On The Trail of an Exclusive

By Paul Gray

MANY NEWSPAPER REPORTERS are convinced that they have a novel in them if only their damned editors and creditors would give them the time to write it. Pete Dexter, 51, is one of the happy few journalists who have lived up to this belief. While working as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, he moonlighted God's Pocket (1984), a gritty story set in that city's seamier neighborhoods, which earned an unusual amount of attention for a first novel. Three others followed, including Paris Trout (1989), which won the National Book Award.

Dexter no longer has to write on deadline for pay, although he keeps his hand in at his old trade by turning out a weekly syndicated column for the Sacramento Bee. And as his fifth novel, The Paperboy (Random House; 307 pages; $23), demonstrates, he remains intriguedand a little appalledby journalistic ethics and the lack thereof.

The setting is a fictional county in northern Florida, circa 1969; the narrator is Jack James, who has recently got himself kicked out of the state university, and now drives a delivery truck for the newspaper his father owns and edits, the Moat County Tribune. Jacks elder brother Ward has become a star reporter at the (also fictional) Miami Times as one-half of an investigative team; he and his partner, Yardley Acheman, have won statewide renown with stories on a plane crash and a fraternity-hazing death. These two fetch up in Moat County looking into the 1965 murder of the local sheriff and the subsequent trial and conviction that put one Hillary Van Wetter on death row. The reporters hire Jack as a driver and general factotum.

One of Jack's jobs is to keep Charlotte Bless occupied and out of the reporters' hair. She is a fading beauty with the odd habit of initiating epistolary love affairs with death-row killers. Hillary has become her favorite, and her boxes of clippings and court transcripts about his case sparked the journalists interest in the story. Spending time with an attractive woman who pines for a convicted murderer wears on Jack's young nerves: "You may have seen dogs rolling on something dead in the grass, wanting the scent in their coats. That was the way I wanted her."

Unfortunately for Jack, it is the slick Yardley Acheman who winds up consoling lonely Charlotte. But Jack has found other reasons to dislike Yardley. He has noticed that Ward does all the hard digging for facts: He wanted to have it exactly right. Yardley hangs around waiting to put his stylish spin on what Ward uncovers. "We get into too much detail," Jack hears Yardley complain at one point. "It ruins the narrative flow." Yardley comes up with a crucial and convenient piece of the puzzle.

Dexter's accountthrough Jack's eyesof this newspaper story in the making is hip, hard-boiled and filled with memorable eccentrics. The reporters' encounters with members of the Van Wetter clan comicallyand ominouslyjuxtapose modern types with people ancient in their cunning and evil. The novel's conclusion feels a bit hasty; but for much of its length, The Paperboy burns with the phosphorescent atmosphere of betrayal.