Reporting at Wit's End: Tales from The New Yorker

by St. Clair McKelway

"Why does A. J. Liebling remain a vibrant role model for writers while the superb, prolific St. Clair McKelway has been sorely forgotten?" James Wolcott asked this question in a recent review of the Complete New Yorker on DVD. Anyone who has read a single paragraph of McKelway's work would struggle to provide an answer.

His articles for the New Yorker were defined by their clean language and incomporable wit, by his love of New York's rough edges and his affection for the working man (whether that work was come by honestly or not). Like Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, McKelway combined the unflagging curiosity of a great reporter with the narrative flair of a master storyteller. William Shawn, the magazine's long-time editor, described him as a writer with the "lightest of light touches." His style is so striking, Shawn went on to say, that "it was too odd to be imitated."

The pieces collected here are drawn from two of McKelway's books--True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality (1951) and The Big Little Man from Brooklyn (1969). His subjects are the small players who in their particulars defined life in New York during the 36 years McKelway the junkmen, boxing cornermen, counterfeiters, con artists, fire marshals, priests, and beat cops and detectives. The "rascals."

An amazing portrait of a long forgotten New York by the reporter who helped establish and utterly defined New Yorker "fact writing," Untitled Collection is long overdue celebration of a truly gifted writer.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Journalism, History

641 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stoke the engine with shovels fulla coal. Pull on the steam whistle. There!

Our locomotive has achieved the full speed of lunacy. We’re off on a Maniacal Mystery Tour!!! (Whew. Thank heaven for MY meds - it gives my Loose Caboose brakes.)

You know, if you - like me - are now safely perched on a promontory of psychiatric remission, you can read this book and mutter, “Been there. Done that.” Quoth the Raven, NEVERMORE.

But St. Clair’s a ripe one.

Had I been born at the turn of the twentieth century too, I might be on Lithium as he quite possibly was. Soli Deo Gratia, for my state of the art neuroleptics.

Like Raid, they stop mental bedbugs in their tracks!

McKelway wrote for the New Yorker in its legendary Ross Era. Trained dogs didn’t need short leashes, for Mr. Ross (if by trained he meant merely house-trained, I get it. At least they periodically were permitted to bare their fangs, meds or no meds!)

CIA operatives tend to give ripe manics short shrift, as McKelway finds to his meandering distaste - but immediate paranoid compliance - one late midsummer night in Edinburgh.

Yes, they have full ID. They’re CIA, alright.

They visit him in the dead of night in his swank Scottish suite.

Now, St. Clair was no dummy, though his weirdness was legendary. He rose to the rank of a USAF Lieutenant Colonel in WWII (Fact). But near Japan he raised hell (in print) about Admiral Nimitz, calling him a traitor.

He had been “not unknown” to plainclothes operatives ever since!

I LOVE this book. Full Five Stars.

But I deeply regret his madness made much of his work obsolete!

This is the only one of his hilarious side-splitters I could hunt down.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a magazine called The New Yorker that published superb writing and made money doing it. That day, I fear, has passed; the magazine probably doesn't make money and I think its *superb* writing is thinner on the ground than once was the case. I am deeply grateful that it still exists and does all the very, very good publishing that it does.

But oh me, oh my, for the times when A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, and St. Clair McKelway were simply among the talent pool, and not standouts!

This collection of McKelway's best pieces of character-driven, crime-reporting pieces from the 30s to the 60s illuminates one of the old New Yorker's best gifts to us, its future: Clear, lucid, beautiful prose about moments in time, people in medias res, events not worthy of Historical Record but too...too...cool? weird? off-kilter? INTERESTING...to miss out on knowing, however briefly. It's a piece of Americana that the magazine doesn't do so much of anymore, though it's by no means a vanished idea in those not-so-hallowed pages anymore. It's just amazing to me how good The New Yorker remains, in this wildly different landscape from that of its heyday.

When I got my copy of this elephantine tome, I quailed at the sheer bulk of it. I self-impose a duty to read books that I review twice. Anything that a writer has spent time, sweat, and possibly money on creating, I can't justify responding to in writing with a glancing blow, a negligible investment of one trip through, that will no doubt leave many incomplete and unsatisfied crannies unexplored.

THIS book, I thought, *has* to be the exception! 1,240 pages, if read twice?! AAARGH!

I loved it all. I can't tell you to read it twice, I don't think most people would listen, but I can tell you that Adam Gopnik, the present-day New Yorker writer who edited the collection, chose very wisely and you will not find your attention flagging. I myownself love the piece "Firebug-Catcher" the best of them all for its bygone Brooklyn setting. I feel very, very sure that any LT member who procures this book will find a lot of joy in reading it because of its literary merits, because it's a glimpse into a past as dead as ancient Rome and just as full of fascinating characters, and most of all because it's just great value for money spent. Member rocketjk uses door-stoppers like this as "between" books, ones he reads a piece out of between other, shorter books, and that is just about the perfect way to read Reporting at Wit's End.

[Anders · Rating 5 out of 5]

I definitely shouldn't have checked this out of the library my first week of grad school... I kept telling myself I would JUST read the "classic" stories, the ones that were TOTALLY essential to understanding the role of this writer in the history of the New Yorker from the 30's to the 60's. 600 pages later... I read this book cover to cover despite my best intentions. this is story-telling of the first order. what I especially love about McKelway is how he treads the fine line between reliability and parapnoia/ clinical insanity, and he explains himself so realistically and so plausibly, and he does it so beautifully and compellingly that you feel yourself right there along with him, exploring his paranoid fantasies, forgiving the oddball characters he explores in his stories.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great pieces in here, particularly "Mr. 880," (his FBI file number) the one about a counterfeiter who eludes the FBI through...I don't know what, exactly, for nearly a decade. He's not that wily (unlike the wily Wilby, an expert accounting fraudster), and his money says "Wahsington" on it, which you'd think would be kind of a giveaway. Maybe it's that he made only dollar bills and not that many of them. In any case, I am not going to put this up there with my Liebling books for memorability; they're maybe a half-step below--something lacking in the lowlife zest, maybe, that doesn't give me a lot of rereading value. The clarity and detail are exemplary (his mini-history of forgery in the "Mr. 880" chapter is a little masterpiece), but there's a lack of...glee in the whole thing that makes it, for me, excellent reporting but not literature. And then his whole "madcap" escapade, "The Edinburgh Caper," goes on and on and on; I thought it was about his drinking problems, but Marc Weingarten's LA Times review, which thought that bit waaay more fun than I did--"a sprawling and brilliant internal monologue that unspools in a wild shaggy dog story as improbable as it is gripping"--suggests it's really therapeutic and about his mental-health problems. Either way, I found it endless and not that fun. But the closer, about a serial impostor who could not and would not stop (there's a mini-saga with this exiled Afghan princess in 1922 where he becomes her White House escort after claiming to be the "Naval Liaison" that cries out for one of those goofy true-crime treatments), is an endlessly astonishing tale. So, those 100+ pages on Edinburgh aside, a lot of good stuff here. Still, I prefer McKelway's out-of-print collection, True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality, which contains the Father Divine piece and pretty much all of the good pieces from this collection.

[Michael Lisk · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're a fan of Joseph MItchell's Up in the Old Hotel, you'll love this. Stories from The New Yorker from the 30s through the 60s.

[Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve had a continuous New Yorker subscription since the early 80’s and one of my greatest regrets is that I could never look forward to picking up the magazine that arrived at my door every week and open it to a story by Joseph Mitchell, A.J.Leibling or St. Clair McKelway (not to mention E. B.White, James Thurber and many others).[return]Mitchell and Liebling have recently been published in new editions but as far as I know McKelway has been out of print for decades. Until now.[return][return]Bloomsbury has just published Reporting At Wit’s End, a hefty volume of eighteen of McKelway’s stories from the Golden Age of the New Yorker, from the 1930s to the 1960s.[return][return]McKelway specialized in gritty true crime stories about arsonists, fire investigators, embezzlers, counterfeiters, suspected Communists, Secret Service men, and FBI agents. His profiles are alive to the ambience of life in New York in the first half of the Twentieth Century. [return][return]His most famous New Yorker tale was a six-part 1940 profile of Walter Winchell, the dean of America’s gossip columnists. [return][return]McKelway began his career as an office boy at the Washington Herald. He went on to become “one of the twelve best reporters in New York” at The New York Herald Tribune. He served as a managing editor The New Yorker from 1936 to 1939, and then a staff writer. During World War II, he held public relations posts and left the service with the rank of Lt. Colonel.[return][return]This book is a delight from beginning to end, 620 pages later. It’s a book about another age, a different New York, and one I still look for every week in The New Yorker.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am very happy to own this book. Pick this one up if you’ve already digested the collected work of Joseph Mitchell (Up in the Old Hotel and My Ears Are Bent). I've read and re-read those collections. I know that I will have a similar experience with St. Clair McKelway. He’s brilliant. If you’re looking for a writer who can convey a massive amount of information in one paragraph without sacrificing narrative — start here. Don’t bullshit yourself.

[Steve Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good collection of New Yorker pieces from the 30s-60s. McKelway was an alcoholic and borderline insane sometimes, which shows up most clearly in The Edinburgh Caper.

The portraits of a bushleague counterfeiter, a serial embezzler, and an arson detective are the standouts here. Also of interest is a firsthand account of McKelway's time doing public relations in the US Army Air Force with Curtis LeMay during the latter days of the bombing campaign on Japan.

[W H · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a delightful book. A collection of Mr McKelway's writings from the New Yorker. A fact laden but writerly story awaits you as you delve into the world of petty safe crackers, gossip columnists and B-29 Bomber Commands. I found my self enthralled enough to look for more of his writings on ABE Books and searching the New Yorker Archive, just plain fun!

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

For The New Yorker fans, this is a must-read. All the stories in the book originally appeared in the magazine sometime from 1930s-1960s. My favorites are the crime pieces- McKelway has a gift for writing about quirky characters like process servers and embezzlers.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful collection of New Yorker pieces from neglected writer St. Clair McKelway.

Typically worthless introduction by current New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.

[Olga Vannucci · Rating 5 out of 5]

He accused the chief admiral of treason,
For extending the war, that was the reason,
A guy who counterfeits one-dollar bills,
And maladroit arsonists who kill,
And other profiles, all of them are pleasing.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful read! The writing style is so matter-of-fact, undramatic, and familiar. Perfect book if nothing else, than for the joy of reading. It’s uncomplicated and easy, and a tiny bit absurd.

[Yusuf Hacking · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was extraordinary writing, through and through. Would recommend to anyone

[Morleena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This group of stories first published in The New Yorker was a delight from beginning to end! I loved it.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone that knows me knows I adore the New Yorker...some of it is a bit silly but I really love it when a reporter is able to do an in-depth article that includes volumes of research and subtle details that make you really know the subject. For example, last month they had a very detailed and fascinating article about some Serbian diamond thiefs, the "Pink Panthers". It didn't just cover their crimes, but went on to their upbringing, their techniques, the methods of searching for them, and on and on. Most magazines are not willing to give up the space for such depth.

That's why Reporting at Wit's End "Tales from the New Yorker" by St. Clair McKelway, is such a treat for me. It's a collection of the best articles New Yorker has offered, but in a totally inventive way. It selects feature articles from different decades, the 1930s, 40s, 50s and concludes with two from the 1960s. These aren't famous people biographies or even well-known articles, just well-written articles about subjects fascinating at the time.

One is "Average Cop", a very long study of one of New York's finest, as he goes about his day, from a 1930s issue. Big details and little details are combined to make a complete character study, and it's done uniquely: there's no mockery or subtle elevation of his character. It's just about him. As he is. There's no effort made to push a political agenda or disclose social ills. It's a simple story about a man, and it's fascinating.

From the 1950s, an article called "The Rich Recluse of Herald Square" about the death of an elderly hoarder, and her mysterious life. Little details make it painful and tragic, and yet there's this strange sense of power that this woman and her sister had, in order to put the world in its place (and out of theirs). Little pictures of human kindness abound.

This is a great collection, and one that I personally enjoyed very much. I thought it was interesting to see the changes in writing and social details between the decades discussed. What was considered improper in the 1930s is handled without note in the 1960s. A great supplement to American history for the 20th century.

[James Foley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I greatly admired the reporting in the book (about half the book). We meet Curtis Lemay, the first NYC fire marshall, an unusually cheerful embezzler, a very responsible counterfeiter and a several doomed souls. That's why I gave this four stars. If I could have I'd have given three and a half. As much as I liked the reporting in the book, I found the memoirs to be shaggy and meandering, but not meandering in an interesting Huck Finn way. I do recommend the book absolutely. It's a collection. A reader who insists on reading the bits that don't interest you (which, of course, might be quite different) is responsible for his own boredom
.

[Melyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway, and I'm so glad I did. I might not have heard of the book otherwise.

The title of the book made me curious, but I wasn't familiar with St. Clair McKelway until this collection of his work from The New Yorker. Even though the articles are several decades old, they really prove that good writing makes a story timeless.

My favorite stories were the ones about an elderly counterfitter, a process server, and the fire marshal of Brooklyn. The characters really came to life through McKelway's writing.

[Daniel Silveyra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up the book on the strength of a review in The Economist.

McKelway hails from the golden era of the New Yorker, or one of many, depending on whom you ask.

Most of the pieces are New York stories regarding crime or something that should be so labelled. All of them have that 50s reporter feel to them - terse, clear, sentences. All of it tinged with that "subtle" New Yorker irony.

Most of the stories are amusing - enough to finish the book. A couple are amazing.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

What people say they get out of Joseph Mitchell is what I got out of this (though focused on less exotic, more relatable urban characters). Funny, evocative, and with some extremely charming portraits of distinctive individuals (fire inspector, process server) plus some truly galling stories (in particular a mistaken conviction that could've been an NYT article this year). The long, largely fake stories are probably worth a pass, but doesn't take away from an excellent collection.

[Amelia]

A gorgeous, beautiful beast of a collection that I really ought to buy and savor instead of try to plow through during fleeting library renewals. McKelway's writing is so damned exquisite that everything that's followed him is a disgrace. I should burn my creative writing degree. I will be back to do you justice, sir, just not this summer.

[Janice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent book, I enjoyed the different era's of writing and how the writing has changed. Most all of the stories were very interesting, I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading.

[Tim Hainley · Rating 4 out of 5]

His true crime stories and reporting on real life weirdos were magnificent. Somehow though, despite the fact that he was also a real life weirdo and minor criminal, for my taste he was his own least interesting subject.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some stories are just timeless, as the ones included in this compilation of articles/stories by Mr. McKelway. Even though the characters and their stories are from decades ago, the themes still resonate with today's society. It's a thick read but worth the effort.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

St. Clair McKelway wrote for The New Yorker for 30 years. This collection pulls together some of his essays from each decade. He is thoughtful and humorous; the essays feature the common-man type of New Yorker rather than the newsmakers of the era.

[Sandy Barnes]

I read most of this book thought finally gave up on it. Just a bit too retro. Author is excellent writer and his unusual past was profiled in a recent New Yorker.

But it all seemed so far long ago and far away. About some rather lovable petty white criminals.

[Darryl Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection of stories.

[Grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

McKelway's detailed writing almost rises to the level of a how-to-manual for various occupations.

A very entertaining jaunt through yesteryear.

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

amazing in little bits. all at once gets a little tiresome.

[Mike Bularz]

Ah sweet! I just got this thing in the mail today, thanks guys!