Word: murderable
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...dark underground caverns of a prestigious New York newspaper are the right setting for the murder at the outset of Black and White and Dead All Over (Knopf; 368 pages) by John Darnton, the author of biology-fiction thrillers Neanderthal and The Darwin Conspiracy. A 30-year veteran of the New York Times, Darnton delivers a knowing, insider's portrait of the newspaper with great sympathy and humor, and successfully captures the intense human drama and daunting business imperatives in the world of newspapering. A sense of impending doom hovers over the enterprise, a sense that its greatness is slipping...
Black and White is really a novel about the Times (where I once worked as a reporter and foreign correspondent), thinly disguised as a murder mystery. What elevates it to the top of any beach-reading pile is its dead-on depiction of the idiosyncratic life of a big-time newsroom, way more chaotic and disorganized than outsiders can imagine. The adolescent jockeying between ambitious editors, the unpredictable twists of a news-driven day, the rush of deadline pressure, the bickering over how to package incomplete information, the prevalent workaholism and utter abandonment of personal lives, the nightly repairing...
...plot of Black and White is engrossing from the get-go. The first murder victim is a much-hated editor who supervised the newspaper's standards of word choice, and who personifies the tyrannical, pretentious side of the Times. (The inside joke here is that the victim, Theodore Ratnoff, is portrayed as a tall and handsome strapping blond, while the real editor of standards, Allan Siegal, was short and heroically rotund.) His body is discovered with a telling item stuck into his chest: a newspaper spike, the symbol of days gone by, when an editor rejecting copy would spike...
...slain general was buried on Sunday at his home village of Draykish, 15 miles east of Tartous, in a funeral attended by Maher al-Assad, younger brother of the President. Bashar al-Assad, who is said to be deeply upset by Suleiman's murder, stuck to his schedule and flew to Tehran on Saturday for talks with top Iranian officials, followed by a trip to Turkey. And the government initially remained silent on the assassination, while the Syrian media ducked the issue. But on Wednesday for the first time, Buthaina Shaaban, an advisor to President Assad, confirmed Suleiman's death...
...Suleiman's murder comes at a critical time for Syria, which is presently engaged in a delicate balancing act of pursuing indirect peace talks with Israel and improved ties to the West, at the same time as maintaining its relations with Hizballah and Iran. In exchange for the return of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in 1967, the Israeli government demands that Syria curtails its strategic alliance with Iran and its backing for Hizballah and for Palestinian militant groups. Still, since Syria and Israel revealed in May that they are negotiating via Turkish mediation, Damascus has paradoxically strengthened...