Scoop! Journalists in Fiction

A Metronome with Acne

Experience counts for a lot in journalism. Partly, it gives an awareness of what needs to be done in a sometimes bewildering range of situations; partly, it gives the deeper world view needed to put what is happening to real people, living real lives, into a human context.

Which means that the stumblings of junior reporters provide a rich vein of comedy.

In The Water Clock, Jim Kelly has fun with the Crow's acne-ridden junior reporter Gary Pymore:

Criminal over confidence was his fatal flaw, compounded by the illusions that it was his spots.

Gary has tombstone teeth, an 'ever-present full-length coat' (for Kelly, a coat defines a man) and smokes inexpertly. He had meningitis as a youth, and lost a good part of his ability to balance.

This had been treated by fitting his shoes with blakeys - small metal plates once designed to preserve shoe leather. The treatment involved smacking his shoes against the ground as he walked and using the sound as a kind of sonic stabilizer. As a result he was, in motion, a human metronome. A metronome with acne.

Gary's real flaw is, of course, enthusiasm - both a great virtue and a heavy burden for a journalist. As Liza Marklund says of a bright young reporter:

His only flaw was his undisguised delight in accidents, murders, and various other tragedies.

And, as Kelly's central character Philip Dryden observes:

... despite some serious handicaps, including phoentic spelling and Olympic stupidity, Gary was probably a born reporter.   

The dividing line

Using a journalist as the central character in a crime novel (or, more accurately, a narrative driven by crime) is that they can get too close to the action.

Dryden recognised he had arrived at the dividing line between being a reporter and a detective. He was reluctant to cross it due to a combination of iinate cowardice and the lack of a blue uniform covered in comforting buttons and insignia (The Water Clock, Jim Kelly)

And here's DCI Pink to Constance Amory in Exit:

"This is not a story; it's a crime. And you aren't a detective, you are a reporter."

Later, in The Water Clock:

(DCI) Stubbs turned on him. "You've got no right shadowing a police office investigation like this. Or for that matter, witholding vital evidence."

Similar to Kurt Wallander in Firewall:

"You and your newspaper are not the ones in charge of this investigation. We are. If you wish to draw your own judgment, we can't stop you. But the truth is going to turn out quite different. Not that you and your editor will give it much space."

The Scoop! meme nudges on

One of the purposes of Scoop! was to invite others to do my work for me by highlighting characters I'd either never heard of - or had forgotten. Partly to that purpose, and partly to see how ideas travel through the blogoshere (the day job intrudes) I set in train the Scoop! meme.

Here are some of the recommendations:

• De komst van Joachim Stiller/The coming of Joachim Stiller by Hubert Lampo  (Serge Cornelus)
• New Grub Street, by George Gissing (Andrea Weckerle)
• Will Farnaby in Aldous Huxley's Island (Jack Yan)
• Derkhan Blueday, art-critic for the Beacon and secret correspondent for the illegal Runagate Rampant in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station (Elizabeth Albrycht)
• Millon De Floss, the journalist/stalker in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book (Charles Arthur)
• Barry White, literary hack in 72 Virgins, by Boris Johnson (Sam Smith)
• The Honourable Schoolboy, by John le Carre (Simon Collister)

Thanks to everyone... More please - and you dopn't have to be invited to join the meme.

A great distraction

"News was a great distraction if you didn't want to think about your own life."

A splendid observation from Jim Kelly's The Water Clock; many more to follow, and thanks to Roger Hermiston for the recommendation.

Faking it

In Self's Punishment, Bernhard 'The Reader' Schlink's detective Gerhard Self suggests another category for Scoop! - fake journalists.

"Herr Mischkey, you've been a great help. In case I think of anything else may I give you a call? Here's my card." I felt around in my wallet for the business card with my private address and telephone number in which I pose as freelance journalist Gerhard Selk.

Earlier in the book, the narrator Self remarks

Tietzke, one of the last honest journalists. When the Heidelberger Tageblatt folded he'd got a job with the Rhine Neckar Chronicle by the skin of his teeth, but his status there was tricky.

There seems to be no narrative purpose for the opinion that Tietzke was an exception - a claim reinforced by the suggestion honesty threatened his job security.

An inky cowboy...

Although Joe Donovan's work as a reporter is significant to the plot of The Mercy Seat, Martyn Waites has little say about journalism. What Donovan provides is a character rugged, Northern and, at the time of the action, a loner.

In one of the weaker exchanges in a novel of uneven dialogue, Donovan is talking to Maria Bennett, an old friend and the editor of his former paper The Herald about the fact that she isn't married - "I am a successful independent woman... not wife and mother material."

Not unless you marry another journalist, says Donovan.

"I know what you inky cowboys are like," replies Maria. Improbably, Donovan suggests she has not lost her facility for an apt phrase.

Although I am struggling to hear any editor referring to a fellow journalist as an 'inky cowboy', it does have a resonance for Donovan. We know he is cool enough to wear a CBGB's t-shirt - and identifies with the Johnny Cash's version of Mercy Seat rather than Nick Cave's...

Peta describes him as...

Tall, long hair. Mid-thirties. Leather jacket and boots. Bit like that old cowboy actor from the 1970s. Sam Ellliott? Yeah. But without the moustache.

We learn ... his usual type of story... involved cover-ups, corruptions or social injustice. One he did on care homes led to a change in the law.

(Maria) named a prominent Conservative politician who had been jailed on perjury and corruption charges.

"Remember him? Joe was on that team, his first assignment." 

An inky cowboy anyone?

Tougher than the rest

Donovan brought his hands up, pushed back into Mark's twisted face. He forced the heel of his left hand on to his top lip, pushing lip and nose back as far and as hard as he could.   

Clearly this reporter is cut from a different cloth than Hughie. The back cover blurb for Martyn Waites' The Mercy Seat, begins:

Once a renowned investigative journalist, Joe Donavan's life fell apart when his six-year-old son disappeared without trace. Now a virtual recluse, Donovan is abruptly thrust back into the limelight when a teenage boy makes contact in desparet need of his help.

Donovan is a tough Geordie who can handle himself in the (several) fights that come his way in a rather violent novel.

It's hard to imagine Hugh, Annika or Constance in this scene, right at the start...

Joe Donovan picked up the revolver from the table, felt the heft of it in his left hand, weighed the options.

Not that Waites can allow Donovan much in the way of social niceties. He is stuck in a Northumberland cottage which 'looked like a building site during lunchbreak.'

He hadn't just let himself go, he'd become abandoned.... Stale booze breath and unwashed skin.