DEATH IMITATES ART The news stories read like the opening of a mystery novel. In the early morning of July 4, in Morristown, New Jersey, a man named Mark McGarrity was found dead on the hard ground outside his apartment. An accident, the police insisted. The fifty-eight-year-old man–an occasional writer on outdoor topics for the Newark Star-Ledger–had apparently forgotten his keys and, trying to climb in the window, fallen to his death. If this were a mystery novel, someone–maybe a homicide detective like Dublin’s Peter McGarr, with an infallible nose for something wrong–would have grown uneasy. Why the Fourth of July? Why the missing keys? And how could an avid outdoorsman fall on such a simple climb? Unfortunately, it’s not fiction, but real life, and Peter McGarr will never investigate the mystery, for the fallen Mark McGarrity was, under the penname Bartholomew Gill, the American author of the popular mystery series about an Irish policeman. Beginning with “McGarr and the Politician’s Wife” in 1976 and ending with the soon-to-be-published “Death in Dublin,” Gill poured out sixteen volumes of Irish-themed detective fiction. The settings ranged from the Irish Republican Army, to Irish immigrants in America, to tinkers wandering the countryside. The best-known, the Edgar-nominated “Death of a Joyce Scholar,” is set on Bloomsday, June 16, and plays–wittily and successfully–on James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Some of the stories indulged a dated kind of Emerald Isle-“Quiet Man” Irishness, while others veered toward the more recent Roddy Doyle-style of dirty realism that pretends Ireland is just like anywhere else in the modern world, only more so. But at his best, Bartholomew Gill wrote clever, well-plotted, and literate mysteries. He would have loved the chance to write about the mystery of his own death. –J. Bottum BOOKS IN BRIEF How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young Da Capo, 368 pp., $24 Toby Young left London for New York seeking wealth, fame, and love. He thought that Eros was his driving force, but he ended up dancing with Thanatos, and what starts as a version of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” ends up looking more like “Leaving Las Vegas.” “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” is Toby Young’s tale of the offer of a lifetime, squandered by self-immolation. In 1995, the Modern Review, the London magazine Toby had been editing for four years, went belly up. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, took notice and extended an invitation to this young Englishman to come and work for him. Vanity Fair! This was it! A-list parties, celebrities, and the chance to be somebody! But Toby always wanted more–from his initial flight from Heathrow to New York, on which he unsuccessfully begged for an upgrade, to his constant battles with the “clipboard nazi” gatekeepers to any party worth getting into. More celebrity, more fame, more women. His experience at the ticket counter foreshadowed the rest of his journey. Toby Young is an excellent writer–which means the scenes he paints in “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” are entertaining, and his ubiquitous self-deprecation is charming. Even his political commentary can be fascinating. His take on the political correctness epidemic that beset Harvard while he was there in 1987 is poignant and telling: Tocqueville and Jefferson help him make sense of it all–although he insists that Jefferson’s natural aristocracy is best exemplified by James Stewart in the movie “Philadelphia Story” and Cary Grant in “His Girl Friday.” Still, gossip-dependent media types will mostly revel in the book’s tales of the Conde Nasties, the ridiculous pomposity of all Vanity Fair employees, and the up-close look at Graydon Carter. Everyone else will enjoy the story, which tells of Young’s slide down the slope from great aspirations–fueled by alcohol and cocaine. The story ends the way all such fairy tales must: He decides at last to return home, and he gets at last the girl. The social and political commentary make Young’s book worth reading. The biography makes it rich. –David Bass
