Like most newspaper professionals these days, Liam
Mulligan, a fictional investigative reporter at The Providence Dispatch, fears the future.
The paper’s longtime-owners, a group of wealthy Rhode
Island families who have controlled the Dispatch
since the Civil War, always ran the place as a public service. For decades,
they held out against the nationwide trend of local owners selling out to
chains, and Mulligan has been grateful for that. But now, after too many years
of declining circulation and advertising, the owners have reluctantly put the
paper on the market. And the only suitor is a bottom-feeding media conglomerate
that cares about nothing but the bottom line.
Mulligan is a wisecracking tough guy. Not much
phases him. But he shudders when he thinks about what’s coming. For him,
investigative reporting has always been a calling—like the priesthood but
without the sex. But he’s in his forties now, and he knows his days as a
newspaperman are numbered. He doubts he could ever be any good at anything
else.
For where he sits, other metropolitan newspapers
aren’t much of an option. Nearly all of them, hemorrhaging readers and revenue,
have become mere shells of the vital institutions they once were. And few of
them are hiring. They are laying people off.
Television news and online news websites don’t look
like much of an option either. Network television news departments, never all
that great to begin with, have shriveled into irrelevance. Twenty-four-hour
cable news channels spew endless loops of trivial celebrity gossip, provide
soap boxes for blowhards, and poison the public discourse with partisan
distortions and misinformation. And the handful of internet news websites
striving to be more than propaganda organs for the left and right lack the
revenue streams required to cover the news with breadth and depth.
Mulligan, the protagonist of my Edgar Award-winning
series of hardboiled crime novels, sees nothing on the horizon to replace
newspapers as honest brokers of information. He’s appalled at how much damage
their demise is doing to the American democracy.
If I were younger, I’d be in the same fix Mulligan
is in. In recent years, I grew weary of being part of a rear-guard action and
dispirited over the inevitability of the journalism’s decline. But I fought the
good fight. The last major project I oversaw as a senior Associated Press
editor, an investigative series about the exploitation of child gold miners in
Africa, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. But five years ago, when the AP
offered an early retirement package—part of its own retrenchment in the face of
economic pressures—I decided it was time for a second act.
I’m a full-time novelist now, and the third novel in
my Mulligan crime series, Providence Rag,
will be published in hardcover and e-book editions on March 11. The book has already received starred reviews
in Publishers Weekly and Booklist.
In each Mulligan novel, my protagonist shows his
grit by investigating crime and corruption in the state of his birth. In Rogue Island, he investigates an arson
spree that is destroying the working class Providence, R.I., neighborhood where
he was raised. In Cliff Walk, he
investigates political corruption that has allowed the state’s rampant sex
trade to thrive. And in Providence Rag,
he and the entire state struggle with the ethical dilemma of what to do about a
psychopath who is being held in prison on phony charges because he is too
dangerous to be set loose.
I want my novels to be enjoyed as suspenseful entertainment—but
they are also about something more. It is my hope that as readers follow the
skill and dedication with which Mulligan pursues the truth under increasingly
difficult circumstances, they will gain a greater appreciation for what all of
us are losing as newspapers fade into history.
Bruce DeSilva ©2014
Bruce
DeSilva grew up in a tiny Massachusetts mill town where the mill closed when he
was ten. He had an austere childhood bereft of iPods, X-Boxes, and all the
other cool stuff that hadn’t been invented yet. I this parochial little town,
metaphors and alliteration were also in short supply. Nevertheless, his crime
fiction has won the Edgar and Macavity Awards; has been listed as a finalist
for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry Awards; and has been published in ten
foreign languages. His short stories have appeared in Akashic Press's
award-winning noir anthologies. He has reviewed books for The New York Times
Sunday Book Review and Publishers Weekly, and his reviews for The Associated
Press have appeared in hundreds of other publications. Previously, he was a
journalist for forty years, most recently as writing coach world-wide for AP,
editing stories that won nearly every major journalism prize including the
Pulitzer. He and his wife, the poet Patricia Smith, live in New Jersey with two
enormous dogs named Brady and Rondo.
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