Reviewed by Sabena Stark  

“Jeannette Schmidt, the professional whistler who has died in Vienna aged 80, performed with Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, and Marlene Dietrich; she had been born a man and had fought in Hitler’s Wehrmacht before undergoing a sex change in a Cairo clinic.” TheDaily Telegraph, London.        

Can reading about the newly dead be entertaining? Or worthwhile? Marilyn Johnson’s The Dead Beat is a love letter to obituary writing and its practitioners. The book is filled with funny and surprising snapshots, quirky metaphors and gallows humor. Despite that it’s a book about sendoffs to the formerly living, it never becomes morbid or grim. Johnson’s prose is engaging, upbeat and alive.

A fully formed obituary piece is the literary antithesis of reality TV. It’s a home-movie trimmed down to its most respectful and illuminating essence. Unlike a death notice, which typically catalogs a person’s job history, list of survivors, and the affliction that killed him, obits sketch the story of a whole person. In a capable writer’s hands, this condensed biography can be elevated to the sublime by its singular and finely drawn details. As Johnson shows us, penning obituaries has become an art form. Although according to Chuck Strum, TheNewYorkTimes’ obit page editor, the story’s “…drama is not in artful prose so much as scrupulous reporting and skillful juxtapositions.”

For journalists, the book is a hard sell for obituary writing. Whether taken up early or later in their careers, every reporter interviewed here who landed at the obituary desk said the job was challenging but satisfying and meaningful.

As author and journalist Yvonne Latty, formerly of the PhiladelphiaDaily News, said, “I had been an urban reporter for years. I used to write murder stories, kids getting murdered, and I’d have to talk to the parents. I thought that was real. After writing obits about foster mothers, machinists, all these inspiring regular people, I realized murder isn’t real life. The people in these obits are real life.”

Jim Nicholson, who writes feature-style, “Ordinary Joe” obits for the Philadelphia Inquirer, asks, “Who would you miss more, the secretary of state or your garbage man?” Even after writing more than 20,000 obits over 19 years, Nicholson said, “I had to give this job everything I had. You don’t get jaded or careless or lazy… You can’t rest on your laurels because the next family, they don’t care what you wrote before.”

If there’s a fault to find with this book, it’s the slightly too perky tone throughout. And sometimes the author tosses clever metaphors around like there’s no writerly tomorrow. 

But maybe it’s just me. I read obits. And I read death-notices too. According to Johnson, that makes me “hardcore.”  Maybe I’m still looking for answers to the question, how do people make good lives? Or wasted ones? Or maybe I’m still learning how to say goodbye. And if there’s a message in this book, it’s that saying goodbye, properly, has to start with saying hello.