Product Description
A keenly intelligent, delightfully mordant novel that blends fact and fiction with the same deft hand that was at work in John Darnton’s best-selling Neanderthal.
Bad news is brewing in the inner sanctum of the New York Globe, the city’s long-standing newspaper of note, whose back is to the wall. Readership, advertising, and circulation are plummeting—along with the paper’s vaunted standards—and the cost cutters have their knives out. But trouble of a wholly different kind begins one rainy September morning when a powerful editor is found murdered in the newsroom, with the spike that he’d wielded to kill stories hammered into his chest. The problem for Priscilla Bollingsworth, the young, ambitious female NYPD detective assigned to the case—besides the fact that the mayor is breathing down her neck—is that there are too many suspects to choose from.
She teams up with Jude Hurley, a clever, rebellious reporter, and together they navigate the ink-infested waters whose denizens include the paper’s resentful old guard, scheming careerists, a bumbling publisher, a steely executive editor, and a rival newspaper tycoon named Lester Moloch. But the waters thicken considerably when more bodies turn up, dead all over.
Armed with the firsthand knowledge he has acquired through forty years in journalism, John Darnton conjures up the cynicism and romanticism of the profession and gives us a cunning, pitch-perfect portrait of the declining—if not yet murderous—newspaper industry. Black and White and Dead All Over is a satirical mystery that entertains from first to last.
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 What is an obituary?
The slug: slay
The lede: Noted reporter and author John Darnton is charged with suffocating characters and burying them in disparate plots in his latest novel "Black & White and Dead All Over."
This reviewer could only lament, "And to think, the ink wasn't even dry."
"Black & White and Dead All Over" spins a murder mystery revolving around the vicissitudes of the newspaper business. Grisly murders are committed at the NY Globe - a NY Times namesake. Jude, a scrupulous reporter at the paper, is tasked with investigating the crime. He sleuths through leads that become frustrating dead ends. He encounters invective suspects and colorful confidants whose real crimes are being too stereotypical. Like a hungry shark circling in on flailing prey, Jude encroaches the unfolding drama -- darting in for a nibble or two before the final lunge. Jude ultimately reveals the big not-so secret, uncovers the forgettable killer and secures his job at a failing newspaper.
Darnton succeeds in recreating the acerbic atmosphere at a pre-eminent newspaper in the throes of internet apoplexy, financial convulsions and tabloid seizures. The hard-drinking, nicotine-addicted neurotics of the Globe suffer their deadlines sobered by their smoke-free office and the realization that the local bar runs them a tab. The duality of these characters is the real story. The reason Darton uses murder as the vehicle to connect the storyline is the real mystery.
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 A Primer on the New York Times and Also a Great Mystery ( manursing )
I have read several books about newspapers but none have given me the inside feeling of the paper in operation as Black & White has done. One sees the stereotypes of the reporters and management. The portrayals are entertaining and very funny.
That would have been enough for a great read. Fortunately, Mr. Darnton has added to this a really good mystery that kept my interest. It is an old fashion mystery when many have a motive. Even the ancillary characters have a great story.
In short this book is a treat.
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LOL - but too many characters ( felixunderhill )
What a fun book; a great plot that keeps you guessing and laughing to the end. However, the author introduces so many characters in the first one hundred pages, I had to make notes to keep track of them all. While many of the characters were merely "charicatures", I would love to meet the ones that were well developed in a sequel.
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All the News That Leads to Murder
"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.
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wonderful whodunit ( harrietklausner@worldnet.att.net )
The New York Globe is in deep trouble financially with ads and circulation dropping dramatically and consequently the stock price is falling. However, that is no reason for someone to murder odious assistant managing editor Theodore S. Ratnoff; whose corpse is found in an office of the paper.
NYPD Detective Priscilla Bollingsworth and Globe's investigative reporter Jude Hurley join forces to find the killer. The problem is almost everyone working at the Glove had the motive including Jude because Theodore took pleasure in humiliating anyone and everyone. The list expands as bad cops, a reporter accused of plagiarism and a disgraced by the deceased executive editor have motives and opportunities. The inquiry spins even uglier and more complex when a Globe's gossip columnist and a food critic are killed.
BLACK AND WHITE AND DEAD ALL OVER is a wonderful whodunit in which the cleverly designed case and the news milieu make for powerful social observations on what and how get printed regardless of the medium. Priscilla and Jude are a fine pairing as their professions insure mutual distrust, but need each other to thoroughly investigate who likes to contribute to the obituary column. John Darnton provides a strong entertaining murder mystery with solid hooks at society's hypercritical foibles.
Harriet Klausner
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