Pete
Dexter is best known as the author of six acclaimed novels,
including PARIS, TROUT, which received a National Book Award. His
most recent novel, TRAIN, came out in 2003. But, like many writers
before him, Dexter honed his craft as a newspaperman and
journalist.

PAPER TRAILS is a collection of his newspaper writings from the
1970s to the 1990s. During this time he worked as a columnist for
the Philadelphia News and Sacramento Bee. In this
book, readers can find the same sharp eye for detail, dialogue and
storytelling that make his novels so memorable.

The big city columnist has traditionally been the home run hitter
of the newspaper world. The columnist is the star of the newsroom,
the only reporter who can write whatever he wants and do it in the
first person.

In 1963, Jimmy Breslin revolutionized and reinvented the column for
the New York Herald-Tribune. Breslin brought the skills of
a brilliant storyteller to page 2. He wrote about the small guy,
the underdog and the forgotten. His columns captured the rhythms of
speech of real people in the street and bars.

And across town on South Street at the same time, Pete Hamill was
banging out columns for the old New York Post. Hamill's
columns were filled with passion and heart. His sentences were as
lean and tough as a boxer's right hand on a good night. In Chicago,
Mike Royko dominated the newsroom. And you could find Herb Caan
working the streets of San Francisco. It was a good time for
reading newspapers.

By 1974, Pete Dexter arrived in Philadelphia and joined the
exclusive fraternity of columnists. And in PAPER TRAIL, you see
that he quickly displayed all the tools needed to be a great writer
and darn good columnist. It's not easy to tell a fully-developed
story in 750-800 words on immutable deadlines, but he does it here
over and over again. Dexter is able to tell poignant tales full of
local color and dialogue, often with a twist at the end.

Dexter's writing is simple and powerful. Consider how he starts
this column about a prostitute. "The rent is $95 a week, and Jolene
still owes the manager fifty. None of the regulars have called, so
it is time to go to work."

Dexter writes with a hilarious dry wit and can toss off one-liners
with the best of them. And he writes with underlining warmth, if
somewhat sardonically, about his wife and family.

But there is something else going on in these columns that make
them cumulatively as powerful as any novel. The first column in the
book is a simple slice of life. Dexter observes a hawk that swoops
down and steals a kitten from its mother, a stray cat in his
neighborhood. He writes:

"As he moved, his shadow crossed the cat and she cringed, and that
is what he would lie awake thinking about that night, and the
next… The man had lost things that had mattered before, and
he knew what it was to cringe at sudden shadows, the ones that just
drop on you out of the sky."

That sets the tone for the collection. By the late 1970s and early
1980s the optimism of the 1960s was long gone, the cities were in
rapid decline and the surge of drugs like crack was making the mean
streets even meaner. Dexter did what reporters always do: he walked
alone with a notebook and pen into those dangerous streets and told
the truth about what he saw.

Consider this lead: "The woman was sitting in a corner of the
emergency room at Parkland Hospital in Dallas --- the same place
they had taken John Kennedy. It had been too late for him; it was
too late for her… It was early afternoon now, she had been
there for a couple of hours at least. The blood on her skirt and
shoes had dried black, her wrist and hand were bandaged, and she
was sitting alone, waiting for the doctor to come out and tell her
what she already knew about her husband…"

That's the sort of work they can't teach in journalism school. By
the time Dexter was writing, the days of colorful losers and
characters out of Damon Runyon were long gone. A sister tells him
about her recently deceased brother who spent his entire life as a
barroom brawler and braggart --- a man who was always getting into
minor and stupid scrapes with the law.

"I loved my brother deeply, but he was never anything but a
fool. And no matter what kind of stories they tell down at the bar,
when my brother died, he didn't have any friends."

The most chilling sentence Dexter writes in PAPER TRAILS is the
simple one on page 226. This is the column where he says goodbye to
Philadelphia and the column at the News: "One night I
almost watched myself die." In 1981, Dexter was attacked by 30 men
with baseball bats and severely beaten after writing a column about
a botched drug deal. Dexter doesn't tell that story in this book.
He doesn't have to. The reporter doesn't become the story. That's
the rule.

PAPER TRAILS is an indispensable book for anybody interested in
journalism or reading a great American writer. It is a chronicle of
our times. Dexter is not afraid to shine a light on the dark side
of the American Dream, about the devastating violence that is never
far from the surface of American life. And that fearlessness is
supposed to be what journalism is about, even in these days of
cautious corporate media. PAPER TRAILS is as good as journalism can
get.