In 1926, hundreds of journalists descended on New Jersey for a double murder trial. Among the writers was a 27-year-old named Morris Markey, writing for a one-year-old weekly magazine called The New Yorker.
,” published this week to mark the centenary of the murders. Markey’s dispatches from late 1926 offer not only a time capsule from a largely forgotten scandal but a snapshot ofin its infancy. Founded the previous year by Harold Ross, its first editor, and his wife, Jane Grant, the magazine was beginning to arouse the curiosity of Manhattan’s intelligentsia, but still struggled to break through. In his memoir aboutearly days, James Thurber would call the magazine “the outstanding flop of 1925 . .
,” appeared ahead of the trial, in the issue of August 7, 1926, and charted the resurrection of the case by Payne, whose tangledinvestigation involved a convoluted marriage annulment, a supposed secondhand confession, thousands of dollars in alleged hush money, a shady private detective, charges of witness tampering, and nearly a year’s worth of shoe leather to piece it all together. Markey’s account of Payne’s tabloid crusade oozed skepticism.
Unlike the formulaic copy that filled the daily papers, Markey’s prose burst with attitude, wit, and literary élan, though he wryly acknowledged that his competitors weren’t without a certain appeal. “This trial is eminently worth following in the newspapers,” Markey advised. “Indeed, the citizen who permits himself to miss a single dispatch is punishing himself profoundly. The reporting of a trial, in the first place, is the one thing which newspapers do exceedingly well. . . .
The trial came to its spectacular conclusion on December 3, 1926. By then, Markey was busy with new assignments for A Reporter at Large, writing about Harlem’s African American jazz clubs and an exorbitant gala celebrating the birth of NBC. He continued to write for the magazine until 1941. Along the way, he published a celebrated book of itinerant reportage, called “,” and tried his hand at Hollywood screenwriting.