Pulitzer winner is alarmed at newspapers' struggles

No one knows the newsroom like a former reporter. John Darnton worked for the New York Times for 40 years and in that role won the Pulitzer Prize for his stories about Poland during a period of martial law. He also received awards for his coverage of Africa and Eastern Europe. But the man is also a prolific novelist, having written "Neanderthal," "The Experiment," "Mind Catcher" and "The Darwin Conspiracy." His newest is "Black and White and Dead All Over," a delightful yet dark, satirical story about crime at the fictional "New York Globe." Darnton considers himself "a novelist by accident," usually writing on scientific and adventure themes. "I always wondered what it would be like to write something you actually know," said Darnton, during a phone interview from his New York home. So, he wrote a murder mystery about Theodore Ratnoff, a greatly detested editor who is

killed with an editor's spike in the chest in his own newsroom. The news staff saw him as a petty tyrant who consistently chewed people out for the tiniest of mistakes, but just once in a while sent a memo to compliment someone for writing a great headline.

The memo said, "Nice, who?"

Was the murder an inside job?

Darnton freely conceded the use of real journalists or composites to create several of his characters. In fact, Darnton's dedication page is devoted to several deceased journalists who helped inspire this novel, including Homer Bigart and Johnny Apple. In the book, R.W. Apple, a legendary New York Times reporter, appears briefly as Jimmy Pomegranate.

In our interview, Darnton recalled that Homer Bigart was a New York Herald Tribune war correspondent with "a wicked sense of humor" who, when told that his rival at the Times, Margaret Higgins, had a baby, he responded with, "Who's the mother?"

This exchange pops up in the novel.

Darnton also remembered that when he was stationed in Africa, "there were actual reporters who had played basketball with Idi Amin, former president and dictator of Uganda, and warned others never to block his jump shot. When Amin fell from power, I went into his basement and opened the fridge to see if there were really human hearts there. There weren't."

No wonder Darnton included the tidbit that Skeeter Diamond, the paper's executive editor, played basketball with Idi Amin.