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, and a court stenographer might beat a nasty judge with his own gavel. In the newspaper world, we reporters usually had one 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 mysteries in which a hated newspaper supervisor was killed with a copy spike. Both books, The Malignant Heart by Celestine Sibley of Atlanta and Goodbye, Goliath by Elliott Chaze of Mississippi were published decades ago.
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 virtually 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 city editor is found dead, wrapped in newsprint inside her car. As the reader follows Katy, they get to 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 even descend into the press room for a near-death experience.
Sibley wrote The Malignant Heart in 1958 and published a few more mysteries about Katy Kincaid in the 1990s. The much-loved columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 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 track down the killer, but not before putting himself into bodily danger.
While Sibley’s novel is definitely in the cozy category, Chaze writes in more of a hard-boiled style. Some of the violence is described as it happens. He is cynical, drinks heavily, and has sex with three women in the course of the story, including a photographer he supervises. Nobody mentions the power imbalance.
Goodbye, Goliath was published in 1983 and 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 in common. They both describe a bygone time when a town’s newspaper had real clout. Does anybody remember those days?
