On the crime beat with St. Clair McKelway

FROM : L.A. Time


PHOTO : http://www.latimes.com/ from Christina Pratt /Bloomsbury







For 37 years, the writer worked the underworld beat for the New Yorker. 'Reporting at Wit's End' displays his craft.

The New Yorker, as J.D. Salinger's recent death served to remind us, has been a crucial outlet for writers for more than 80 years. A.J. Liebling, Lillian Ross, Joseph Mitchell, Calvin Trillin -- these are just a few of the voices the magazine has nourished and encouraged, been defined by and, in turn, helped to define.Still, for every such contributor, there are numerous New Yorker writers whose legacies have drifted away over the decades like so much dust. St. Clair McKelway is one of these. For 37 years, McKelway was one of the New Yorker's most prolific and inventive nonfiction writers. In his time, he was regarded as a master of the long-form profile, a superior chronicler of rapscallions and low-rent hustlers. Indeed, when he was on his game, McKelway might have been the best nonfiction writer the magazine had -- this at a time when Liebling, Mitchell and E.J. Kahn Jr. were also producing signature work.





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