"Perhaps the Greatest Magazine Writer that No One Knows About"

"For a man with an almost embarrassingly patrician name (he was of Scottish descent), McKelway found his métier in the tenement backrooms and police stations of the city. He produced long profiles of the cunning crooks he lovingly called 'rascals' as well as of the men who worked hard to bring them to justice. At a time when the New Yorker's fiction writers were producing quaint doily-and-tea-cozy sketches of domestic life, McKelway delved into the marrow of the lower class. His dispatches read like character-driven short stories from the underworld."

In the Los Angeles Times, Marc Weingarten reviews Reporting at Wit's End: Tales From the New Yorker by St. Clair McKelway.