`Deadline’ will challenge reporters, entertain others

DEADLINE, by Gerry Boyle, North Country Press, 306 pages, $17.95.

A warning to newpaper reporters in Maine, especially those of you who write for weeklies: If you don’t like taking your work home with you, don’t read Gerry Boyle’s first book, “Deadline.”

It’s too realistic. Pick it up and you’ll probably feel compelled to cover a news story, any story.

The rest of you readers who think that a tale about a big-city reporter working at a Maine weekly who gets wrapped up in a nasty, local murder might make a good read will be pleased with this book.

Boyle, a longtime reporter and editor in this state, skillfully depicts the darker side of mill town life; all the boredom, monotony, and craving for excitment that run the emotions of local residents, the sleazy underpinnings that nobody wants to acknowledge, and the inherent fear that operates in a place dependent on a single industry and run by a self-important police chief.

A thoughtful reader probably could name any number of towns in Maine that fit the description, but the locale in Boyle’s book is the fictional muncipality of Androscoggin, some place south and west of Bangor, a town built by a paper company called St. Amand Paper — SAP for short. This is no picturesque, tourist-filled little town along the coast, but instead a gloomy, isolated place, the kind of town that likes to keep its business to itself.

Dumped by choice in this burg is Jack McMorrow, a former New York Times reporter who has hidden out in the obscurity of the Androscoggin Review after realizing that his big-time newspaper career had slipped a few rungs. McMorrow is depicted in a first-person narrative as cynical tough guy trying to keep from falling over the edge into apathy.

While forced to cover the bean suppers and junior high science fairs that weekly reporters in Maine know only too well, the beer-swilling McMorrow still knows a news story when he smells one, even through the paper-mill stink that fills the air in Androscoggin. And he’s not afraid to pursue a good news story even to its dangerous end.

When a free-lance photographer for the paper is found drowned in an icy canal, McMorrow suddenly finds himself immersed in a mystery that leads to his being beaten and kidnapped by town punks, to his Portland girlfriend being stalked, and to a near-fatal resolution of the murder.

This is a fast-paced, well-written novel, and Boyle has created a world which the reader will find highly believable, and maybe even uncomfortably familiar. I especially enjoyed the author’s depiction of McMorrow’s mandatory visit to an elementary school to explain newspapering to the kiddies. It brought back memories of my own command performances before school-age inquisitors.

It was only after I finished the book that I questioned whether any murder in this state would end up as Boyle has imagined it would, but while I was reading “Deadline,” I believed every word. That’s the sign of good writing. But I also have to wonder why all the female characters in this mystery were stereotypically relegated to being either sexy, stupid or insane.

But these aren’t major criticisms. “Deadline” is a good book that any reporter aspiring to be a novelist would be proud to have written.

Jeanne Curran is a NEWS staff writer.