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Santa Cruz Sentinel story on Paul and Deadlines
Photographs from the launch of DEADLINES at Book Passage in Corte Madera.
Interview in The San Francisco Chronicle's "96 Hour" section.
Kayak surfers weigh in on "Deadlines"
Journalism can be murder in 'Deadlines'
By Pete Carey
pcarey@mercurynews.com
02/04/2010
Paul McHugh's "Deadlines" is an entertaining tale that concisely captures life in a big-city newsroom. In fact, this amusing novel is more than a murder mystery. It's a portrait of metropolitan journalism amid its time of troubles.
"By 2007, America's newspapers already had started to 'twirl 'round the gurgler' " McHugh's narrator reports, and the San Francisco Post-Dispatch is no exception.
The Post-Dispatch — McHugh's fictional No. 2 San Francisco paper — recently has been taken over by investors based in Denver.
A new editor has arrived with orders to slash costs and cut staff, and the venerable Colm MacCay, a heavy-drinking middle-aged journalist, has just stepped in it big time with an over-the-top column that has greatly displeased his new boss. Meanwhile, a young adventurer, Sebastian Palmer, has improbably landed a job at the paper. But his dreams of jumping on a big investigative story have crashed with his first assignment as a gofer to the paper's semi-corrupt travel editor.
Still, while newspapers shrink, in fiction and real life, good journalism somehow gets done. Palmer's prospects pick up with a random phone call from an elderly gadfly who says she's been "getting threats" related to her opposition to a big development proposed for a pristine stretch of California coastline.
The tip launches the young reporter, and eventually the aging columnist, on a risky investigation.
McHugh could be one of his own characters — 22 years as an outdoors feature writer at the Chronicle, during which he memorably sea kayaked from the Oregon border to San Francisco. This is his second novel, written after he took a buyout in 2007. McHugh lives in Redwood City and is married to Dawn Garcia, a former Mercury News editor.
October 8, 2009“Every reporter worth his or her notepad is a sleuth at heart. Paul McHugh brings this truth to life with crackling suspense and a true, ink-stained veteran's eye for the newsroom.”
Click to read how Paul McHugh won an endorsement from Dan Rather for his novel.
"Paul McHugh's new "novel of murder, conspiracy, and the media" is "Dead Lines," which is set in San Francisco and environs, especially those nestled against the Pacific Ocean. Louis', which overlooks the old Sutro Baths, is mentioned; also Duarte's, down the road a spell in Pescadero.
"And also Tu Lan, just a block away from The Chronicle. McHugh worked here for 22 years, and the book, in his words, is not only a murder story but also a "celebration of what a newsroom is like when it's running at full steam." He'll be at Book Passage in Corte Madera on February 13.”
“The themes of Paul McHugh’s companionable, rock-solid and soul-satisfying mystery ‘Deadlines’ could not be more modern and relevant. But it is his wonderful character, the has-been alcoholic newspaper columnist Colm MacCay, who will stay with you, and who channels McHugh’s considerable writing talent into a voice that surprises and delights with all the narrative panache of the classic Irish storyteller. ‘Deadlines’ is a superior story, not to be missed.”
NY Times best-selling author
"With Deadlines, Paul McHugh nails the desperation of new-millennium newsrooms and the quirky crusaders of the Bay Area. He also has a lot of fun with the unlikely culprits in this land-and-money murder mystery. As you learn from very first page, Deadlines is not a ‘who’ done it but a ‘why and how will our heroes find out’ done it. The fact that those heroes are journalists, and that McHugh’s prose uses humor to great effect, are welcome twists indeed.”
—Farai Chideya
Author
"Kiss the Sky" and "The Color of Our Future"
“People who love San Francisco and appreciate a good mystery will find Paul McHugh’s ‘Deadlines’ a page-turner with unforgettable characters and a realistic view of crime. Mchugh creates an eccentric figure who epitomizes an endangered species - a reporter who can connect the dots. My wife Beverly and I couldn’t put it down.”
Sheriff Mike Hennessey
City and County of San Francisco
"A cheerful romp through quite serious territory.”
“I love Colm MacCay, the unlikely hard-drinking protagonist as much as I do David Skibbins' bi-polar, tarot-card reading Warren Ritter. A big plus, too; revisiting San Francisco, Half Moon Bay and points south, places I know so well. But best of all is the story itself. I was riveted!"