{"id":901,"date":"2012-06-19T13:37:27","date_gmt":"2012-06-19T13:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2012\/06\/19\/whys-this-so-good-number-47-calvin-trillin-and-classic-edna-buchanan\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T19:00:06","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T19:00:06","slug":"whys-this-so-good-number-47-calvin-trillin-and-classic-edna-buchanan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2012\/06\/19\/whys-this-so-good-number-47-calvin-trillin-and-classic-edna-buchanan\/","title":{"rendered":""Why’s this so good?" No. 47: Calvin Trillin and classic Edna Buchanan"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n Where is Edna Buchanan when we need her? Admittedly, the lede on this recent Associated Press story wasn\u2019t half bad:
MIAMI\u00a0\u2014\u00a0A witness says a naked man chewing on the face of another naked man on a downtown highway ramp kept eating and growled at a police officer, who fatally shot him to make him stop.<\/em><\/blockquote>
Still, Buchanan<\/a>, who was the great chronicler of Miami murder<\/a> before she retired from the Miami Herald in the late 1980s to concentrate on fiction, probably would have come up with something even greater. At least that\u2019s the impression I have from Calvin Trillin\u2019s splendid 1986 New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0profile of Buchanan, \u201cCovering the Cops<\/a>.\u201d

Not to get too meta here, but some would argue that the first graph of the profile is the classic Calvin Trillin lede:
In the newsroom of the Miami Herald, there is some disagreement about which of Edna Buchanan\u2019s first paragraphs stands up as the classic Edna lead. I line up with the fried-chicken faction. The fried-chicken story was about a rowdy ex-con named Gary Robinson, who late one Sunday night lurched drunkenly into a Church\u2019s outlet, shoved his way to the front of the line, and ordered a three-piece box of fried chicken. Persuaded to wait his turn, he reached the counter again five or ten minutes later, only to be told that Church\u2019s had run out of fried chicken. The young woman at the counter suggested that he might like chicken nuggets instead. Robinson responded to the suggestion by slugging her in the head. That set off a chain of events that ended with Robinson\u2019s being shot dead by a security guard. Edna Buchanan covered the murder for the Herald\u2014there are policemen in Miami who say that it wouldn\u2019t be a murder without her\u2014and her story began with what the fried chicken faction still regards as the classic Edna lead: \u201cGary Robinson died hungry.\u201d<\/em><\/blockquote>
You can see so much of Trillin\u2019s approach in that paragraph. Most prominently, there\u2019s the pleasing and subtly comic juxtaposition of high rhetoric and low subject. \u201cThere is some disagreement\u201d; \u201cthe fried-chicken faction\u201d; \u201cthe young woman \u2026 suggested\u201d: the language is appropriate to an exploration of philosophical niceties, not of a lowlife capital crime in a fast-food restaurant. Also characteristic is that the tone, diction and content bespeak an intimate familiarity with and knowledge about the subject. It is a long paragraph, a stylistic habit Trillin absorbed from the New Yorker<\/em>, his employer for some 50 years. Trillin, like Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling before him, comfortably inhabits those grafs (some of which are considerably longer than the one quoted). Within them, he speeds up and slows down. He digresses. And he often ends them, as he does here, with a choice kicker.

\u201cCovering the Cops,\u201d like all of Trillin\u2019s work, is journalism in the form of essay, or maybe it\u2019s essay in the form of journalism. On the journalistic side, it is grounded in (very) deep reporting. On the other hand, it indulges in none of the egregious conventions of magazine profiles: present-tense scenes; gratuitous insertion of the author\u2019s opinions and activities; catchphrases and clich\u00e9s; and breathless, breezy, false or self-satisfied language. As I suggested about the lede, it has a faint but pervasive comic tone. This too is true of all Trillin pieces (even his own sober murder coverage, collected in the superb Killings<\/em>). The tone emerges from his observation that in the world, things often do not turn out the way humans plan or expect, and also that odd and unexpected things frequently end up next to each other.

This sensitivity to juxtaposition may lead to the characteristic Trillin figure of speech, which is the toothsome simile. From \u201cCovering the Cops\u201d: