Reporting at Wit's End: Tales from the New Yorker Book

Some great pieces in here, particularly "Mr. 880," (his FBI file number) the one about a counterfeiter who eludes the FBI through...I don't know what, exactly, for nearly a decade. He's not that wily (unlike the wily Wilby, an expert accounting fraudster), and his money says "Wahsington" on it, which you'd think would be kind of a giveaway. Maybe it's that he made only dollar bills and not that many of them. In any case, I am not going to put this up there with my Liebling books for memorability; they're maybe a half-step below--something lacking in the lowlife zest, maybe, that doesn't give me a lot of rereading value. The clarity and detail are exemplary (his mini-history of forgery in the "Mr. 880" chapter is a little masterpiece), but there's a lack of...glee in the whole thing that makes it, for me, excellent reporting but not literature. And then his whole "madcap" escapade, "The Edinburgh Caper," goes on and on and on; I thought it was about his drinking problems, but Marc Weingarten's LA Times review, which thought that bit waaay more fun than I did--"a sprawling and brilliant internal monologue that unspools in a wild shaggy dog story as improbable as it is gripping"--suggests it's really therapeutic and about his mental-health problems. Either way, I found it endless and not that fun. But the closer, about a serial impostor who could not and would not stop (there's a mini-saga with this exiled Afghan princess in 1922 where he becomes her White House escort after claiming to be the "Naval Liaison" that cries out for one of those goofy true-crime treatments), is an endlessly astonishing tale. So, those 100+ pages on Edinburgh aside, a lot of good stuff here. Still, I prefer McKelway's out-of-print collection, True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality, which contains the Father Divine piece and pretty much all of the good pieces from this collection.