No. He or she is a convicted shoplifter. Similarly, Sandusky is not a convicted pedophile, he is a convicted child molester or abuser. (The pairing of convicted and serial is problematic, too, unless serial attacks are a crime separate and distinct from individual attacks.)

The Times' imprecise use of pedophile reminds me of a similar unacknowledged Times mistake, a post about which I reproduce below. In neither case is the Times' mistake likely to confuse readers. But in neither case is the language precisely correct, either. It's disappointing that that is good enough for the New York Times.

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(Ed. note: This error, published by the New York Times Aug. 6, 2011, remains uncorrected and unacknowledged as of Oct. 3 Oct. 16 Oct. 28 Dec. 11 Dec 18,  Jan. 23, 2012 Jan. 30, 2012 March 25, 2012 June 9 August 20. I don't know why an editor has not corrected the mistake. It's not as if the story's author is Bono, or anything.)

The New York Times recently published the following in its online edition:

NEW NFL RULE IS LIKELY  TO LIMIT KICKOFF RETURNS

By JUDY BATTISTA
c.2011 New York Times News Service

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to be an NFL kick returner, to peer toward the sky, hoping to catch a wobbling ball, while thousands of pounds of opponents thunder toward you. It is going to take more — maybe much more — this season.

In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten defined chutzpah as "gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible 'guts,' presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to." He also called it "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan."

Chutzpah means audacity, in other words, not, as the Times seems to think, bravery. Sure, nerve is a component of and near synonym for both, but this does not mean audacity and bravery are themselves synonymous.

***

Or maybe they have become synonymous, which raises an interesting question: Who determines what's linguistically right and wrong? Respectable authorities, of which the Times is unquestionably one? Trouble is that, while writing and editing at the Times have become sloppier in absolute terms, in relative terms, both may be stronger than before.

That is, though the Times has in recent years given space to Bono and allowed usages once considered mistakes ("Prosecutors like Rudolph W. Giuliani busted the mob, or tried to," New York Times, Aug. 25, 2011), it is surrounded by outlets that care even less about getting things right: newspapers that have de jure or de facto eliminated their copy desks, Web sites that make the most basic editing mistakes and refuse to acknowledge and correct their errors, crime novels that misuse loathe for loath or think that the vibrating organs that enable human speech are vocal chords rather than cords.

So, who decides what's right? Standardized English spelling and, possibly, grammar, meant little before the rise of mass literacy from the middle of the eighteenth century; who says they have to mean anything now? Read loathe for loath or vocal chords for cords, and you'll still probably get what the author intended. Is literacy, beyond the minimum functional level, a luxury? Does getting it right matter?

Comments from readers, writers, editors, and, if any wish to join in, publishers welcome.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011, 2012

Truth and ... that other stuff

The debate about Ryszard Kapuściński's fabrications looks to have been a dreary affair, at least immediately following his death in 2007, perhaps because I-was-there journalism in which the journalist could not possibly have been there had gained prestige, and perhaps because many of his defenders and attackers did not bother citing examples of  his truth or his lies. The anti-Kapuścińskis found it sufficient to invoke Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, and the pros answered with Tom Wolfe but also John Hersey and Daniel Defoe in a high-toned game of name-calling. 

I don't know where The Emperor, Kapuściński's retrospective look at the downfall of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie, fits in that controversy. It looks to me as if Kapuściński may gradually have abandoned the pretense of reportage over the course of the book. 

Who could possibly believe that anyone really said

"A kind of mania seized this mad and unpredictable world, my friend: a mania for development. Everybody wanted to developed himself! ... Yet our Empire had existed for hundreds, even thousands of years without any noticeable development and all the while its leaders were respected, venerated, worshiped. The Emperors Zera Jakob, Towodros, Johannes all were worshiped. And who would ever have gotten it into his head to press his face in front of the Emperor and beg to  be developed?"

as Kapuściński has an interlocutor say in the book's middle chapter, "It's Coming, It's Coming"? (The first chapter is called "The Throne," the last "The Collapse." That should you give you an idea of how things end.)

Yet the comedy is frequently shot through with acid-tongued reminders that the lives of a country and its people are at stake, and with plausible diagramming of a revolution's progress.

Debates about journalistic ethics in America tend to become shrill, puritanical, and, when the debaters are in the newspaper business, desperately and self-laceratingly so, and I can't stand that sort of thing when I'm out of the office. So, what should readers do if they want to read Kapuściński in good conscience? I'm just one book into my Kapuściński-reading career, but I think one could do worse than to start with an observation from the Economist quoted in Wikipedia's Kapuściński article:

"[Kapuściński] creates an Africa of his own. It is a fascinating place. Whether it ever existed as he tells it is another matter altogether."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

I walk in the footsteps of giants

My newspaper's new newsroom occupies a floor of Philadelphia's old Strawbridge's department store. It's a spooky feeling to walk to my desk through a corridor identical to the one where, one floor below, I had once pawed piles of socks, T-shirts, and boxer shorts.

The Beaux-Arts-style building dates to 1931 and was the second store the Strawbridge & Clothier company built at the site. Before that, Thomas Jefferson had his office here when he was secretary of state, across the street and a block up from where he had earlier written the Declaration of Independence (with some judicious copy-editing help).

But neither Jefferson nor his doubtless stream of important visitors captures my imagination as immediately as does another figure who once worked here and who is even more intimately associated with Philadelphia.

(That's an introduction to my new newsroom. Read and see my farewell to my old one.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bye, Bye Broad Street, or my newspaper's moving experience

Tonight my newspaper moves from the building it owned and occupied, and that has borne its name, for eighty-seven years to new, rented quarters.

(R2D2 lends a hand to the
Philadelphia Inquirer's move from
400 North Broad Street to 801
Market Street. All photos
by your  humble blogkeeper)

Movers have been at work for weeks, so hard at work that Friday night they tried to cart away the possessions of one of my colleagues while he was still trying to lay out the newspaper.

Twenty-two years for me, eighty-seven years for my paper. That's a lot of stories, folks, and if the mood strikes me, I'll tell you one or two of those stories as the Inquirer and I settle into our new professional homes. Don't worry; I'm a copy editor, so my stories will duplicate none of those in the official accounts. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Did I praise Portis prematurely? — A view from the copy desk

I'm working on a real post to get this blog's second 2,000 posts off to a real start, but the book in question and the comments I'll want to make require some thought. In the interim, I'll follow a practice long established by those of my fellow journalists who write columns, and I'll rattle off a few paragraphs about what I happen to be thinking about at the time.

=======================

A few paragraphs about what I happen to be thinking about at the time

by Peter Rozovsky

My pathetic need for professional approval may have led me to impute to Charles Portis a sentiment he never intended.

I was so stunned by a brief but believable sketch of a newspaper copy editor in Portis' novel The Dog of the South a few months ago that I neglected to consider that Portis, rather than paying my profession the honor of a rare mention, may have been indulging in an old, tired prejudice.

The Portis passage told of a copy editor who

"was not well liked in the newsroom. He radiated dense waves of hatred and he never joined in the friendly banter around the desk, he who had once been so lively. He hardly spoke at all except to mutter `Crap' or `What crap' as he processed news matter, affecting a contempt for all events on earth and for the written accounts of those events."

The description was accurate and clear-eyed, much more so than the typical depiction of copy editors in newspaper novels and movies (Just kidding. You've never seen a copy editor depicted in a novel or movie, except maybe the one in which Drew Barrymore plays a copy editor who, someone told me, has her own office and is assigned a story to write. And that shows how much those filmmakers cared about getting newspapers right.) Portis made me so grateful to see a copy editor's point of view recognized, as it never is even in newspapers' coverage of newspapers, that it never occurred to me I may have been duped.

The critical words are "processed news matter." I assumed that was the narrator (and hence Portis) sympathizing with the ill-tempered copy editor. But what if I was wrong? What if "processed news matter" is meant to reflect what Portis regards as the copy editor's objectionably cranky tone? What if Portis indeed regards copy editors as contemptibly negative and, like some newroom folks, mistakes analysis for criticism and criticism for subversion?

If I see him, I'll ask. In the meantime, I'll recast the passage and ask how you'd feel about it if you were a reporter:

"He was not well liked on the copy desk. He radiated flabby waves of laziness and arrogance, a vacuous verbal chameleon who riddled his unpunctual prose with the jargon of his beat, a self-dramatizing, self-imporant, questionably literate prima donna who thought nothing of demanding the most trivial changes to his copy long past deadline."

Now, would that be fair?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Charles Portis' (non)fiction: The update

I've received an exciting update to this post I first put up earlier this month. I was told today that Charles Portis is a long-ago former colleague of my newspaper's former managing editor and was best man at his wedding. More to the point, this former managing editor brought the Inquirer's copy desks into the modern age, converting them from pre-retirement way stations for burned-out reporters into a unit with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Did my ex-M.E. get his interest in copy editors from Portis? Did Portis learn to respect copy editors from my ex-M.E.? Or did they imbibe together from a wellspring of respect for copy desks that runs deep beneath the Arkansas soil?

=================================

  I first heard of Charles Portis' 1979 novel The Dog of the South from a Detectives Beyond Borders reader who thought I might be interested because the book's protagonist is a newspaper copy editor who has recently quit his job.

Here's the paragraph that persuaded me to buy the book:

"I had sat next to Dupree on the rim of the copy desk. In fact, I had gotten him the job. He was not well liked in the newsroom. He radiated dense waves of hatred and he never joined in the friendly banter around the desk, he who had once been so lively. He hardly spoke at all except to mutter `Crap' or `What crap' as he processed news matter, affecting a contempt for all events on earth and for the written accounts of those events."

Now, what the hell does Charles Portis know about newspapers? Why would a copy editor complain, especially about the news matter he processed? That sort of thing can only foster disunity in the newsroom.

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(Portis is probably best known as the author of True Grit, which became the basis for two movies. Read more at the Unofficial Charles Portis Web site.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Detectives Beyond Borders schmoozes the elite

Still working too much, reading too little, so I'll keep this brief.

I hope I violate no confidences by saying that Declan Burke's latest novel, Slaughter's Hound, is shaping up as funny, melancholy, and angry at the state of Ireland all at the same time. And that's good, very good.

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Schmoozed with my newspaper's new owners this week, a step or seven above my usual social circles. The new guys include a former NBA team owner, a man widely considered the most powerful political figure in Southern New Jersey, and a philanthropist so ubiquitous in Philadelphia that I welcomed him to the last remaining institution in the city that did not have his name on it. All in all, they don't seem bad sorts, and I hope they do good things with and for my beleaguered paper.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A newspaper's list of international crime fiction

Not so terribly long ago, the Christian Science Monitor published a list of Top 7 detective series set in foreign locales. Here's the list:

1. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, by Alexander McCall Smith
2. Andrea Camilleri's novels about Salvo Montalbano.  
3. The Dr. Siri Paiboun series, by Colin Cotterill 
4. The Yashim the Eunuch series, by Jason Goodwin  
5. The Omar Yussef mysteries, by Matt Beynon Rees  
6. Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen Cao novels set in Shanghai 
7. The Nayir Sharqi and Katya Hijazi novels, by Zoë Ferraris

 © Peter Rozovsky 2011

New York Times, you're one of us now

For some time now, the clincher in any discussion of declining standards of literacy in American newspaper and book publishing has been "I'm even seeing mistakes in the New York Times." Now I can make the same declaration.

Here at my newspaper, I used to play a little game when reading or editing stories from wire services, including the Times' service. Whenever I'd come to a bit of mangled grammar or an ugly, sloppily executed sentence, I'd think, well, this can't be from the Times, and I'd scroll to the top of my computer screen to verify this. Until recently, I was always right.

Then, a few weeks ago, I edited a story by a Times writer who did not know the difference between nominate and appoint. (Think the difference is academic? Not when the story is about presidential nominations subject to Senate confirmation.)

Today there was this, from the Times' Bill Pennington:

"Last weekend he was talked about in entirely different contexts: to note that McIlroy was almost the same age as Woods was when he won his first major..."

In fact, Rory McIllroy, who won golf’s U.S. Open on Sunday, is not almost the same age as Woods was when he won the 1997 Masters, he's 10 months older. Sure, you can figure out what the Times meant, but not so long ago that extra step would have been unnecessary. The Times' reporters knew what they meant and the right words to say it, and if they didn't, its copy editors were good enough or given enough time to fix the mistake. No longer.

The Times is still better written than many newspapers, though it's not as good as the Wall Street Journal or the Economist. It's probably also a better source of news than most, so you won't be clueless if you read it. As for me, though, I'll have to find a new game to play at work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Catch me in the Guardian ... while you can!

That man of the world Adrian McKinty alerted me to Noam Chomsky's commentary on Egypt this week on the Guardian's Web site. Whatever one thinks of Chomsky's politics, his prose style leaves much to be desired, and I wrote as much in a comment at the Guardian's site yesterday.

By today, my comment had been replaced by a notice that "This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards."

So I hardly expect my reply to last any longer. In case it, too, has been deemed to fall short of the Guardian's community standards by the time you get around to clicking the link at the beginning of this sentence, here it is:

6 February 2011 2:28AM

I have learned much about the Guardian's editorial policy from this debate. One may safely accuse authors and commenters of communism, fascism, anti-semitism, anti-Arabism, anti-Americanism, pro-Americanism, depravity, degeneracy, illiteracy, stupidity, and bad spelling, but dare suggest — not state outwardly, not even imply, but merely suggest — that a prominent author gets hands-off treatment from editors, and your comment will be removed faster than if you criticized the British Royal Family at Speaker's [sic--author's error] Corner.

Recommend? (2)

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P.S.

Right on schedule, the Guardian has deleted that comment, too. So it's official: Criticism of the Guardian on the Guardian's Web site is verboten.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Copy-editing error turns up in classic movie

Alfred Hitchcock's movie Shadow of a Doubt is all about a young California woman's realization of the shocking truth about her beloved Uncle Charlie.

Just as shocking is bald evidence that bad copy editing goes back at least to 1943. A pivotal scene has Teresa Wright's Charlotte learning from a newspaper article about the past that Joseph Cotten's Charles, for whom she was named, so desperately conceals.

The article trumpets the quest for the notorious Merry-Widow Murderer (with a hyphen), who is referred to later in the same article, however, as the hyphenless Merry Widow Murderer. A competent copy editor would have caught this inconsistency. The reassessment of Hitchcock's critical reputation begins now.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Donald Westlake dies

Donald Westlake, one of the world's liveliest, funniest and most prolific crime writers, died New Year's Eve. He was 75.

Westlake wrote around 100 novels, virtually inventing the comic caper with his Dortmunder series and the amoral, professional thief/killer in twenty-seven novels featuring Parker, written under the pen name Richard Stark.

Westlake was also a screenwriter, and his screenplay for The Grifters earned an Academy Award nomination in 1991. He won three Edgar awards from the Mystery Writers of America, which named him a Grand Master in 1993

Westlake was one of the cleverest of crime novelists, engaging in such experiments as beginning two different novels with the same botched robbery in order to take the story in two different directions. He also liked to share chapters with authors whose work he enjoyed, a Westlake novel and a book by the cooperating author having a common chapter that features characters from both. He did this notably in the Dortmunder novel Drowned Hopes, which shares a chapter with Joe Gores' 32 Cadillacs, a delicious treat for anyone, doubly so for readers who know both writers.

The New York Times obituary of Westlake, by the way, is a shoddy piece of work, full of what the writer probably thought was delightful color ("who pounded out more than 100 books and five screenplays") but not mentioning Dortmunder, one of the author's two most influential and enduring creations. The obituary also makes the questionable assertion that Westlake's work translated well to the screen. The Dortmunder novels especially have been notoriously ill-served by screen adaptations.

(A knowledgeable observer of both crime fiction and journalism points out that the Times was likely caught unaware by Westlake's death. With a holiday schedule likely in effect, the Times had to draft a non-obituary writer and non-crime-fiction expert. But my correspondent also expressed surprise that the Times did not have an obituary ready in advance, as it should have and as newspapers traditionally do. Westlake was 75, he was extremely well known, especially in New York, and he had had health problems in recent years, though not apparently related to the heart attack that appears to have killed him. The Times dropped the ball on this one. )

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The mysteries of newspapers

Three recent events have me thinking about mysteries set in newspapers. First, I started Garbhan Downey's Running Mates, a comic political crime novel in which newspaper editors and publishers are part of the political web.

Then Gregory McDonald, author of the Fletch novels, died. Finally, a colleague and I talked about Black and White and Dead All Over, a mystery novel by the New York Times reporter John Darnton that he had just read.

When newspapers mattered in America more than they do now, movies, plays and novels were often set in newspapers. That is not to say that these movies, plays and novels were about newspapers. Mostly they were about reporters and, since I'm a copy editor, those fictional worlds had little to do with my real one.

When was the last time you read a newspaper novel or saw a newspaper movie that had a copy editor in it? I thought so. When was the last time you read a newspaper novel or saw a newspaper movie that offered an accurate picture of newspapers? Same answer.

Anyhow, McDonald has stuck in my mind since I read a scene from one of the Fletch books that recounts the character's failure as a newspaper obituary writer. Why did he fail? Because he made the mistake of writing an accurate obituary. I don't have the book at hand, but I believe the fictional obit included the phrase "a life distinguished by absolutely nothing."

Darnton, meanwhile, though a reporter, takes the highly unusual step of acknowledging, at least implicitly, that copy editors exist. His novel's first victim is an editor found dead with a spike bearing a note driven into his chest. The note is a mocking imitation of memos this editor used to send when he wanted to find out who had written a particularly good headline: "Nice. Who?" Since copy editors write the headlines, that note, even if it is the extent of copy editors' involvement in the book, is still a hell of a lot more acknowledgement than fictional depictions of newspapers usually give us.

Of course, Darnton doesn't take this accuracy thing too far. According to my colleague, the novel includes a reporter who lost his job because he wrote poorly. If Darnton thinks any reporter ever lost a job because of poor prose style, he has moved beyond fiction into fantasy.

What's your favorite novel, movie, story or play set in a newspaper? It it's a crime story, so much the better.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008