Crime and Publishing

Mark Singer's inquiry into the denial of a prisoner's rights began as a relatively straightforward magazine story. But as he dug deeper, his project became a morass of deceptions and ethical dilemmas worthy of Dostoyevsky.

by Yvonne Abraham

Part 2

On one of the last warm days of the year, Mark Singer stands at his kitchen sink, peeling the vegetable whose name Dan Quayle couldn't quite spell back in 1992. He lives in Pelham, New York, a small town 30 minutes by train from Grand Central Station. Houses in Pelham are pretty and rambling, with vast front yards and plenty of trees for climbing. Singer moved here from Manhattan in 1990, to provide his three young sons with Cleaver-esque childhoods, the kind Singer himself had in Tulsa during the '50s and '60s. (And the kind of childhood Brett Kimberlin had, too, in Indianapolis, around the same time.)

Singer cups the potato in his left hand, and, turning it, slowly, deliberately shaves off the skin in extended spirals. Such precision takes some time, but he seems happy enough to take it.

Singer has a fleshy face, a big, square jaw, and a lot of brown hair. He has a low brow and dark, turned-down eyes. His bottom lip juts forward when he laughs, which is not often for someone with as many funny stories as he has. He is 46, but he retains a boyishness that makes the Converse All-Stars he wears on the book's jacket seem perfectly appropriate.

While Singer peels, he talks charmingly and effusively about his background: his Midwestern childhood, his extended family, his years at Yale, his first meeting with revered New Yorker editor William Shawn, his start as a Talk of the Town writer at 24.

As a writer, Singer is masterful at capturing personalities. "He's always had the ability to catch people," says fellow New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin, "and get a feeling for them, especially for the way they talk." His favorite -- and best -- profiles are of people the world has never heard of (court buff Benjamin Shine; the five Brennan brothers, all building superintendents), or knows little about (filmmaker Errol Morris). Singer is old New Yorker, influenced in his writing and his view of the world by the likes of Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling. His profiles take months, even years, to report. "That's the thing about these pieces," he says, mid-potato. "You have to have the time."

Singer reheats some coffee in the microwave and sits down to answer questions. When talk turns to Kimberlin, he is more guarded. He has spent the last four years thinking about the relationship between reporters and their subjects, ever mindful of Janet Malcolm's view in her book The Journalist and the Murderer that:

Every journalist . . . is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns -- when the article or book appears -- his hard lesson.

Malcolm's work, about another book called Fatal Vision, takes writer Joe McGinniss to task for deceiving his subject, convicted triple murderer Jeff McDonald, into believing McGinniss was on his side, even sending him letters decrying the injustice of his conviction, while all along he'd been writing a book reinforcing the case against him. In Malcolm's analysis, McDonald, despite the heinous crimes of which he'd been convicted, was that credulous widow.

When it's his turn to be a subject, Singer seems fearful of such a fate himself. He measures his words carefully when they concern Kimberlin, retracting sentences that come out wrong, volunteering little, suspicious of the metajournalistic turn some of my questions take. ("How has this changed the way you write?") He sees my meta- and raises me, frequently drawing attention to my interview method, letting me know he's onto my game. ("When you take your recorder out after you've warmed your subject up, like you did, you can spook your subject.")

"When you sit down with me," he says, "you know, you're very good at what you do, and I'm very good at what I do, and we both do the same thing. So we're having this conversation, I'm trying to choose my words carefully. . . . I feel like there's a reason to talk to you, because this book is going to come out, and I want it to be read and I want it to be bought, and I want it to be seen for what it is -- an interesting study of truth and lying."

Talking about his own reporting is not fun for Singer. Reporting about his reporting is no picnic either.

Part 3

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.