Former OPC president Larry Martz has been committing journalism for more than 50 years, and he has written two non-fiction books. Now he has perpetrated his first novel, To Know the Truth. The OPC will host a book night to discuss the novel on April 3 at Club Quarters.

The book is about a young reporter learning his trade in Detroit in the late 1950s. By no coincidence, that was when Martz was working for The Detroit News, before moving to New York and spending 32 years as a reporter, writer and editor for Newsweek. The novel’s plot follows its protagonist through a summer of interlaced stories including a murder, its coverup, a political campaign, corruption in the Teamsters Union and a complex scam that erupts into national news. Kirkus Reviews wrote that the book is "a compelling mystery set in an industry that has radically changed over the past 50 years."

Detroit has changed, too; it was then a swaggering town brimming with hubris and the colorful characters who inhabit Martz’s book. In the January OPC Bulletin, member John Martin wrote that the book is "a reporter’s novel" that evokes the era before "carpets, air conditioning and computers replaced the stale air and cigarette-scarred linoleum of the City Room."

The book also evokes a time when journalists tried, perhaps naively, to uncover something called the truth, as well as to right wrongs, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. At the book night, former president William J. Holstein will serve as interlocutor and discuss with Martz how the craft of journalism has changed, and why.

To RSVP, please call the OPC at 212-626-9220 or e-mail.