I first discovered Dunning with his private eye series featuring Denver bookseller Cliff Janeway, the first of which was Booked to Die in 1992. He’d produced a number of reasonably successful novels over the previous two decades, but I had been only peripherally aware of them. In his backgrounder Introduction to this reissue, Dunning says people still ask him how long it takes to write a novel, and he gives them the classic answer: “It takes as long as it takes.” He then details how his early books him took him anywhere from eighteen months to three years to write and how each involved a good deal of bloodletting, back-filling, blind alleys, and the discarding of whole chapters and numerous stillborn characters. Deadline, on the other hand, was written in 139 consecutive workdays, from first idea to mailing it off to his agent, without a single false step. He has always felt he should apologize for the lack of struggle in its creation.
Dunning had been a journalist for the Denver Post and other publications for a number of years before hos writing began to be good enough to support him, so the central character of Walker, who has worked for big-city newspapers and small papers o one has ever heard of, and he’s won both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award., but he never stays anywhere long. That’s just him, but hose two awards make him near-royalty n the newspaper world and every publisher he meets wants to hire him. So he’s walking to an interview one day in New Jersey, right across the river from Manhattan, when he come across a circus tent on fire, surrounded by pumper trucks and hoses and with a row of burned bodies nearby. One of those is a small girl, maybe seven years old, and (being a newspaper man to his very core) the first thought in his head isn’t “tragedy” but “story.”
He takes the job and keeps thinking about that young victim while he waits for the identification. But it never comes and the coroner investigates in every way he can think of, but finally has to bury the child as a Jane Doe. Walker doesn’t know what to think. What parent, or family friend, takes a little girl to the circus but doesn’t claim her body? Walker can’t let it go, and so he begins to bring his formidable skills to bear.
Meanwhile, he has another assignment that was handed him by his new publishers. There's a girl who has been dancing with the Rockettes at Radio City for the past ten years, whose name is Diana Yode. And she’s Amish. Many journalists have tried to get her story, which everyone figures must be unusual, but she’s not talking. Walker’s kind of on the girl’s side on this case -- she shouldn’t have to discuss her private life if she doesn’t want to -- but he’s as curious as anyone else, so he figures out a way to meet her and begins working his way into her confidence. Maybe he'll write the story, maybe he won’t, but he wants to know about her to assuage his curiosity. Then Walker seeks the assistance of an old buddy in the New York office of the FBI with his investigation into the circus victim’s story, and that links into a longstanding hunt for a “Most Wanted” from the ’60s, and suddenly it’s a whole new ball game.
It’s a pretty good story and Walker is a interesting character with assorted faults. The author notes also that the major events -- the circus fire, the Amish Rockettes dancer -- came from his own fat files of news clippings. They really happened. Any fiction writer of experience has files like that which provide ideas for plots and characters, and this time they all just came together perfectly. A good way tol spend a rainy weekend.