Throughout, Darnton does a wonderful job capturing the nerve-jangling excitement and ulcer-inducing tension that come with chasing a big, breaking story. One of the nicest grace notes in a book full of them comes after a close call, when Hurley realizes that he had “never come that close to death. But even more trying, he had never written so much on deadline.”
In the solipsistic media world, much time has been spent tittering about the real-life antecedents of characters like Edith Sawyer, a floundering former hotshot who had done “a stint in Latin America, where, rumor had it, she bedded an array of dictators and banana magnates, emerging pregnant with stories,” and Hickory Bosch, a disgraced former executive editor who “settled in an old saltbox cottage on the shore of Cape Fear, where he indulged his passion for clamming.” That manner of insider arcana shouldn’t intimidate the civilians out there; you don’t need to have spent a lifetime obsessed with media gossip to enjoy this any more than you need to know that Woody Allen was referencing Fellini’s Amarcord to appreciate the opening scenes of Annie Hall.
Black and White and Dead All Over is above everything else a page-turner, but there’s also a message contained therein. By the end of the book Darnton’s respect for the life-and-death power of the written word is readily apparent: a pilfered paragraph from War and Peace leads to one character’s downfall, the novel’s denouement is brought about by a couple of lines of Byron, and a crucial plot point stems from an epically clumsy lead paragraph.
This always-present subtext, along with Darnton’s palpable anxiety about the threats to modern journalism, brings him closer to the intent of his original task than it appears at first. Fittingly, his bittersweet nostalgia for a bygone era in journalism — one that Darnton and his father both embodied, in their own ways — is captured best in a toast offered up by Jimmy Pomegranate, a Falstaffian scribe with “the self-regard of Orson Welles” and a passport that’s been stamped in 182 countries:
“Here’s to us
“Who’s like us?
“Damned few
“And they’re all dead.”
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