The Dead Hour by Denise Mina (A Paddy Meehan mystery)

During one scene in Denise Mina’s The Dead Hour, the series protagonist Paddy Meehan struggles to climb a tall gate in order to inspect a property possibly involved in a murder. Paddy, an overweight, insecure but determined Scottish Daily News crime reporter, eventually scales the door, but not before gracelessly falling into the mud and tearing her stockings.

The stockings are more than just an aesthetic inconvenience; Paddy supports her parents and one sister on her meager reporter’s salary and every penny counts, so it's not simply a matter of buying a new pair. Not to mention that it’s terribly cold in Scotland and wool stockings help. Still, frustrated but undaunted, Paddy nevertheless makes her way to the house to snoop around.

It’s the kind of scene Denise Mina handles exceptionally well. Her deft touch allows the protagonist to be brave without being invulnerable, intelligent but still prone to making utterly human poor decisions, and to remain themselves even while trudging through days punctuated by the small indignities that accompany being broke and on a lower social tier. 

I’ve whined before about heroines who come dangerously close to becoming bland, boring Mary Sues. Of course this woman detective has studied that obscure dialect of a lesser-known language, and of course they have impeccable fashion sense and yes, they’re good at Math and have a perfect sense of direction and handle all social morasses with diplomacy and aplomb. Yawn (and eye roll if they're pretty, too). Happily, Paddy Meehan will never run the risk of being that boring.

Thus this third installment of the Paddy Meehan series which begins, appropriately enough, when Paddy inadvertently accepts a bribe at the scene of a domestic violence incident that becomes a brutal murder. In all fairness, the much-needed, blood-stained money is thrust into Paddy’s hands by the man who answers the door and before she can react the door is slammed in her face.

Paddy’s internal vacillations about whether to keep the money or turn it in to the police as evidence, and the consequences of that decision for her both personally and professionally, turn a compelling thriller and mystery into something more literary and rich.

A counternarrative of an addict, from a completely different point of view, adds an undercurrent of suspense that keeps the reader turning pages. Mina’s ability to completely change narrative voice, syntax, perspective and style are comparable to Tana French.

Although I’m not overly familiar with Scotland’s recession during the 1980s, the dreary ghosts of empty factories and the lingering wounds suffered by the workers' families are an ever-present, sinister whisper throughout the story. Yet the reader is never bludgeoned over the head with it, either.

But all that is signature Mina, of course. One is forced to confront the totally unvarnished and only loosely fictionalized realities of poverty, sex trafficking, mental health care, (or the lack thereof) and much more in all of Mina’s novels. (Brace yourself when reading her phenomenal and gripping Garnett Hill  trilogy.) But the reader is never being proselytized, either. Reality simply is what it is, and there’s little use complaining about it.

Don't let that deter you from giving Mina a shot, however, even if that sounds a bit dark. Her books have intelligent, complex characters and her heroines all have a wicked, laugh-out-loud sense of humor that helps lighten the shadows of the brutal, objective truths.

In short, The Dead Hour is a pretty enjoyable installment in the series, although I concede a character development cliff hanger at the end left me frustrated and annoyed. In keeping with my cardinal rule for this blog, I won’t give spoilers, but suffice it so say I was left thinking, “Oh great, not another one!”

As a final note, allow me to indulge in a personal aside. There is a line in this book in which a new editor from London replaces the bedraggled, grizzled old-school editor. That dismissal is soon followed by the exit of several of the other reporters of a very old generation from a time during which writing a story from a bar nearby while drinking was not only the norm but damn near expected.

The presses leave the building. The sales staff and editors all move into cubicles on the floor beneath, exiled from the comfortably broken-in newsroom with its scarred tables, clanging typewriters and assorted detritus.

The line observes that now the newspaper could just as well be selling insurance, and no one would be able to tell the difference.

It reminded me, sharply, of when the small press that was housed adjacent to my first paper, The Pahrump Valley Times, was shut down so the paper could be printed in Las Vegas, about 45 minutes away.

Before then, I would sometimes go into the press building and chat with the press guys or just watch the presses whir. More than anything I loved to breathe in the sharp, slightly acidic smell of ink and be wrapped in the thudding rumble of events being churned onto giant rolls of paper. It felt like being right inside the world’s heartbeat.

I often lingered in the press room of my last paper, The Casa Grande Dispatch, too, for the basically the same reason. Both papers had wonderfully broken-in newsroom where reporters filed stories alongside wavering stacks of the newspapers next to their desks and the editor (or in the Dispatch’s case, the publisher) had the only real office. I suppose, in a way, they were the transition between Paddy’s old-school newsroom and today’s slick, cubicle-mazed offices.

At any rate, though I don’t think I’d want a return to the boorish, chauvinist, functioning-alcoholic newsrooms of the past (we had them here in America, too), I deeply appreciated Mina’s nod to the death of a certain era.