BOOKS
149
OF HOMICIDE AND HEADLINES
FADEAWAY. By
Richard Rosen.
Harper
&
Row. $15.95.
The most interesting contemporary thrillers seem to have
a symbiotic relationship with headlines and other tabloid truths.
An
incidental detail in
Strike Three, You're Dead,
Richard Rosen's Edgar–
winning first mystery, illustrates the point. Detective Sergeant Lin–
derman of the Providence police agrees to meet Harvey Blissberg,
Rosen's baseball-playing sleuth, at a bar on the Brown University
campus. "Nice place," says Linderman. "We pinched a couple hook–
ers there last month." You could have read that back in 1984, when
Strike Three, You're Dead
was published - two years before the Brown
prostitution-ring scandal made front-page news.
The headlines anticipated in
Fadeaway,
Rosen's equally good
second novel , are "Hoop Homicides Horrify Hub" and "Did Two
NBA Careers Go Up In Coke?"
If
headlines are the haiku of jour–
nalism, these are splendid inventions. They take pleasure in their
own artifice, as if to mimic and exaggerate the form, but at the same
time they're hardly too good to be true. They come close to the
headlines one actually did encounter a year ago - after the novel was
written but before it was published - when college phenom Len Bias
died of a cocaine overdose just days after the Boston Celtics had
made him their first-round draft pick. Bias's death is likely to be
fresh in your mind as you pick up
Fadeaway,
and this sense of the
novel's anticipatory accuracy makes it easy enough to suspend your
disbelief in the plot Rosen proffers.
The plot centers upon the murdered bodies of Tyrone Terrell
(forward, Boston Celtics) and Gus Sturdivant (guard, Washington
Bullets), which turn up in a luggage locker and a trash barrel, re–
spectively, at Boston's Logan Airport. Terrell is found with "a sus–
picious white powdery substance adhering to his mucous mem–
brane"; Sturdivant's well-known prescription for basketball success
was "toot 'n' shoot." The police naturally assume that these are drug–
related murders-which is precisely what the killer wants them to
think. Blissberg, assisted by television sports reporter Mickey
Slavin, his scene-stealing live-in girlfriend, thinks otherwise. He
learns that the two players took part in a 1979 charity game in Prov–
idence on the same night a can't-miss high school prospect was run
