She found herself standing in the cold, dark alley next to a stranger’s blood. Her feet were going numb and she was hungry. She looked down at the blood of a dead man her own age. This was exactly what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Exactly.
Field of Blood begins as a straight-up crime novel, with an almost clinical description of the last hours of an innocent victim. The first chapter is hard to read, and very nearly put me off the rest of the book. However, I had read Mina’s previous novel (the breathtakingly excellent Deception), and had reason to think this book would be worth the effort, even if it continued to be as cold and dark as the beginning.
It does not. Rapidly, the focus of the narrative shifts away from the crime and its victim and onto Paddy Meehan, and eighteen-year old woman trying to do the impossible. Paddy is instantly likeable, and it’s easy to root for her success throughout. It’s 1981, and Paddy is part of the insular Irish Catholic community of Glasgow, where the tension between Republicans and Orangemen is palpable. Her upbringing should have prepared Paddy to spend her life contentedly as a wife and mother, a devout part of her religious community, adhering to the beliefs passed on to her. The divisions of class, gender, religion and ethnicity should have kept her neatly behind an invisible fence, and quiet about it, too.
Mina deftly uses realistic details of daily life to weave a rich background, and her fictional Paddy Meehan stands out against it. Part of this background is the story of the real Paddy Meehan, a man who lived a life of professional petty crime, who may or may not have gotten caught up in the outer edges of the Cold War in the early 1960’s, and who spent seven years in solitary confinement for a murder he didn’t commit. In real life, as in the novel, it was the work of an investigative journalist (Ludovic Kennedy, if you want to look him up) that led to Meehan being pardoned and released. It was this event that led the fictional Patricia Meehan to decide to become a journalist herself. Journalists, Paddy believes, are the only people who can set things straight, who can bring justice to those who otherwise would never be heard.
Which leads to the two things that stuck with Paddy from her upbringing: The downtrodden need protecting from abuse of power, and don’t be a Judas.
Paddy has begun her career in journalism where she could: she gets a job as a copyboy (yes, I said copyboy) at a Glasgow newspaper. She’s one of four women on the staff. Two are receptionists, and one is a journalist, writing stories that the editors consider suitable for a woman but herself itching for more. The vicious murder of a small child, and the arrest of two other children for the doing of it, shatter the status quo in the way only murder can.
The child’s murder occurs squarely in the context of Paddy’s Glasgow, on territory she knows. Worse for her, one of the boys arrested is her fiance’s cousin, and that makes him family. Even if he wasn’t, he would still be one of her own – another poor, Irish kid easy made into one of “Them” by the majority population. Newspapers, like the police, are part of the power structure, and even though this is the story that could open every door she ever dreamed of, Paddy knows she can’t tell it. That would make her a Judas in the eyes of her community, and she can’t be a Judas.
Paddy learns on her first turn at night rounds (riding through Glasgow with a veteran reporter named McVie in search of stories) that the police are missing some significant details of the crime. It’s also on this night that she has her calling confirmed as she stands next to the blood of a teenaged gang member who fell to his death trying to escape out of a window. They also learn of two suicides to be covered. The first is a young girl who failed some significant exams. McVie passes this by for the second: a young man who hung himself on a lamppost outside his girlfriend’s home. He makes this choice when he hears their names – the dead boy was named McIntyre, his girlfriend Taylor. This suicide isn’t just teenage angst over love gone wrong, it’s a case in point of bigotry, and Paddy is happy the next day to see that McVie has given it a good shape as a story, made it “a death with meaning.”
Who gets to tell the story? This is a major theme of the novel. Perspective and detail matter, as does the voice that gets to be heard. In the ordinary course of things, Paddy’s voice would never be heard. She is everything the dominant culture devalues, and has a narrowly proscribed space inside her own culture. Paddy, though, makes a choice.
Not yet having made the transition in her thinking from girl to reporter, Paddy chooses to confide her dilemma to the female reporter on the newspaper’s staff, who has no such scruple herself, and takes what Paddy tells her to print. On the day of publication, Paddy goes home to find she’s being shunned, a harsh and formal exclusion by her family and friends. No one speaks to her, she has to eat alone, and when she enters a room whoever is in it leaves. The intent is to shame her back into submission to the community rule. This isn’t what happens.
The isolation gives Paddy the space she needs to move about into new territory, take some risks, and grow up toward the woman she wants to be. She begins to make her own inquiries about the murder case, to visit the scenes of the murder and the kidnap, and becomes convinced that there is more to the case than the police have seen. In the course of her investigation, she is joined by a young man who is a reporter for the same paper. Valentine’s Day is the Saturday when her shunning is to end, but Paddy spends it not celebrating with her family or on a date with her fiancé, but out investigating. She returns late at night, disheveled and bleeding from a wounded knee. Rather than tell them truth, Paddy says she’s been at a friend’s house.
“Which friend? We phoned everyone.”
“It’s someone you don’t know.”
The boys looked nervously at each other. Mary Ann took a deep shuddering breath and bit her hand. The family knew everyone. They were everyone.
Without realizing it as it happened, Paddy has moved herself beyond the confines of her place of origin. She knows she is in two kinds of danger: falling victim to the killer, and failing to make it all the way out of one closed society into another. In between is no man’s land, a kind of walking death, belonging nowhere. To survive, Paddy must not only escape, she must make herself into the person who gets to tell the story, she has to become an accepted part of a new cultural group.
Now, I’m not going to tell you what happens. I will say that it seems evident that the book was originally envisioned by Mina as another examination of the tight intersection between psychology, crime and the law, focused more on the murder itself and what, in her ackowledgements, she calls the “construction of child offenders.” The book as it is now is clearly aimed at the big screen, complete with a politically acceptable (i.e., Male) deus ex machina. Mina’s previous novel, Deception, was fresh voice with stunning talent. In Field of Blood we have good writing and a good story with snappy banter and characters who are appropriately likeable or despicable, but conventionally told, and whatever freshness that’s left is subtle enough to have made it past the suits in marketing. Where Deception was a fine example of genre fiction taken to the level of literature, Field of Blood is a good crime novel/coming of age story. You see the same sort of loss of voice between Deja Dead and Death du Jour by Kathy Reichs. It doesn’t mean they’re bad books, quite the contrary, just that the sense of them being the genuine voice of the author is gone, and replaced by the sense of the content being tailored to the dictates of the publishing house, itself both driven by and driving the tastes of the reading public.
That said, read the book. It’s worth cover price, and the time.
