In the newsroom of the Miami Herald, there is some disagreement about which of Edna Buchanan’s first paragraphs stands as the classic Edna lead. I line up with the fried-chicken faction. The fried-chicken story was about a rowdy ex-con named Gary Robinson, who late one Sunday night lurched drunkenly into a Church’s outlet, shoved his way to the front of the line, and ordered a three-piece box of fried chicken. Persuaded to wait his turn, he reached the counter again five or ten minutes later, only to be told that Church’s had run out of fried chicken. The young woman at the counter suggested that he might like chicken nuggets instead. Robinson responded to the suggestion by slugging her in the head. That set off a chain of events that ended with Robinson’s being shot dead by a security guard. Edna Buchanan covered the murder for the Herald—there are policemen in Miami who say that it wouldn’t be a murder without her—and her story began with what the fried-chicken faction still regards as the classic Edna lead: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”

All connoisseurs would agree, I think, that the classic Edna lead would have to include one staple of crime reporting—the simple, matter-of-fact statement that registers with a jolt. The question is where the jolt should be. There’s a lot to be said for starting right out with it. I’m rather partial to the Edna lead on a story last year about a woman about to go on trial for a murder conspiracy: “Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin.” On the other hand, I can understand the preference that others have for the device of beginning a crime story with a more or less conventional sentence or two, then snapping the reader back in his chair with an abbreviated sentence that is used like a blunt instrument. One student of the form at the Herald refers to that device as the Miller Chop. The reference is to Gene Miller, now a Herald editor, who, in a remarkable reporting career that concentrated on the felonious, won the Pulitzer Prize twice for stories that resulted in the release of people in prison for murder. Miller likes short sentences in general—it is sometimes said at the Herald that he writes as if he were paid by the period—and he particularly likes to use a short sentence after a couple of rather long ones. Some years ago, Gene Miller and Edna Buchanan did a story together on the murder of a high-living Miami lawyer who was shot to death on a day he had planned to while away on the golf course of La Gorce Country Club, and the lead said, “. . . he had his golf clubs in the trunk of his Cadillac. Wednesday looked like an easy day. He figured he might pick up a game later with Eddie Arcaro, the jockey. He didn’t.”

These days, Miller sometimes edits the longer pieces that Edna Buchanan does for the Herald, and she often uses the Miller Chop—as in a piece about a lovers’ spat: “The man she loved slapped her face. Furious, she says she told him never, ever to do that again. ‘What are you going to do, kill me?’ he asked, and handed her a gun. ‘Here, kill me,’ he challenged. She did.”

Now that I think of it, that may be the classic Edna lead.

There is no dispute about the classic Edna telephone call to a homicide detective or a desk sergeant she knows: “Hi. This is Edna. What’s going on over there?” There are those at the Herald who like to think that Edna Buchanan knows every policeman and policewoman in the area—even though Dade County has twenty-seven separate police forces, with a total strength of more than forty-five hundred officers. “I asked her if by any chance she happened to know this sergeant,” a Herald reporter once told me. “And she looked at her watch and said, ‘Yeah, but he got off his shift twenty minutes ago.’ ” She does not in fact know all the police officers in the area, but they know her. If the desk sergeant who picks up the phone is someone Edna has never heard of, she gives her full name and the name of her paper. But even if she said, “This is Edna,” there aren’t many cops who would say, “Edna who?” In Miami, a few figures are regularly discussed by first name among people they have never actually met. One of them is Fidel. Another is Edna.

It’s an old-fashioned name. Whoever picks up the phone at homicide when Edna Buchanan calls probably doesn’t know any Ednas he might confuse her with. Edna is, as it happens, a rather old-fashioned person. “She should have been working in the twenties or thirties,” a detective who has known her for years told me. “She’d have been happy if she had a little press card in her hat.” She sometimes says the same sort of thing about herself. She laments the replacement of typewriters at the Herald with word processors. She would like to think of her clips stored in a place called a morgue rather than a place called an editorial reference library. She’s nostalgic about old-fashioned criminals. As a girl growing up around Paterson, New Jersey, she used to read the New York tabloids out loud to her grandmother—a Polish grandmother, who didn’t read English—and she still likes to roll out the names of the memorable felons in those stories: names like George Metesky, the Mad Bomber, and Willie Sutton, the man who robbed banks because that’s where the money was. She even has a period look about her—something that recalls the period around 1961. She is a very thin woman in her forties who tends to dress in slacks and silk shirts and high heels. She wears her hair in a heavy blond shoulder-length fall. Her eyes are wide, and her brow is often furrowed in concern. She seems almost permanently anxious about one thing or another. Did she neglect to try the one final approach that would have persuaded the suspect’s mother to open the door and have a chat? Will a stray cat that she spotted in the neighborhood meet an unpleasant end? Did she forget to put a quarter in the meter? Despite many years spent among people who often find themselves resorting to rough language—hookers, cocaine cowboys, policemen, newspaper reporters—her own conversation tends to sound like that of a rather demure secretary circa 1952. Her own cats—she has five of them—have names like Misty Blue Eyes and Baby Dear. When she is particularly impressed by a bit of news, she is likely to describe it as “real neat.” When she discovers, say, a gruesome turn in a tale that might be pretty gruesome already, she may say, “That’s interesting as heck!”

Among newspaper people, Edna’s line of work is considered a bit old-fashioned. Daily police reporting—what is sometimes known in the trade as covering the cops—is still associated with that old-timer who had a desk in the station house and didn’t have to be told by the sergeant in charge which part of the evening’s activities to leave out of the story and thought of himself as more or less a member of the department. Covering the cops is often something a reporter does early in his career—an assignment that can provide him with enough war stories in six months to last him through years on the business page or the city desk. Even Gene Miller, a man with a fondness for illegalities of all kinds, turned rather quickly from covering the cops to doing longer pieces. The Herald, which regularly shows up on lists of the country’s most distinguished dailies, does take a certain amount of pride in providing the sort of crime coverage that is not typical of newspapers on such lists, but it does not have the sort of single-minded interest in juicy felonies that characterized the New York tabloids Edna used to read to her grandmother. When Edna Buchanan began covering the cops for the Herald, in 1973, there hadn’t been anyone assigned full time to the beat in several years.