The Crime Scene: John Darnton’s ‘Black, White, and Dead All Over’

Names matter. They either resonate or they don’t. The good ones sometimes define the character, or have a sequence of syllables that combine memorably to imprint the reader’s consciousness.Would the great detective have become the most famous literary character in history if Arthur Conan Doyle had stayed with his initial choice of names, Sherrinford Holmes, instead of the slightly less outré Sherlock Holmes? Would Ellery Queen have become America’s most famous detective for a quarter of a century, beginning in 1929, if the novels had the bylines of the real names of the authors, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee?There can be no doubt that the hero of Wilkie Collins’s “The Woman in White” is Walter Hartright, nor that the villains are Percival Glyde and Count Fosco. It is inconceivable that the damsel in distress, Laurie Fairlie, could be anything other than lovely.No one was more renowned for colorfully naming his characters than Charles Dickens, who christened them so aptly that they became familiar elements of the language, used as shortcuts to describe character traits: Scrooge (mean-spirited miser), Pecksniff (sanctimonious hypocrite), Fagin (thieving corrupter of young), and Uriah Heep (hand-wringing conniver). When they first appear on the page, we know what they are, just as we know that we have met good, kindly characters when introduced to Fezziwig, the Cheeryble brothers, and Polly Toodle.I can think of no mystery writer of recent memory who has used names so wonderfully as John Darnton in his new mystery novel, “Black and White and Dead All Over” (Knopf, 351 pages, $24.95). Although set in the present day, with contemporary speech patterns, including the smart-mouthed snarkiness of its many characters, it has all the feel of a “Golden Age” (i.e., the era between World Wars I and II) mystery, when writers, and the people with whom they populated their books, subscribed to the “oh, what fun” school of detective fiction.At the New York Globe, a newspaper that bears more than a passing resemblance to the New York Times (no surprise, since Mr. Darnton worked there for 40 years), a corpse with an editor’s spike hammered into his chest is discovered in the newsroom. This is regarded as a tragedy by a very tiny percentage of the people who knew him, so virtually everyone on the staff is viewed as a suspect.Among those who parade across the pages are Peregrin Whibbleby, Elisha Hagenbuckle, Vickie Gimmy, Heaton Squire, Jimmy Pomegranate, Neville Dumpster, Ellen Butterby, Hickory Bosch, Gulliam Toothy, Elmer Boxby, Hank Higgle, Brisley Townsend, Pat Lorn (a gossip columnist), Nat Dreck (a blogger), and Judith Outsalot, the food critic, who everyone calls Dinah, of course.Short of actually going to work as a journalist on a big-city newspaper, one could have no better glimpse at what it’s really like behind the scenes of a familiar medium that gives the appearance of having been produced by a team of educated, rational, and perhaps dedicated professionals, rather than the egotistical, backstabbing, self-centered, nasty gossipmongers and drunks who actually ride its elevators and click away at its computers.As is true with those old-fashioned (a non-pejorative word when I use it) mysteries of the Agatha Christie, S.S. Van Dine, Craig Rice, and John Dickson Carr era, there are red herrings galore, plenty of suspects, and a good cop (with the unlikely moniker, as they used to say, of Priscilla Bollingsworth) who is tough and tenacious, but with some charm and acumen. And there is humor. Almost before the body is cold, the reporters and columnists gather at their favorite bar, trying to top each other with stories and bons mots reminiscent of the drinkers at the Algonquin Round Table, except the anecdotes are true — more or less. One old-time reporter, a regular in the boozy group, is described as “the quintessence of a newspaperman — a quick mind and a tough exterior. His credo was: If your mother says she loves you, demand a second source.”The zany but sharp wit (he has Dinah Outsalot write a cookbook when her beloved grandmother died, titling it “Eating Your Way Through Grief,” which had topped the best-seller list for five months and “was being made into a movie starring Meryl Streep”) should give Mr. Darnton a good shot at making it on the best-seller list himself, as he did in 1996 with his thriller “Neanderthal.” I hope so, as that might encourage him to write more mysteries like this one.Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop and the series editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories. He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.

The Crime Scene: John Darnton’s ‘Black, White, and Dead All Over’

The Crime Scene: John Darnton’s ‘Black, White, and Dead All Over’

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