Times reporter Scott Martelle, currently assigned to the Barbara Boxer-Bill Jones Senate race, will move over to the Style desk after the election to cover the L.A. literary beat. The memo:

To: The Staff
From: Richard Nordwind, Style Editor
         Elena Howe, Deputy Style Editor

Friends,

The Style department is pleased to announce that Scott Martelle will be joining our staff, where he will take on the important literary L.A. beat, covering local and national book news and trends. As you all know, Scott brings a wealth of experience, a talent for storytelling and a flair for writing to this new assignment.

Hired in 1997 for the Orange County edition, he worked as a general assignment reporter. He has gone on to cover post-war life in Kosovo, the California recall election, this year's Democratic primaries and, currently, the U.S. Senate race in California. Along the way he's profiled such authors as Bret Easton Ellis and Andrea Barrett, written features on a wide variety of subjects, including forgotten victims of the blacklist and the reaction to the drawn-out Bush-Gore election battle. These stories have appeared on A-1, in Calendar, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine and other sections.

Before joining The Times, he was a feature writer at the Detroit News. He also has worked at the Rochester, N.Y., Times-Union. Scott, who will report to Elena Howe, joins the department following the November election.

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