The Dead Hour: Denise Mina

The Dead Hour is the second book to feature Paddy Meehan, a young reporter in Glasgow. Three years after the events in Field of Blood, she is still on the night shift and stuck following police calls and hoping for a story big enough to promote her. A call to a domestic dispute in a wealthy neighborhood doesn’t seem like much until the next morning, when the woman involved is found murdered.

Mina’s story is well crafted and her plot is fairly tight. Most of her characters have a clear and distinctive voice. They are easy to picture in your mind:

“The paper’s editor, Farquarson, had big hair. His pomade had worn off during a long day of head holding and his hair had risen like warm white dough.”

She also weaves some very beautiful and evocative passages throughout the story:

“They were cruising along empty roads to the south bank of the Clyde where a body had been seen floating in the fast-moving water. A cold mist began to descend on the midnight city, a stagnant exhalation that clung to the tops of passing cars. Yellow streetlights jostled hard against the thickening dark.”

But for me the book has several problems; there were more than a few unfamiliar Scottish words and phrases which forced me to reread passages to decipher the meaning. For instance: Paddy “swithered over the promise of porridge.” but it took more than one read of the passage to understand she was agitated and worried about her weight. While unfamiliar words and phrases are fairly common in European fiction, they do sometimes distract from the story.

I was also disappointed in how sparingly the city is described; the detail she uses with characters is missing from her descriptions of the places Paddy frequents. I get no sense of the “feel” of the city and it could almost be anywhere with buildings and a river.

The story itself is set in 1984, where in Glasgow, attitudes toward women seem to parallel those held in the United States in the forties and fifties. In particular, Paddy’s newspaper office is unlike anywhere I have worked. Even in the 1980’s women were common, not only in the newsroom but also as editorial staff. Yet at The Scottish Daily News women are almost nonexistent. It was also difficult to reconcile the attitudes and behavior of her fellow journalists with those I know and have observed myself. I haven’t been at a newspaper where rude comments such as Paddy being told to ‘piss off’ and then later called a ‘cow’, or where cursing from more than one person with words like ‘fucking’ would be tolerated. Remarks like “at least bend over and give us somewhere to put our pens” would be highly inappropriate and possibly grounds for a lawsuit.

But the biggest problem I have with this book is the author’s attitude. Not only does she give the impression that it is okay to break the law if you are poor and need the money, but she seems to indicate that poor people will and do break the law as a matter of course, simply because they are poor. I found this attitude extremely insulting and it was difficult for me to ignore it and focus on the actual story.

Reading taste is very personal and subjective. If you are a fan of Mina then I would recommend the book. You know her style and as a whole it is a good story. If you aren’t a fan, you might want to skip it or at least pick up the paperback edition.

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Hardcover: 341 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company July 2006 (Hachette Book Group)
ISBN: 0-316-73594-9
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