Statehouse Intrigue

...In The Fly on the Wall, Cotton is investigating the possibility that a large amount of money was stolen during the construction of new highways His problem, aside from the fact that some people are trying to kill him, is that breaking the story will presumably harm the progressive wing of the Democratic party and help the faction led by a man who sounds like too many of our senators The murder attempts lead to some entertaining, if not quite believable, chases The conflict of conscience provokes some soul-searching about objectivity in journalism What is interesting and authentic about Cotton is that he is troubled only by the question of whether or not to print the dirt about the stolen highway funds It never seemed to have occurred to him to write the story of why all that money was being spent on highways when the mass-transit system of his unnamed Midwestern state was undoubtedly about to fall apart...

...The hero, John Cotton, and the men who share the press room with him see reporting as a kind of game —the man from the afternoon paper managing to beat his morning competition in punting something like when a bill is going to be read out of committee, the most enterprising reporters occasionally scoring points by uncovering a documentable case of thievery by some politician or bureaucrat The journalistic triumphs Cotton respects are all exposes of conniption Just about everybody is thought to be dishonest, yet the game requires that the offense be specific and documented before it can be mentioned m print...

...On the wall behind the speaker's rostrum was a huge tote board bearing the name of each legislator flanked by a red light and a green light When a vote was taken, the board would come alive like a pin-ball machine—flashing in red and green as some legislators changed their minds again and again before the machine closed A few days later, when I told a friend in New Orleans that I had found the State Legislature a bit, well, unusual he put it all into writers...

...perspective for mc "What you have to remember about the state capital,'' he said, "is that it's not southern United States, it's northern Costa Rica ". Though some state governments in the U S do have a kind to Central American quality, I think Louisiana was atypical State legislatures tend to be unspectacular and tor the most part numerological They have a common atmosphere??Good Old Boy camaraderie, a tradition of city-baiting enjoyed by the country folks, a jaded view of why those insurance agents and lawyers want to be legis-lators and how a man gets chosen to serve on the Alcoholic Beverages Board Tony Holliman has caught part of that atmosphere in The Fly on the Wall, his mystery novel about a statehouse reporter in an unnamed Midwestern state capital...

...afflicted There was considerable le-sentiment, since nearly everyone on the coast had heard about somebody with a legitimate hurricane-damage claim being cheated in one way or another by his insurance company...

...Holliman??s reporters, reflecting real newsmen, seldom covey the type of corruption represented not by a legislator padding his expense account on an official junket but by an industry wielding effective control over a legislative committee or a state agency or a regulatory commission That kind of corruption is frequently out in the open, and accepted as part of the system After Hurricane Camille hit Mississippi's Gulf Coast a few years ago, the State Insurance Commission approved a 50 per cent rate increase for the area...

...At about the same time it was pointed out that the commission, which has to pass on rate changes, consisted of two insurance agents and a lawyer for insurance companies Nobody seemed surprised, the strongest response I found in a Glut Coast newspaper said that perhaps a fourth commissioner should be added to represent the consumer With a few exceptions like the Texas Observer and the New Mexico Review, no weeklies or monthlies try to cover state government in greater depth than the daily newspapers Correspondents for what amounts to the national press hardly ever write about state politics, and when a national political reporter stops overnight at a state capital it is almost always to do a piece about how the state is likely to vote in the next Presidential campaign...

...Statehouse Intrigue The Fly on the Wall By Tony Holliman Harper & Row 212 pp $5 95 Reviewed by Calvin Trilling Staff waiter, "The New Yorker , author, "US Journal" A decade ago, I spent a year as a reporter covering the South When people in New York said later that I must have seen a lot of interesting (or amazing or shocking, depending on their point of view) things in that time, what always came to my mind was the Louisiana Legislature I first saw it during a special session called to stop the impending desegregation of the New Orleans public schools—or at least to give the appearance of a good try at stopping it The governor then was Jimmy Davis, best known as the composer of "You Are My Sunshine,' and visitors were always taken into his outer office so they could see the Federal court subpoenas his secretaries had let dip to the floor rather than accept, and afterward had placed under Plexiglas The governor s legislative leader for the anti-integration bills was a very short man from Napoleonville named Riley C Niche Another active proponent of the segregation package, as I remember, had gray hair and a carefully trimmed pencil moustache and was called Well-borne Jack All of the other legislators seemed to have similarly appropriate names, they also had the habit, while delivering a speech, of holding the microphone in a desperate grip—as if some race-mixer was about to run up to snatch it away from them—anod shouting into it from about an inch away People who had come to demonstrate for one cause or another were standing right on the floor of the House behind the legislators, constantly cheering or booing and shaking placards that said segregation had to be maintained or that the schools had to remain open 01 that Jesus was watching...