Tabloid City

by Pete Hamill

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

In a stately West Village townhouse, a wealthy socialite and her secretary are murdered. In the twenty-four hours that follow, a flurry of activity circles around their shocking deaths: the head of one of the city’s last tabloids stops the presses. A cop investigates the killing. A reporter chases the story. A disgraced hedge-fund manager flees the country. An Iraq War vet seeks revenge. And an angry young extremist plots a major catastrophe.

The City is many things: a proving ground, a decadent playground, or a palimpsest of memories—an historic metropolis eclipsed by modern times. As much a thriller as it is a gripping portrait of the city of today, Tabloid City is a new fiction classic from the writer who has captured it perfectly for decades.

Release date: May 22, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

“There’s murder and mayhem in Pete Hamill’s latest novel, Tabloid City, but the real victim in his book is the print journalism that Hamill knows and loves so well. This ticking time bomb of a novel is about the end of a form of daily storytelling in which America’s big cities are like small towns—their recognizable casts of characters, dramas, and moral struggles playing out on a slightly bigger, more complex stage…. Hamill moves around the city easily on paper, with a great fondness reminiscent of the writing of Joseph Mitchell—the New Yorker writer who is a sacred name at the intersection of New York journalism and literature.”

—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“It’s hard to find a mention of Pete Hamill that doesn’t include his association with the city of New York. Over his long career, the man has come to symbolize the grittier level of the world of New York letters…. In his latest novel, entitled Tabloid City, he offers a picture of the city as he sees it today, told from the vantage points of a host of characters who could have been pulled straight from the pages of one of his tabloids, all lonely, all at the end of their rope, all entirely New York…. Gripping enough to keep the pages turning, this novel is really about the city itself, and how even though it may be in flux, it’s still the best place in the world to be lonely.”

—Nicholas Mancusi, Daily Beast

“Hamill has written a glorious homage to New York and the tabloid journalists who cover the dark corners of the city.”

—Newark Star-Ledger

“A bedazzling new book…. A vivid, nonstop, time-stamped romp around a New York that brims with authenticity. [Hamill’s] novel bittersweetly bridges tabloid newspapering’s last gasps and the emerging brave new world of digital journalism. His characters intersect in a gripping and sentimental ode to the profession and to the city that have been the objects of Mr. Hamill’s most enduring crush.”

—Sam Roberts, New York Times

“Hamill is as New York City as the Empire State Building and the Bowery, a classic newspaperman schooled in the old days of several daily newspapers. And his many novels have been based in the Big Apple. His latest is no exception, with a title that suggests both journalism and New York…. With this murder as the centerpiece of the plot, Hamill moves the story around and around through a cycle of characters all related in some fashion to the central event, each visitation to each character adding layers to the author’s knowing depiction of New York’s varied lifestyles.”

—Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred review)

“Set in modern-day, [recession-plagued] Manhattan, this book revolves around 24 hours in the life of a cast of characters whose paths intersect in surprising and sometimes alarming ways…. A page turner of a book with a somewhat complex and rapidly advancing plot. As characters begin to interact with each other more and more, you can’t help but wonder how Hamill will possibly weave it all together at the end—and when he does, it’s impressive indeed.”

—Catherine Mallette, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“You expect an old newspaper guy to get it right. Hamill does.”

—Anne Bendheim, Asbury Park (N.J.) Press

“Sensational mayhem…. As different as they all seem, each of the players has a vital and well-crafted place in the story. And when that double homicide—at an upscale address, no less—takes place, Hamill’s round-robin technique becomes a vital way for readers to experience the wide-reaching effect of the crime without losing track of the other threads that give the book its texture and make it much more than another hard-boiled crime novel in a fedora. Tabloid City’s subplots really shine—this is where Hamill’s attention to detail and talent for writing memorable characters are most apparent…. Each piece of the story is thoughtfully crafted and written with care and cutting caricature. The frequent dropping of names—socialites, politicos, and bankers all make the cut, but a special fondness is reserved for whiskey-soaked journalists’ haunts—adds a personality and tabloid-style punch that Hamill, who has been editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and New York Daily News, clearly delights in. Tabloid City is, at its core, exciting to read. The story is engaging and the characters distinct and fascinating.”

—Adam Rathe, National Public Radio

“Be prepared to be captured by this gritty, riveting New York City drama. Covering scarcely a 24-hour period, uncommon in its style, detail, and intensity, this mystery will sink its teeth deep, shake you, move you, scare you, and, above all, entertain. Using a tough, edgy, no-nonsense style, Hamill is the master of the moment and the memory. He leaves no stone unturned and no sense unexplored as he provides deeply personal clandestine glimpses into life’s hard realities…. Written in a style that underscores that life does not occur in complete sentences, Tabloid City is not a standard mystery novel. Hamill packs a ton of life into each paragraph. That and a powerful ending give Tabloid City a definite wow factor. Buy it. Borrow it. Read it.”

—J. Curran, The Mystery Site

“In veteran newspaperman Pete Hamill’s new novel, no character has just one cross to bear, one death to mourn. Perhaps to match its setting, the book is full of big, lurid trouble, conveyed in the bluntest tough-guy terms possible. The plot throws together newspaper folk, terrorists, cops, homeless veterans, an aging painter, a patron of the arts, and other assorted New York types as they hurry about, colliding with one another in acts of lust, commerce, and crime.”

—Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

“Tabloid City might be the most ambitious of all [Hamill’s novels]… as seen through the eyes of a disparate cast of characters as they hurtle toward an apocalyptic convergence…. Even though the major characters experience misfortune that would rival the trials of Job, the book exudes a subtle undercurrent of hope that would seem to reflect New York’s defiance in the aftermath of 9/11.”

—George Kimball, Irish Times

“Few authors are as synonymous with New York City as Pete Hamill, so it is fitting that the Brooklyn-bred darling of the Post and the Daily News returns with a story as frenetic, complicated, harrowing and alive as his beloved town. We begin Tabloid City at midnight with Sam Briscoe, an aging editor of a daily newspaper, putting the next day’s afternoon edition to bed. But the night is far from over in the city that never sleeps, and anything could happen before the ink hits the page…. As the night and the following day progress, Hamill weaves seemingly unrelated stories together in a cohesive narrative, showing both the deep chasms and the uncanny connections between the city’s many threads. He writes with an almost cinematic flair…. Hamill is, as always, a consummate storyteller, and his prose vibrates with raw energy…. Tabloid City is an exciting, thought-provoking read.”

—Rebecca Shapiro, BookPage

“In a storied career that included stints as editor of the Daily News and the Post, Pete Hamill has long been embraced as New York’s Own and likely one of its finest. Tabloid City stands as both an authentic thriller as well as a farewell to the city that was Hamill’s New York. Even as he insidiously builds the tension of a homegrown Islamic terrorist planning his final act, Hamill name-checks some of the great journalists of yesterday, then embodies them in characters like Helen Loomis, the achingly lonely rewrite woman who can tell any story on deadline, or Bobby Fonseca, the kid starting out who ardently believes in delivering the word. Throughout, Hamill conjures many recognizable New York types, then takes the giant step of connecting them. This is the veteran journalist at his best. Where others see only the grid that delineates New York by social status, Hamill eyes the intersections where all cross paths…. In Tabloid City, terrorism blindly lives among us while Hamill sees a world almost gone by. Those who would dismiss that world as nostalgia might consider what in today’s New York will they have to lovingly evoke years from now.”

—Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News

“The story unfolds in time-stamped, you-are-there bursts that follow a large cast, including several journalists…. Hamill is at his best in the [newspaper editor] portions, rich in print anecdotes and mournful for a passing age…. Hamill nails the dying newsroom.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A large and lively cast…. provides Pete Hamill with an excellent vantage point from which to comment on—and lament over—his beloved city…. If you love New York, or journalism, you’ll love this book. And if (like me) you love both, you may not be able to put it down until you’ve finished.”

—John Greenya, Washington Times

“Pete Hamill’s engrossing new novel about a New York daily newspaper, its offices, and its editors and writers may seem like historical fiction. For readers who have been around a while, the book will in part read like a eulogy for good news sheets past. Everyone who stays with the book—which I recommend they do—will certainly regard it as a gritty tone-poem in prose on New York City life—and death. You’ll find the former on every page, depicted in Hamill’s enlivening plain style, while the latter—in the form of a double murder—plays a pivotal role in the development of his plot. The killings link a number of major characters in Hamill’s kaleidoscopic, almost hour-by-hour unfolding of nearly 24 hours of a day both typical and distinctive in contemporary Manhattan…. I found the characters so appealing…. He certainly is a good novelist, awfully good, in fact, writing, as he seems to be doing, in the literary tradition of John Dos Passos’s epoch-making Manhattan Transfer, and making a plausible contribution of his own.”

—Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle

“Tabloid City teems with life. People die in ugly ways in this riveting crime novel, but it’s also concerned with another death: the shutdown of a daily newspaper. At the same time, the book is a gritty, cynical but heartfelt love song to New York City, in days gone by and right this minute. Pete Hamill writes with authority on life in the newsroom…. [He] does a masterful job of structuring the novel, gradually revealing connections among all those people and building suspense as the body count mounts. The entire tale takes place in less than 24 hours, with the pressure of all sorts of deadlines adding to its urgency. He’s also adept at the telling detail, the kind that gives us a character in a couple of sentences…. As a thriller, Tabloid City works beautifully. But it’s just as much a fond farewell to an era of journalism that’s passing fast, with an eye toward its uncertain future.”

—Colette Bancroft, St. Petersburg Times

“[An] ambitious literary crime tale…. Veteran journalist and novelist Hamill serves up a distinctive take on the naked city with his eleventh novel. At its core, it is a lament for the ever-changing metropolis that eight million call home, a mournful love letter to the dying newspaper biz, and a tribute to the newshounds who hoof the pavement every day hungry to break a story and make their deadlines before dawn…. What makes Tabloid City extraordinary is its author’s clear-eyed observations of characters who know that their narratives are coming to an end, but who refuse to fade away quietly. He displays impressive skill binding it all together with prose that treads deftly between poetry and hard-boiled clarity. Pain, regret, and melancholy permeate the various story lines, but Hamill manages to generate compassion as well. The city may be stitched together with heartbreak, but there are also moments of tenderness and joy that resonate just as strongly…. Tabloid City will engage the crime reader who seeks a complex, thoughtful approach to noir.”

—Derek Hill, Mystery Scene

“Erstwhile newspaperman Hamill writes what he knows—New York City…. The fast-paced story travels from the Upper East Side to the Chelsea Hotel to a Brooklyn tenement and more, with an NYPD detective and an ambitious reporter as guides.”

—Billy Heller, New York Post

“The author handles his large cast with patience and clarity, and the city is well realized, as you’d expect from Hamill, himself a New York institution who has served as editor-in-chief of both of the [fictional] World’s very real rivals…. As with any reliable tabloid, there’s always another good story on the next page.”

—Allison Williams, Time Out New York

12:02 a.m. Sam Briscoe. City room of New York World, 100 West Street.

HERE COMES BRISCOE, seventy-one years old, five foot eleven, 182 pounds. He turns a corner into the city room of the last afternoon newspaper in New York. He is the editor in chief. His overcoat is arched across his left shoulder and he is carrying his jacket. The cuffs of his shirtsleeves are crisply folded twice, below the elbows. His necktie hangs loose, without a knot, making two vertical dark red slashes inside the vertical bands of his bright red suspenders. He moves swiftly, from long habit, as if eluding ambush by reporters and editors who might approach him for raises, days off, or loans. Or these days, for news about buyouts and layoffs. His crew cut is steel gray, his lean furrowed face tightly shaven. The dark pouches under both eyes show that he has worked for many years at night. In the vast, almost empty room, there are twenty-six desks, four reporters, and three copy editors, all occasionally glancing at four mounted television screens tuned to New York 1 and CNN, Fox and MSNBC. A fifth screen is dark. Briscoe doesn’t look at any of them. He goes directly to a man named Matt Logan, seated at the news desk in the center of the long wide room. Other desks butt against each other, forming a kind of stockade. All are empty.

–We got the wood yet? Briscoe says.

Logan smiles and runs a hand through his thick white hair and gazes past Briscoe at the desks. Briscoe thinks: We live in the capital of emptiness. Logan is fifty-one and in some way the thick white hair makes him seem younger. Crowning the shaven face, the ungullied skin.

–The kid’s still writing, Logan says, gesturing to his left. Maybe you could remind him this is a daily.

Briscoe grunts at one of the oldest lines in the newspaper business. Thinking: It’s still true. He sees the Fonseca kid squinting at his computer screen, seeing nothing else, only the people he has interviewed hours earlier, far from the city room. Briscoe leans over Logan’s shoulder, glances up at the big green four-sided copper clock hanging from the ceiling, a clock salvaged from Pulitzer’s World. Thinking: Still plenty of time.

–What else do we have? he says, dropping coat and jacket over a blank computer monitor. The early editions of the morning papers are scattered on the desk, the Times, the Post, the News. Logan clicks on a page that shows four possible versions of the wood. The page 1 headline. Briscoe thinks: I’m so old. He remembers seeing page 1 letters actually cut from wood in the old composing room of the Post, six blocks down West Street. The muffled sound of Linotype machines hammering away from the composing room. Most of the operators deaf-mutes, signaling to each other by hand. Paul Sann trimming stories on the stone counters beyond the Linotype machines, his editor’s hands using calipers to pluck lines of lead from the bottom of stories. Everybody smoking, crushing butts on the floor. Hot type. Shouts. Sandwiches from the Greek’s. All gone forever.

One possible front page says JOBS RISING? With a subhead: Mayor Says Future Bright. New unemployment numbers are due in the morning. The AP story will lead what they now call the Doom Page, always page 5, the hard stuff about the financial mess, with a sidebar trying to make the recession human. Names. Faces. Losers. Pain. If they have jobs, it’s a recession. If they don’t have jobs, it’s a depression. Foreign news is on page 8, usually from AP and Reuters, no overseas bureaus anymore, plus features bought from a new Web service that has correspondents all over the planet. OBAMA MOURNS AFGHAN DEATHS. Plus a thumbsucker out of the one-man Washington bureau. The problem is that most readers don’t give a rat’s ass. Not about Iraq, not about Afghanistan, only about whether they can still feed their kids next week, or the week after. Two more suicide bombings in Baghdad. Another bombing in Pakistan. A girls’ school. More stats counting the dead, without names or faces. It has been months since foreign news was used as wood.

–What else ya got? Briscoe says.

Logan picks up a ringing phone, whispers to the caller, but keeps clicking on the various page 1 displays. BLOOMIE’S LAMENT. All about more city job cuts, the need for a fair share of the stimulus package, the crackdown on parking permits for well-connected pols, the assholes in Albany grabbing what is not nailed down. And closing libraries while heading for the limousines. News should be new. This is all old. With this stuff, Briscoe thinks, we might even achieve negative sales. Logan gets off the phone.

–Where was I? he says. Oh, yeah. The Fonseca kid got the mother. Her son was admitted to Stuyvesant two years ago. Now he’s shot dead in the street.

Logan makes some moves on the keyboard, and then Briscoe sees six photographs of a distraught thin black woman pointing at a framed letter.

–That’s the mother, Logan says. The letter is from Stuyvesant. When he was accepted.

She is staring into the camera, her face a ruin, holding a framed photograph of a smiling boy in a blazer. The woman is about thirty-five, going on eighty.

–The quality sucks, Briscoe says.

–Yeah. We don’t have a photographer tonight so Fonseca shot it with a cell phone. Anyway, that’s the vic in the other picture. The dead kid. In his first year in Stuyvesant, after winning a medal for debating.

Logan points to a young man’s body on a sidewalk, facedown, chalk marks around him.

–Then he’s dead, late this afternoon. Shot five times.

–Why?

–The usual shit, Logan says. Drugs. Or someone got dissed. So say the cops. Who ever really knows? But there’s a Doom Page angle too. The mother lost her job six weeks ago. They’re gonna throw her out of the house, and the cops think maybe the kid started dealing drugs to save the house.

–Put that in the lede. If it’s true.

–I already told Fonseca.

Briscoe glances out the window, where he can see Stuyvesant High School in the distance, across the footbridge over the West Side Highway toward the river’s edge. The school where all the bright kids go, a lot of them now Asian. The lights are dim, the kids slumbering at home before Friday’s classes, the school corridors inhabited by lonesome watchmen. Briscoe sees the running lights on a solitary black tanker too, moving slowly north to Albany on the dark river. Delivering pork to the pols, maybe. Which way to the river Styx, Mac? Most of the river is dead now. That pilot who landed his plane in the river? Ten years ago, he’d have smashed into a freighter. Now it’s nothing but sailboats and ferries. Briscoe exhales slightly. Another dead kid. How many had there been since he started in 1960? Five thousand dead New York kids? Twenty thousand? More than have died in Iraq, for sure. Maybe even more than Nam.

–Anyway, it could be wood, Logan says. Depends on the story.

–It always does, Briscoe says, in a hopeless tone.

He turns and sees Helen Loomis three empty desks to the right of Fonseca. Briscoe has known her since each of them had brown hair. She was shy then too, and what some fools called homely, long-jawed, gray-eyed, bony. Down at the old Post. She sat each night with her back to the river, smoking and typing, taking notes from street reporters and interviewing cops on the phone, her dark pageboy bobbing in a private rhythm. She was flanked by good people, true professionals, but most of them knew that she was the best goddamned rewrite man any of them would ever know. Later, the language cops tried to change the title to “rewrite person.” It didn’t work. The rhythm was wrong. Too many syllables. Even Helen Loomis described herself, with an ironic smile, as a rewrite man. In her crisp, quick way, she could write anything in the newspaper. Finding the music in the pile of notes from beat reporters, the clips from the morning papers, files from the Associated Press, and yellowing clips from the library. She was the master of the second-day lede, so essential to an afternoon paper, and she often found it buried in the thirteenth graf of the Times story, or in the jump of the tale in the Herald-Tribune. Or, more often, in her own sense of the story itself. When her questions were not answered, and the reporter had gone home, she made some calls herself. To a cop. A relative. Someone in a corner bar she found in the phone company’s immense old street index. Her shyness never stopped her, even when she was calling someone at ten after three in the morning. She was always courteous, she always apologized for the hour, but she worked for an afternoon paper. That is, she worked according to a clock that began ticking at midnight and finished at eight. Now, fuck, everything has changed, even the hours.

Briscoe waves at Helen Loomis. She doesn’t see him. Doesn’t respond. She is wearing small reading glasses, her body tense behind the computer, peering at the screen, nibbling at the inside of her right cheek. Her helmet of white hair doesn’t move in the old bobbing style. Briscoe long ago realized that she hadn’t looked loose, or in rhythm, since cigarettes were banned from all the newsrooms in the city. But she comes in every night, always on time, always carrying a black coffee and a cheese Danish, always ready to work. And once an hour, she moves to get her coat and goes down to smoke in the howling river winds.

In addition to a few breaking stories, she writes the “Police Blotter” now, made up of two- or three-graf stories of crimes and misdemeanors that don’t deserve to be blown out. Cheap murders, usually at bad addresses. Assaults. Rapes. In the city room, they used to call the column “Vics and Dicks.” A young female reporter out of Columbia objected, and it was renamed “Bad Guys” for the reporters and “Police Blotter” for the readers. There was, alas, no music in these tales, no way for Helen Loomis to turn them into haiku or a blues riff. Most of the dickheads now were robbing techno-junk: cell phones, iPods, digital recorders. A digital camera was a big score.

Briscoe knows in his heart that it wasn’t the end of cigarettes that took the music out of her. Not really. With Helen, it was the final triumph of loneliness. Young Helen Loomis was only one of many great reporters he’d known who were drawn to the rowdy newspaper trade because of the aching solitude in their own lives. Their own pain was dwarfed by the more drastic pain of strangers. As bad as your own life might be, there were all kinds of people out there in the city who were in much worse shape. Their stories filled the newspapers. And for a few hours, the lives of reporters and rewrite men. Until the clock ticked past all deadlines. And the profane, laughing city room emptied. Helen Loomis was now a straggler at a late-night party that was already over. When the deadline was go. . .