'The Dead Beat' traces and celebrates the rebirth of the obituary

The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, By Marilyn Johnson, HarperCollins, 244 pp., illustrated, $24.95

Marilyn Johnson doesn't just whistle past the graveyard, she stops to smell the flowers in ''The Dead Beat," her enthusiastic tribute to the obituary and the colorful writers who have breathed new life into the art form.

Johnson, a former writer for Life and self-confessed member of ''the church of the obituary," has written obituaries of Princess Diana, Jackie Onassis, and Johnny Cash. ''Forgive us, but this is what we live for," she says of the obit writer's craft, but no apology is necessary to those of us who rip open the newspaper and turn first to the ''Irish sports pages."

Where else would we learn of Henry Giordano, the pharmacist who became an undercover worker for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration? ''He could pose as a down-at-the-heels narcotics peddler, a flashily prosperous racketeer, a small-time gambler, an escaped convict or a sailor and get away with it," wrote Wolfgang Saxon in an obituary in The New York Times. Or Richard ''Boss Hog" Hodges, school custodian and bon vivant, whose roast beef melted in your mouth, according to Jim Nicholson, retired obit writer for The Philadelphia Daily News.

Did you know there are five polka halls of fame, or that Harold von Braunhut was the marketing genius who parlayed brine shrimp into the Sea Monkey mail-order pet craze? ''You don't know how many things you don't know until you start dawdling over the obituary page," writes Johnson, a true student of the form, who got her hands dirty riffling through the pages of The New York Times, the London Daily Telegraph, and dozens of other dailies and keeps abreast of developments in the field on the Internet.

Johnson proposes that we're living in the golden age of the obituary. As evidence she quotes an unsigned obituary of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker published in The Times of London in 1988: ''There were certainly off nights, but even when his trumpet tone was practically transparent, his singing voice a whisper, and the music seemingly in imminent danger of coming to an absolute halt, his innate musicianship could still achieve small miracles of wounded grace."

Johnson traces the rebirth of the obituary to 1986 and The Independent newspaper in London, which spruced up its obit pages with lively writing and large photographs. The Times of London, the Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian jumped on the bandwagon, and there soon were ''Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" writing vivid obituaries in London, which Johnson calls ''the beating heart of a living art."

Johnson made a pilgrimage to London and attended a couple of meetings of the Great Obituary Writers International Conference, a gleeful group of writers and fans who meet annually. She said she wanted to see what obit writers look like and found them to be ''regular people who happen to spring to life when bad news arrives."

Writing with the gusto of a groupie, she introduces us to Stephen Miller, the wisecracking former computer technologist who writes witty obits of the beautiful and bizarre for the New York Sun and disdains writing about everyday people; Nicholson, the no-nonsense master of the ''egalitarian" obit who wrote of butchers, bakers, and mischief makers for the Philadelphia Daily News; and Andrew McKie, the curmudgeonly cowboy-hat-sporting obit writer for London's Daily Telegraph.

Hugh Massingberd, the irreverent reporter Johnson describes as the father of the obituary at the Daily Telegraph, once wrote in a mock obit of himself that ''he has an appetite of such magnitude that friends counted him three men at their table." He helps crack the code of euphemism popular in some publications. Tireless raconteur? Read crashing bore. Affable and hospitable at every hour? Chronic alcoholic. Fun-loving and flirtatious? Nymphomaniac.

The book is slow going in the early pages when Johnson expounds on her theory that good obits come in twos: two movie stars, two organized-crime figures, etc. Any discerning obit reader knows they come in threes. She writes with wit, though she sometimes lets her enthusiasm carry her away. Who else would describe the memorial service for playwright Arthur Miller as ''the ultimate theatrical experience"? But she does an able job of ferreting out lively obits and the eccentric reporters who succeed in shrinking the world into a neighborhood on deadline.