On the surface, one might think that Denise Mina’s crime fiction protagonist is another in a line of hoary clichés that wander the fictional landscape. After all, 21-year-old Paddy Meehan is an investigative journalist, one of the ultimate clichés. But Paddy is also a woman who fights a weight problem and shares a Glasgow flat with her father, mother and three siblings.
Paddy is part of the working-class Scots in the Margaret Thatcher era of Great Britain, when, we’re told, “one in three adults were unemployed in many parts of the city.” So Paddy has become the sole bread winner for her family. Which explains why, when she accompanies two policeman on a domestic disturbance call in Bearsden, a well-to-do section of town, Paddy unflinchingly accepts a blood-stained 50-pound note that the suspect shoves into her hand when she questions the wisdom of letting things be. After all, as Billy, a police officer whom she has gotten to know during her days reporting for the Scottish Daily News, tells her, “They not like us, rich folks.”
Although Paddy writes up the story for her paper, the woman, a political activist and lawyer named Vhari Burnett, turns up dead the next day. Paddy’s conscience kicks in and she reports the bribe to her editor and opens up an investigation. It isn’t long before Paddy connects a recent suicide to the murder of Burnett. And her investigative trail leads Paddy to Burnett’s drug-addled sister, Kate, who is now on the run from Burnett’s killer.
While the plot of Mina’s latest is simple and sweet, the characters, like Paddy’s friend Billy, or Paddy herself, are never so. Mina’s narrative alternates between Paddy’s point of view and that of Kate as she is on the run. Along with a matter-of-fact, behind-the-scenes look at investigative reporting, Mina’s narrative lends an earthy, down-
and-dirty sense of reality to the suburban crime (“Field of Blood,” Paddy’s first fictional outing, dealt with the murder of one child by two others). And the moral uncertainty that Mina had painted into the character of Paddy Meehan makes her more human and much more interesting than the run-of-the-mill protagonists who never seem to think twice in an ethically compromising situation.
“The Dead Hour” is an intense and entertaining work of crime fiction that feels so real it’ll leave dirt underneath the reader’s fingernails. And Paddy Meehan is a brilliant auctorial concoction. One can only hope that Mina (“Garnethill,” “Deception”) will revisit her life more often in the future.
Dorman T. Shindler is a freelancer from Missouri.
