I SHOULDN'T BE TELLING YOU THIS by Mary Breasted
Harper & Row; 361 pages; $15.95
BYLINES by Bernard Weinraub
Doubleday; 590 pages; $17.95
DEADLINES by Desmond Ryan
Norton; 285 pages; $15.50
Deep in the desk of every hardbitten, wisecracking, deadline-haunted reporter, alongside the bourbon and the Maalox, is an unfinished novel. Typically, the manuscript is not about great events but about what is truly important to the journalistic fraternity: sex, office politics, money, fame and lunch. That, at least, is the message of these three novels by and about newspaper reporters.
The most entertaining of the...