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Summary
Summary
In a stately West Village townhouse, a wealthy socialite and her secretary are murdered. In the twenty-four hours that follow, a flurry of activity circles around their shocking deaths: the head of one of the city's last tabloids stops the presses. A cop investigates the killing. A reporter chases the story. A disgraced hedge-fund manager flees the country. An Iraq War vet seeks revenge. And an angry young extremist plots a major catastrophe.
The City is many things: a proving ground, a decadent playground, or a palimpsest of memories-an historic metropolis eclipsed by modern times. As much a thriller as it is a gripping portrait of the city of today, Tabloid City is a new fiction classic from the writer who has captured it perfectly for decades.
Author Notes
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y. to Irish immigrant parents on June 24, 1935, Pete Hamill attended Mexico City College, Pratt Institute, and The School of Visual Arts before starting a career in journalism. In 1960, Hamill accepted an entry-level job at the New York Post, becoming a columnist five years later. Hamill subsequently worked as a columnist for the New York Daily News and the Village Voice.
Later working as a contributing editor at Esquire, Hamill has written articles for the New York Times magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Vanity Fair, and Playboy magazine, among others. He is also an accomplished novelist, having written more than a dozen books, including his national best-selling memoir, A Drinking Life, and the novels Snow in August; Why Sinatra Matters; and Lost Cities, Vanished Friends.
Pete Hamill died on August 5, 2020 at the age of 85.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hamill (North River) forays into Dominic Dunne society crime territory before veering uncomfortably into a far-fetched terrorist plot. Just as the last ever edition of the New York World is getting put to bed, veteran editor Sam Briscoe stops the presses for a sensational murder: socialite Cynthia Harding and her personal secretary are found stabbed to death in Harding's Manhattan town house. The story unfolds in time-stamped, you-are-there bursts that follow a large cast, including several journalists; Cynthia's adopted daughter; a disgraced Madoff-like financier; a media blogger; the murdered secretary's husband, a police officer assigned to a counterterrorism task force, as well as their son, a convert to radical Islam; and best of all by the weary and worldly Briscoe himself. Hamill is at his best in the Briscoe portions, rich in print anecdotes and mournful for a passing age, but as both the initial murders and the closing of the paper play into a larger plot and the young extremist becomes the driving force of the novel, the quality slides precipitously, and, as if sensing defeat, the book is brought to a too abrupt conclusion with most of the principals gathered for a group of scenes that strain credulity. Hamill nails the dying newsroom, but gets lost on the terrorism beat. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The veteran newspaperman and novelist (North River, 2007, etc.) couples a lament for a dying tabloid culture with a cockamamie plot about the murderous rampage of a jihadist; it doesn't work.Few writers know the newspaper business as intimately as Hamill; he has reported for and edited New York tabloids. So we feel in safe hands as we enter the newsroom of the fictionalNew York Worldin this winter of the Great Recession. Our guide is 71-year-old Sam Briscoe, editor in chief. He's the novel's center of gravity as it cycles through some 14 different viewpoints. Hamill uses broad strokes for a big canvas. There's Cynthia Harding, the love of Sam's life, a philanthropist in the Brooke Astor mold who's hosting a fundraising dinner for the library; her black secretary, Mary Lou; Mary Lou's husband Ali, an anti-terrorist cop; the almost blind artist, Lew; the office cleaner Consuelo, who Lew painted years before in Mexico. They're all connected to the rest of the large cast. The contrivance is brazen, but less disconcerting than Ali's son Malik, a would-be street criminal who needs money for his very pregnant teenage girlfriend. He's also a spiritual brother to the 9/11 terrorists; his thoughts are one long rant, a collection of scraped-together clichs. In due course, besides knocking off an imam, he will murder his mother Mary Lou and her "slave owner" Cynthia. Back at the World, the murders feed "the tabloid joy of murder at a good address." It's a good, knowing line, and could have been the trigger for a more focused, credible work. As it is, the joy is clouded by the news that the publisher is closing the paper, moving it online, and also by Sam's anguish over Cynthia's death. Hamill ratchets up the melodrama with a climactic confrontation at a mosque turned disco between Malik, now wearing a Semtex vest, and his father.A wasted opportunity to memorialize the tabloids through fiction.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Hamill is as New York City as the Empire State Building and the Bowery, a classic newspaperman schooled in the old days of several daily newspapers. And his many novels (which include the widely applauded Snow in August, 1997) have been based in the Big Apple. His latest is no exception, with a title that suggests both journalism and New York. As the novel opens, we're in the offices of the New York World, and we follow a step or two behind the editor in chief, 71-year-old Sam Briscoe, whose career harks back to ways now considered antique (he can remember seeing page-1 letters actually cut from wood ). Briscoe knows his own days and the days of old journalism are numbered, under assault from digitalized artillery. But a more specific crisis looms. His longtime girlfriend and her maid are found murdered in the girlfriend's townhouse in Greenwich Village. With this murder as the actual centerpiece of the plot, Hamill moves the story around and around through a cycle of characters all related in some fashion to the central event, each visitation to each character adding layers to the author's knowing depiction of New York's varied lifestyles. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: An author tour to major U.S. cities, an intensive online marketing campaign, and interviews in the print media and on radio and television will bring public attention to what is certain to be a national best-seller.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A New York murder tale unfolds over the 24-hour news cycle. GRANTED, as silver linings go this may be scant consolation, but the decline and demise of newspapers seems to be ushering in a raft of good novels by journalists who miss the old ink and newsprint. Reporters harking back to footloose times are not new (think of Evelyn Waugh's "When the Going Was Good"), but now that end days may actually be upon us, we may be facing a complete subgenre: Où sont les news d'antan? We've already had Tom Rachman's book "The Imperfectionists." Now comes Pete Hamill's "Tabloid City," which sets a high bar for those that follow. Brooklyn-born and a newspaperman since 1960, formerly the editor in chief of both The New York Post and The Daily News, Hamill speaks tabloidese. He writes it, too. His sentences are short and pack a punch. Sometimes without verbs. In a single paragraph. Like bullets. And no one can accuse him of not knowing New York. He plies its underbelly for a suspenseful tale, set in the present day, that captures the grit and smell and pulse of Gotham's sidewalks and subways. It centers on a double murder at a fancy Greenwich Village address, that tabloid sensation that cries out for "the wood" (the gigantic front-page headline). One of the victims is Cynthia Harding, a wealthy socialite devoted to the public library, who's been carrying on a love affair for decades with Sam Briscoe, editor in chief of The New York World, the last remaining afternoon tabloid, whose numbered days, unbeknown to him, have dwindled to less than one. Sam is a 71-year-old with a past (an early marriage gone wrong, a conquered drinking problem), and losing both his woman and his newspaper in a single day is his own kind of double murder (though at times it's hard to tell which one he mourns more). The story takes place over 24 hours, which is what used to constitute the daily news cycle. It's told through the footsteps and psyches of no fewer than 14 characters who roam the city like figures out of an Edward Hopper painting, in various stages of loneliness, rage and frustration. They're a varied lot: a homegrown Muslim terrorist out for blood; a sympathetic black cop working on the antiterrorism squad; a veteran from the Iraq war, in a wheelchair and packing a gun; an aging blind artist in the Chelsea Hotel; a hard-pressed Mexican cleaning woman who loses her job; a business tycoon on the lam; and so on. Some, like the young, idealistic reporter and the chain-smoking rewrite woman consigned to producing the paper's "Vics and Dicks" column, verge on stereotype, but they don't stick around long enough to become annoying. They all put in bite-size appearances, announced by headings of time and place, which give the story a staccato Web-like immediacy. At the end most wind up at the same spot, a onetime mosque turned into a crowded disco, with danger in the air. As the title suggests, the main character is New York, and it's not particularly friendly or inviting. This is not the fabled "melting pot" or even the "gorgeous mosaic" David Dinkins used to talk about. "It's a tabloid city," one character says, where people are out for money or fame or just trying to muddle through, and where they bounce up against one another in random and largely fraught encounters, like the playfield of a loony pinball machine that fires off all its balls at once. The real poignancy comes from nostalgia, and Hamill slathers it on like a counterman packing in the pastrami at Katz's. The list of remembered places and things is legion: egg creams, suspenders, the Dodgers and Giants, Linotype machines, Murray Kempton, the Clancy Brothers, the Cedar Tavern, the Lion's Head, Sloppy Louie's, the Third Avenue El, the Fulton Fish Market, the Village Gate. Everything but Horn & Hardart. It's enough to make you weep. Real tears. In Pete Hamill's novel, the editor of a tabloid loses both the love of his life and his newspaper in a single day. John Darnton, a former correspondent and editor at The Times, is the author of the recent memoir "Almost a Family."
Library Journal Review
Hamill's long career in newspaper newsrooms and his vast knowledge of New York City inform and enrich this tale of the last days of the fictional New York World. Tensions from the economic meltdown and a high-profile murder drive the plot, but this is very much a character-based story, with a cohort of disparate but believable personalities weaving across one another's paths. In such a program, the voices of the characters are key to its success, and New York-based actors Peter Ganim and Ellen Archer deliver the goods. Verdict Recommended for all audiobook collections. ["[Hamill's] many fans will enjoy this latest book," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Little, Brown hc, LJ 4/1/11.-Ed.]-Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, IA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
