The Books: Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker; edited by David Remnick; ‘Covering the Cops’, by Calvin Trillin

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Next up on the essays shelf:

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick

Life Stories is a collection of “profiles” from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick. The pieces span the 20th century, one of the best parts of these compilations. I also love that it’s not just celebrities who are covered, although they are represented here too. There are celebrities in certain sub-cultures, and then also a couple of people who are virtually unknown (“Mr. Hunter” from Staten Island), and yet fascinating. The best part of the profiles is that they are so in-depth and so lengthy (some of them run to 40 pages long), that you actually feel like you have met these people.

Today’s piece is a famous one by Calvin Trillin, about Edna Buchanan, a crime reporter for the Miami Herald, from 1986 (the year she won a Pulitzer Prize). It’s delightful. An improbable tale. Edna Buchanan spent her career “covering the cops” in Miami, a beat usually reserved for brand-new green reporters. But something about crime set Buchanan’s genius free. At the time of the article, she lived alone (well, except for her five cats), and spent her days tracking down leads, calling up the police department (they all knew her by name: “It’s Edna”) and asking “what’s going on over there?” The cops had a love-hate relationship with her. She had to be told to stay behind the yellow crime tape. Repeatedly. Sometimes, just to freak her out, a cop would show her the crime scene of some gruesome homicide – maybe hoping that the gory details would turn the little lady’s stomach. The opposite result would occur. Edna was like a dog with a bone. She would interview neighbors of suspects, she was interested in the small detail, the human detail that could make a story come to life.

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She wrote an article whose first line has since become hallowed-ground in crime reporting, generally considered one of the best first lines in an article ever: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”

I Googled her this morning to see what she was up to, if she was still around, and found this very interesting article. She just got married. Her background was fascinating. She didn’t go to journalism school or anything like that. She took a creative writing course, wrote a short story (a thriller) and the teacher praised some of it as reminding him of Tennessee Williams. That was it. She was a writer. She heard the Miami Sun was looking for reporters. She applied and got the job. She wrote up all kinds of things: society events, local politics, and crime. It was in crime that she found her niche.

Trillin hangs out with Edna, picks up on her way of speaking (she’ll look over a report from the cops over some crime and say to herself, “That’s interesting as heck”), and tries to break down for us what is so unique about Edna Buchanan. It’s great.

Here’s an excerpt, the opening of the profile.

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick; ‘Covering the Cops’, by Calvin Trillin

In the newsroom of the Miami Herald, there is some disagreement about which of Edna Buchanan’s first paragraphs stands as the classic Edna lead. I line up with the fried-chicken faction. The fried-chicken story was about a rowdy ex-con named Gary Robinson, who late one Sunday night lurched drunkenly into a Church’s outlet, shoved his way to the front of the line, and ordered a three-piece box of fried chicken. Persuaded to wait his turn, he reached the counter again five or ten minutes later, only to be told that Church’s had run out of fried chicken. The young woman at the counter suggested that he might like chicken nuggets instead. Robinson responded to the suggestion by slugging her in the head. That set off a chain of events that ended with Robinson’s being shot dead by a security guard. Edna Buchanan covered the murder for the Herald – there are policemen in Miami who say that it wouldn’t be a murder without her – and her story began with what the fried-chicken faction still regards as the classic Edna lead: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”

All connoisseurs would agree, I think, that the classic Edna lead would have to include one staple of crime reporting – the simple, matter-of-fact statement that registers with a jolt. The question is where the jolt should be. There’s a lot to be said for starting right out with it. I’m rather partial to the Edna lead on a story last year about a woman about to go on trial for a murder conspiracy: “Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin.” On the other hand, I can understand the preference that others have for the device of beginning a crime story with a more or less conventional sentence or two, then snapping the reader back in his chair with an abbreviated sentence that is used like a blunt instrument. One student of the form at the Herald refers to that device as the Miller Chop. The reference is to Gene Miller, now a Herald editor, who, in a remarkable reporting career that concentrated on the felonious, won the Pulitzer Prize twice for stories that resulted in the release of people in prison for murder. Miller likes short sentences in general – it is sometimes said at the Herald that he writes as if he were paid by the period – and he particularly likes to use a short sentence after a couple of rather long ones. Some years ago, Gene Miller and Edna Buchanan did a story together on the murder of a high-living Miami lawyer who was shot to death on a day he had planned to while away on the golf course at La Gorce Country Club, and the lead said, “… he had his golf clubs in the trunk of his Cadillac. Wednesday looked like an easy day. He figured he might pick up a game later with Eddie Arcaro, the jockey. He didn’t.”

These days, Miller sometimes edits the longer pieces that Edna Buchanan does for the Herald, and she often uses the Miller Chop – as in a piece about a lovers’ spat: “The man she loved slapped her face. Furious, she says she told him never, ever to do that again. ‘What are you going to do, kill me?’ he asked, and handed her a gun. ‘Here, kill me,’ he challenged. She did.”

Now that I think of it, that may be the classic Edna lead.

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4 Responses to The Books: Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker; edited by David Remnick; ‘Covering the Cops’, by Calvin Trillin

  1. bill says:

    Great post! I still go back and read Trillin’s piece from time to time. (And thanks for the link!)

  2. Desirae says:

    “Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin.”

    That is one hell of a sentence. There’s a whole world of possibilities in it.

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