'NY Times' Editor Murdered! (in Fiction)

Have you picked out your beach reading material yet? If you work at The New York Times, you might want to get your hands on an advance copy of Black and White and Dead All Over by John Darnton -- if only to find out if you're in it.

The novel, which comes out July 31, is a roman à clef about the Times, where Darnton worked for more than 30 years as a reporter and editor. Its fictional counterpart is the New York Globe, a publicly-owned, family-controlled broadsheet with a dual stock structure and a plummeting stock price, headquartered on Eighth Avenue just off Times Square (which really ought to be "Globe Square" for consistency, but whatever).

Virtually every well-known Times journalist from the last few decades turns up somewhere in the murder mystery, along with a few recognizable figures from outside the paper, including Matt Drudge (a.k.a. Nat Dreck) and Rupert Murdoch (a.k.a. Lester Moloch). As a guessing game, it's almost too easy. Could the square-jawed, email-addicted foreign correspondent-turned-executive editor be anyone other than Bill Keller? Do you need to know that "Jimmy Pomegranate" is a rotund expense-account abuser to guess that he's a stand-in for R.W. "Johnny" Apple? And whoever could be the inspiration for the hyper-aggressive middle-aged female reporter known for big-footing others' stories and getting excessively intimate with the powerful men she covers?

But perhaps no one receives rougher treatment than Allan M. Siegal, the former Times standards editor who retired in 2006. Siegal was known for enforcing the paper's usage standards with daily memos called "greenies," written in green ink; his doppelganger, Theodore S. Ratnoff, uses a purple pen, and his memos are called "poison plums."

The novel opens with Ratnoff found dead in the newsroom, an editor's spike implanted in his chest.

"I loved it," said Siegal when I called to ask him how he felt about being graphically murdered in a former colleague's imagination. "I had heard somewhere along the way that it was a roman à clef, so I asked him if I could see it. I found a great many people in it that I recognized. I think it was riotously funny."

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