Skip Yetter spent many years in journalism. His first reporting gig came at Four Corners School in Greenfield, where as a sixth grader he wrote an advice column, “Dear Flabby” — he was apparently a portly youth.
Yetter studied journalism at Syracuse University and interned at The Recorder, before going on to work as a reporter and publisher at larger newspapers and news services.
In his new novel, “Rilertown,” he draws on his experiences as a novice reporter at the now defunct Holyoke Transcript-Telegram.
The book’s afterword reveals that the protagonist, Jake Ketcher, is based on Yetter in his youth, and that many of the incidents in the book are loosely constructed from his career.
The action takes place in the late 1970s. Jake arrives for his first full-time reporting job at the Rilertown Post-Recorder.
Rilertown is a medium-size city in western
Massachusetts, with a burgeoning Latino population and a corrupt, racist city government.
Jake is thrilled to find himself in the paper’s busy newsroom and wants to channel the real-life heroes he has seen portrayed onscreen in the film, “All the President’s Men.”
He starts as a cub reporter, working a split shift that includes covering local sports. He quickly rises to general-assignment reporter.
He is soon drawn into an investigation of the city’s crooked mayoral administration. He follows the story of a shady local entrepreneur who is bribing officials to look the other way as developers plot to overrun a wildlife habitat.
In his spare time, Jake also pursues an older story: the mysterious death of a young woman in a local motel several years earlier.
She was found alone, suffocated, in what the coroner ruled an accidental death. Jake believes her death may be murder, and he wants to avenge her. He needs to track down hard evidence before he can write her story, however.
“Rilertown” doesn’t offer a lot of surprises in terms of its central mystery. Nevertheless, the book moves swiftly and is hard to put down. Jake is an attractive, enthusiastic hero whose enthusiasm for basic hometown journalism is infectious.
At the end of the story, author Skip Yetter calls his novel a “lament” for the newspaper industry. His trade was burgeoning when he joined it in the 1970s, but has fallen on hard times in the past 20 years.
Nevertheless, he offers hope that old-fashioned journalism will endure — and he encourages his readers to support the work that newspapers perform.
“Newspapers are like anything else worth valuing,” he writes. “And anything worthwhile is worth fighting for.”
Greenfield native Jake Yetter will sign copies of “Rilertown” on Saturday, Dec. 10, from 10:30 a.m. to noon at the World Eye Bookshop in Greenfield.
BOOK REVIEW: “Rilertown” by Skip Yetter (The Meanderthals Publishing, 258 pages, $20)
Tinky Weisblat is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook” and “Pulling Taffy.” Visit her website, www.TinkyCooks.com