Dead Souls

By John Skow

KILLINGS by Calvin Trillin Ticknor & Fields; 231 pages; $14,95

The Marco Polo of Junk Food, as he is known to awestruck lesser feeders, is renowned for his courageous researches into such regional American delicacies as barbecued chicken wings and Philadelphia cheese steaks. Here he is on a less eupeptic journey. We may assume that Calvin Trillin occasionally takes on a plateful of crab cakes or refried beans, but only as fuel. As his title indicates, this time Topic A is violent death.

To write about killings, as he does it in the pieces collected here, is a touchy matter. The author's franchise is broad but unclear. A newspaper routinely covers the murders in its area if the central characters are celebrated or the crimes gaudy, and offers a selection of corpses from afar if both conditions are met. Duty requires this; the news must be reported, however disgustingly fascinating. Trillin is under no such absolving obligation.

Merely to satisfy his own low curiosity and ours, the author eases into a town where death has been done. If a trial is going on, so much the better; people can be made to answer at a trial, and the ring of lie clanking against truth tells something about them. A slick Florida lawyer has been shot to death and left to ruin the upholstery of his fancy car. A feud among Mexican Americans in Riverside, Calif., feeds on itself so long and so bloodily that one participant admits being in jail is a relief. Three acquaintances booze away the afternoon in a country bar in Iowa, and a few hours later one of them has been shotgunned out of this life.

"Jim Berry came to Center Junction in 1962 and didn't do much that anybody approved of from then until the time he left, rather suddenly, last June." That is how the Iowa story begins; it ends with two hung juries, and no real answers.

A piece of short fiction involving a crime usually leaves the reader with a solution of sorts to hold in his hand. Trillin's narratives often leave no more than a handful of smoke. In an odd way this takes the curse off what is really voyeurism. For a dozen pages or more, the reader sees so closely that he wants to excuse himself, to clear his throat so the figures in the drama will know he is there. Then the curtain closes abruptly, and he is left to brood about why psychological insulation burned through at just such a time and place, with precisely these results.

Trillin writes with skill and economy. He plays fair and never invents quotes or deals in the shabbiness of composite characters. He never claims too much for his conundrums and does not speculate for half a sentence too long about where the truth may lie. A single reservation is in the matter of scale. In The New Yorker, these articles seemed exhaustive; in the book, some of them are disappointingly brief. The same illusion of time slowed and prose made denser is observable in even the best of the magazine's longer fact articles, which can seem interminable when becalmed among ads for Jaguars and diamond earrings, and then are transformed unedited into brisk 180-page books.

Whether Trillin wrote too skimpily seems to be a matter of surroundings. Certainly these brief and chilly recountings work best when they are jostling for space in a weekly magazine, telling Pauline Kael and the perfume commercials to please, for once, shut up and listen. The collection's hard covers enclose a bare stage that the author has not quite managed to fill with his company of spattered souls. --By John Skow