The Stringer

Abstract

“What the hell kind of reporter are you?”1 “Stringer, they call it. Paid by the story.”2 Jack McMorrow suffers. He suffers insults and beatings. And he suffers the truth. The New York Times metro reporter cum backwoods Carl Bernstein—as in the Pulitzer-winning Watergate reporter—can’t leave well enough alone.3 McMorrow’s driven. Driven to drink. And driven by the ethical journalist’s inability to abide a story that stinks. Part working-class hero, part working-class stiff, the protagonist of Gerry Boyle’s eight-novel Jack McMorrow Mystery series embodies the archetypal ethical reporter, as defined by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). For all his foibles and occasional ethical lapses, McMorrow seeks truth and reports it, minimizes harm, acts independently, and embraces accountability.4 McMorrow also stomps a few corrupt toes in the process, as he notes. Over the years, I’d gotten the late-night phone calls, the notes nailed to the door of the apartment. Bad grammar. Atrocious spelling. Threats of violence and a sad commentary on the state of public education. But even then, I’d had the protection of being one of millions. I could disappear into the crowd, hide behind the big security guards who stood in The Times lobby. In Androscoggin, [Maine,] there was no place to hide.5 Not for McMorrow nor for his fellow newsmen at the weekly Review, where the mysterious death of a third-rate photojournalist marks the beginning of Deadline, the first book in the series. Readers meet McMorrow freshly humbled by his fall from grace. Or, at least, the journalistic good graces of a promising career that delivered him to “the newspaper of record.”6 And then to the brink of journalistic oblivion. “Patriot Ledger i