Deadline
Authors: Gerry Boyle
Praise for
Deadline
“The rhythms of the weekly newspaper work a wonderful counterpoint to the building tension of McMorrow's investigation, and the writing is sharp and evocative without being showy.”
âWashington Post Book World
“A crackerjack debut ⦠a genuinely surprising ending.”
âBoston Sunday Globe
“Boyle deftly transplants a big-city-noir atmosphere to the western Maine mill town of Androscoggin realistic characterizations, diverting subplots, and evocative descriptions of rural Maine a powerful, scary denouement. A fine debut ⦠One hopes to see more of McMorrow.”
âPublishers Weekly
“Boyle lets his suspense build to an excruciating point.”
âLibrary Journal
“A great plot, even greater writing. This guy is good.”
âJanwillem van de Wetering, author of
Outsider in Amsterdam
“I can't believe
Deadline
is Gerry Boyle's first novel ⦠Terrific.”
âSusan Kenney, author of
One Fell Sloop
and
Graves in Academe
“Part detective, part humorist, part novelist, [Boyle] shows us the real lives of real Mainers with wit, insight, and love.”
âJames Finney Boylan, author of
Constellations
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DEADLINE
First Islandport edition / November 2014
Printing History
North Country Press edition published 1993 Berkeley Prime Crime edition / March 1995
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 1993 by Gerry Boyle
ISBN: 978-1-939017-13-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014942414
Islandport Press
P.O. Box 10
Yarmouth, Maine 04096
Publisher: Dean Lunt
Cover Design: Tom Morgan, Blue Design
Interior Book Design: Teresa Lagrange, Islandport Press
Cover image courtesy of © Tim Martin
Printed in the USA
For my father and for my mother and for Vic, who is always there.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
I
n 1979 I returned to Maine after a stint in New York City, where I had tried my hand at the business of book publishing. For a few weeks I'd sat in a windowless room high in a Midtown skyscraper and read other people's book manuscripts. I was supposed to decide whether they were worth publishing. I performed my task halfheartedly. I realized I didn't care about other people's books. I wanted to write my own.
So by mutual agreement with my employer, I ended my book-publishing career and headed north. Back in Maine, home of my alma mater, Colby College, I scoured the job ads and came across one posted by a weekly newspaper in the western part of the state. The
Rumford Falls Times
wanted a reporter. I'd never been one, but I could read and write, and I liked to talk to people. I drove over to Rumford, which I'd never seen but knew as a paper-mill town on the Androscoggin River. As the car crested the rise on the road into town from the south, I was awestruck.
At the center of the three-street downtown, white clouds of steam rose from towering stacks. Logs were piled nearby, the jumble of tree trunks looking like toothpicks in the distance. Trucks loaded with pulp logs idled in the wood yard, waiting to be unloaded. Gigantic loaders pivoted. Steam billowed high into the sky like a nuclear bomb had detonated. The town, built on an island in the river, was sidled up to the mill, the community clearly existing for one purpose: to make paper.
It was marvelous. Better yet, I was hired. I covered town government, general news, even a little sports. And, more importantly, the police blotter. The seed for this novel,
Deadline
, was planted.
Very early into my six months at the
Rumford Falls Times
, I concluded that the town was shrouded by more than steam clouds from the mill. The townspeople were welcoming and helpful, but I felt there was a deeper layer to the place that I could never quite grasp. People had histories that went back years and generations. These backstoriesâsome illustrious, some dark and grimâwere rarely talked about, especially with a newcomer. And the relative isolation of the town and region could, on a bad day, turn it claustrophobic. The result was a place that was intimate but vaguely threatening, beautiful but sometimes scary.
And wonderful fodder for a mystery novel.
I used it as the basis of the fictional town of Androscoggin, and placed it securely in the rugged landscape of western Maine. I peopled it with small-town characters, including the newspaper editor. His name was Jack McMorrow. He had been dispatched by the
New York Times
to write about a far-flung place on the edge of the western Maine mountains. He was so intrigued he stayed on. And, like me, he soon realized that there was much more to this Maine mill town than showed on the surface. In McMorrow's case, the unknown threatened to be his undoing.
After I'd left the weekly newspaper to take a job at the daily
Morning Sentinel
in Waterville, I sent my manuscript to a half-dozen literary agents and publishers, three of each. I got six rejections, mostly positive. There is much to like in your novel, and if you change this, rewrite that ⦠I was happy with
Deadline
the way it was, so I ignored their advice and instead printed out one more copy on my dot-matrix printer and sent it to a small publisher called North Country Press in Belfast, Maine. The proprietors and sole employees
of the press, Bill and Linn Johnson, said they liked it very much; not only that, they wanted to publish it, and pay me for the privilege.
I remember hanging up the phone and sitting in stunned, dumb-grin silence while the newsroom clattered all around me. I felt like screaming, dancing, sprinting around the room. I didn't do any of that, but I did sign the contract and send it back before they could change their minds. They didn't, and
Deadline
was published in November 1993. It received strong reviews in the
New York Times
,
Washington Post
, and beyond. I was amazed that the wider world was so eager to read the real-life crime story I'd made up, set in small-town Maine.
Deadline
, which I'd started writing on a portable Smith Corona electric typewriter, turned out to be the start of the Jack McMorrow series, including the tenth novel,
Once Burned
, to be published in May 2015. I hope you enjoy meeting McMorrow and, like me, are fascinated by this wild part of Maine, which remains to this day a mysterious, magical, and sometimes dangerous place.
Gerry Boyle
October 2014
1
T
hey laid Arthur on a green canvas tarp, so close to the crowd that a few people tried to back away but couldn't because the people at the rear were still pushing forward to see. Nobody could move so we just had to stand there in the cold night and stare down at Arthur and his head that was at a funny angle and his wet hair that was starting to freeze to his forehead and his hands that were gray-blue with darker gray fingernails. We all stood there with our hands in our pockets and nobody said anything except an old guy from mill security who was in uniform but looked like he'd spent a few hours drinking at the Legion.
“Eh, Christ,” he said, pronouncing it the French way,
Crist
.
We all stood there and wished something would happen but there was some screw-up with the hearse being blocked by a fireman's pickup so we had to wait, like people gathered around somebody who had collapsed in the street. There was nothing you could say so we stared dumbly at Arthurâat his glasses that were still on his face but perched crooked, at the bare patch of hairy white ankle that showed because his socks had fallen down.
He really didn't look bad, considering.
“Come on, move it back,” somebody said behind me, and I turned to see firemen in boots and raincoats with
ANDROSCOGGIN FD
stenciled on the backs. They were pushing a stretcher through the crowd and behind them was Steve Theriault from the funeral home, bald and chubby and carrying a light green sheet. The four of them pushed through and raised the stretcher to waist height, then stood eyeing Arthur and huffing steamy breath into the night air. Two of the firemen hunched over and picked Arthur up by the legs and the other two, including Theriault, got him by the armpits. One of them grunted.
I guess that's why they call it dead weight.
After they got him up and on, they straightened Arthur on the stretcher and put the sheet over his face, just like on television. His feet still stuck out, also just like on television, but they didn't cover them. They just plowed back into the crowd, which parted and then followed as if the whole thing were some strange public funeral procession, held under the glare of the lights.
I brought up the rear, scanning the crowd as it dissolved among the cars and pickups like fans leaving a football game.
“Come on,” I said. “Where's a cop when you need one?”