EQMM 2007-07 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

When Millard Glass took me on at the Chronicle, it was a big step up for me. After working on a series of small-town weeklies, a medium-sized city daily looked like the New York Times. He was a fierce-looking little guy, usually soft-spoken but intimidating, with a reputation for periodic tantrums. For the first few weeks, he didn’t have a lot to say to me; then one day he called me into his office. Dominating the room on the wall behind his desk was a huge poster of four long-ago Notre Dame football players on horseback, with the famous Grantland Rice line below the photo: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again…” Amid the clutter on the desk, I saw books by Jim Murray and Damon Runyon.

“Gus,” he said, “you do good work. I like to see a writer with a sense of style for a change. That’s how sports writing is supposed to be. Accurate’s important, sure, but so’s colorful. I don’t say you’re Red Smith reincarnated just yet, but you have a touch of the poet to you, know what I mean?”

“I had no idea I was so touched, but thanks, Mr. Glass.”

“Now that you’ve been here awhile, what do you think of our sports department?”

Awkward question. How frank did he want me to be? A fair amount of the sports page came from the wire services, and some of the local stuff was the work of stringers, often high-school and college journalism students. I had only three full-time colleagues.

Lead columnist Rex Burbage was old, fat, and lazy and had been there since the year one; rumor was he had something on the publisher and couldn’t be fired. Rex wrote a pretty good story when his heart was in it, but he was prone to careless mistakes. He drank a bit and liked to feature that particular reporter stereotype, but his inherent indolence went deeper than that. As a columnist, he wrote about everything, but he favored horse racing, boxing, and football.

Sally Ashe was small, cute, up for anything (at least in the journalism line), and so energetic she made you tired just watching her dart around the newsroom. A decent writer and good at breaking stories, Sally could exploit the advantages and accept the disadvantages of being an attractive young woman in a profession dominated by middle-aged, beer-bellied men. The newsroom hadn’t freed itself of a long tradition of sexism, and I think even those who practiced it most constantly admired her ability to take it in stride. Her main beats were hockey, basketball, and tennis.

Bill Toolmaker was about my age, thirty, but he seemed older and not just because of the thinning hairline. His wife had some kind of degenerative disease and caring for her told on him. Bill was already a veteran on the Chronicle and became my closest friend there. Thanks to him, I knew where the extra office supplies were hidden, whom to call for accurate information (the university

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