The Dead Beat, by Marilyn Johnson

Once, indeed, obituaries were a private vice. Newspaper readers of a certain age savoured their cryptic codes and opaque idiom behind closed doors, occasionally cutting out an old friend and pressing him (it was usually him) between the leaves of a book. Obituaries passed as the top people's samizdat: anonymous, highbrow, low-circulation. But now look what's happened.

Every newspaper in the Anglophone world is competing to do them. The Americans are shortly producing a glossy magazine, Obit. There are weekly radio programmes, daily blogs, internet discussion groups, websites with titles like Dead People Server. Plays and novels are written about them; PhD students depose on them; there is even an artist who sells exhibitions of paintings of them. And Marilyn Johnson, a friendly, plausible and apparently intelligent journalist, has sat down and written a maniac's guide to them.

The Dead Beat seeks to deconstruct the obituary, to name its elements, to pinpoint its peculiar allure. Johnson exhaustively interviews editors, writers and fellow fanatics. She attends a "Great Obituary Writers' International Conference" in Las Vegas, the climax of which is the death (one couldn't make this up) of Ronald Reagan. She ruminates on the "Portraits of Grief" after 11 September 2001 with Chuck Strum, the obits wallah of The New York Times. She is bewitched by Jim Nicholson, Philadelphia's king of "Ordinary Joe" obituaries, who could be an original for Carl Hiaasen's savvy Jack Tagger in Basket Case.

She makes her first visit to England to visit the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse": the principal London newspapers whose obituaries she worships this side of idolatry. She apologises for her ghoulishness but (girlishly) makes more death jokes than would a ward of medical students. She just can't help herself.

For her the pleasures of obituaries "are obviously perverse". Her book is a wacky, weird, rollicking read and she is particularly kind about The Independent. I can't help but feel at the end, however, a lurking disappointment.

When The Independent was founded in 1986, signing obituaries on principle, going big with pictures, we set out to demystify the obituary, to normalise it, to kill cultishness, to stifle the crossword language of innuendo. We sought to create a page that was serious, entertaining, well-written, accountable, part of the journalistic mainstream - to bring new (and younger) readers to what is, after all, a branch of biography rather than the funeral business.

Yet here, 20 years on, we still are, giggling in the graveyard. The American edition of The Dead Beat (though not the English) features photographs of obituarists posing as though on the set of The Loved One. And one of Marilyn Johnson's best web friends (another estimable fan of The Independent) runs a "Deadpool" where you can bet on who will die in 2007. The Pope, anyone? Where did we go wrong? I wonder what Jessica Mitford would say. She wrote for us, but she's dead now herself (read Anne Chisholm's fine obituary, 25 July 1996) and I can't ask.

James Fergusson is obituaries editor of 'The Independent'