Janet Malcolm’s work was a marvel, both chilling and provocative

One fall night in 1992, I was slumped at the cash register of an East Village bookstore, reading “The Journalist and the Murderer,” a chronicle of seduction and betrayal by Janet Malcolm, the peerless journalist who died Wednesday.

The book, wisely shorn of a subtitle, has a distinctive cover — pale yellow with block letters. One of the shop’s patrons as…