Death by Copy Spike
We’ve all wanted to kill our boss at one time or another, and do it in a fitting manner. For instance, a mean construction foreman could be jackhammered to death. A court stenographer might beat a nasty judge with his own gavel. In the newspaper world, we reporters used to have a handy murder weapon: a copy spike.
Copy spikes are basically long nails built into a base so the sharp end points upward. In the old days, when an editor was finished with a piece of paper copy, he’d impale it on the spike. If editors decided not to run a story, it was spiked. That’s one old newspaper term that has survived the digital age of journalism.
I just read two murder mysteries in which a hated newspaper supervisor was killed with a copy spike in the newsroom. The Malignant Heart by Celestine Sibley, the much-loved columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was published in 1958. Goodbye, Goliath by Elliott Chaze of Mississippi, came out in 1983.
In The Malignant Heart, beautiful, manipulative, and well-dressed Paula Reynolds is found dead with an eight-inch copy spike impaled in her back.
She’s face-down on the desk of our narrator, Katy Kincaid, who has personal reasons for hating Paula, like every person in The Atlanta Searchlight newsroom. Paula has played with all their lives, romancing the men and moving the women to jobs they hate, all while becoming the South’s outstanding newspaperwoman.
Katy is compelled to investigate, being the nosey sort, and more so when the beloved male city editor is found dead, wrapped in newsprint inside her car. As the reader follows Katy, they walk the streets of 1950s Atlanta, get to know many oddball members of the news staff, go to the opera, meet street people Katy has befriended, and descend into the press room for a near-death experience.
Sibley published a few more mysteries about Katy Kincaid in the 1990s. She died in 1999 at the age of 85.
Elliott Chaze was a well-traveled newspaperman who ended up as a reporter, columnist, and city editor at The Hattiesburg American. The protagonist of Goodbye, Goliath is Kiel St. James, city editor of The Catherine Call, a daily in Alabama. He goes into work early one morning and finds John Robinson, the huge and arrogant general manager of the paper, dead at his own desk with a copy spike buried into his neck.
Everybody’s a suspect, including St. James. Like Sibley’s heroine, he’s very chummy with the police, even jogging with the chief detective. He helps identify the killer, but not before having sex with her and putting himself into bodily danger.
While Sibley’s novel is definitely in the cozy category, Chaze writes in more of a hard-boiled style. He’s cynical, drinks heavily, and has sex with three women in the course of the story, including a young photographer he supervises. Nobody mentions the power imbalance.
Goodbye, Goliath was one of several novels starring Kiel St. James. Chaze published nine crime novels in all and one of them, Black Wings Has My Angel, is considered an underrated classic by some fans of the pulp genre. He died in 1990 at 74.
The two novels have something else in common. They both describe a bygone time when a town’s newspaper had real clout. Does anybody remember those days?
