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Denise MinaDenise Mina
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BiographyCrime novelist Denise Mina is the author of a trilogy of novels set in Glasgow: Garnethill (1998), which won the Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger; Exile (2000); and Resolution (2001).
Sanctum (2002), is the story of a forensic psychiatrist, convicted of killing a serial killer. The Field of Blood (2005) is the first in a new series, the second in the series, The Dead Hour, being published in 2006, and the third, Slip of the Knife, in 2007.
Denise Mina also writes short stories which have appeared in various anthologies, one of which, 'Helena and the Babies' from Fresh Blood 3 (1999), won the Crime Writers' Association Macallan Short Story Dagger. Two short stories and a play, Hurtle (2003), have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her latest play is Ida Tamson.
IIn 2004 she was approached by DC comics to write a 13-episode run on 'Hellblazer', colllected as Empathy is the Enemy (2006) and The Red Right Hand (2007). A new DC graphic novel is due for publication in October 2010 – A Sickness in The Family - and is drawn by the Italian artist Antonio Fuso. She is currently working with John Bolton on a proposed graphic novel set in Paris during the occupation.
Her lastest novel is Still Midnight (2009).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Crime, Fiction, Radio drama, Short stories
BibliographyGarnethill Bantam, 1998 Fresh Blood 3 (contributor) Do-Not Press, 1999 Exile Bantam, 2000 Resolution Bantam, 2001 Sanctum Bantam, 2002 The Field of Blood Bantam, 2005 Hellblazer: Empathy is the Enemy Vertigo (US), 2006 The Dead Hour Bantam, 2006 Hellblazer: The Red Right Hand Vertigo (US), 2007 Slip of the Knife Bantam, 2007 Still Midnight Orion, 2009 A Sickness in the Family Vertigo (US), 2010
Prizes and awards1998 Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger Garnethill 1998 Crime Writers' Association Macallan Short Story Dagger (Helena and the Babies) 2000 Scotland on Sunday/Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award 2007 Edgar Award (shortlist) The Dead Hour 2008 Crime Writers' Association Dagger in the Library Award (shortlist)
Critical PerspectiveGlasgow-based Denise Mina is one of the most unusual crime thriller writers to have emerged in recent years, her ‘Garnethill’ trilogy having as its leading character not a detective or a serial killer – but a woman, driven by her knowledge of what it is to be a victim. Mina is part of a highly successful current generation of Scottish crime writers, whose best-known figure is of course Ian Rankin; but her books are far from escapist or celebratory. Garnethill (1998), Exile (2000), and Resolution (2001), are tough-minded, outspoken in their use of the vernacular and graphic in depicting mental illness, alcoholism, sexual abuse and extreme violence. This makes them harrowing reading at times. They are, however, also full of compassion and dry wit, creating a totally believable world of patients, abusers, psychiatrists and police in which issues of trust and authority are fully explored. Such harshness is ameliorated by Mina’s command of often brutally funny Glaswegian speech, her frequently funny or threatening similes (‘as rough as a badger’s arse’), and her depiction of warm female solidarity amongst aggressive or downtrodden working-class women. The over-arching plot in the trilogy, however, revolves around a man - an excellently creepy, but also brilliant, psychiatrist. The mutilation of victims and his playing of mind games with the police, and his female antagonist, may owe something to the iconic Dr. Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs. However, in choosing to set her books in working-class Glasgow (counterpart of Rankin’s Edinburgh) Mina is highly convincing. Her version of the city is grim, with ‘drizzling rain and a fifty year recession … endemic domestic violence and armies of drunk men shouting about football’. In its derelict housing schemes there is a ‘heroin plague’, with ‘splatters of milky Sunday morning vomit’ on pavements.
Mina’s ‘detective’ is Maureen O’Donnell, a worker at Glasgow Women’s Shelter, who is herself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and a former mental patient. Constantly drowning her angry inner tensions in drink (usually whiskey) she proves however to be resourceful, tenacious and bloody-minded, whether dealing with suspicious men or the police. During her investigations of the murders she remains haunted by flashbacks, the imminent return of her father to the city; and the bitterness she feels towards most of her family. Amid the awful relentlessness of her own life, she is able to sympathise with victims, and takes up their cause as her own. They are equally wronged women, from prostitutes to eccentric ex-patients such as ‘Suicide Tanya’, and the beautiful fragile Siobhain who crucially gains in mental resilience as the trilogy progresses. There are also some strongly negative female role models, notably Maureen’s alcoholic mother Winnie (‘a vindictive, self-serving cow’), who doubts her daughter’s story. Apart from the psychiatrist, the men are useful subsidiary characters, such as her drug-dealing brother Liam, who does believe in her, and the on-off Asian boyfriend Vik with whom she enjoys occasional happiness. They also tend to be disposable (when a Partick Thistle fan hospital porter is introduced, you know he’s doomed), sinister neighbours or pub creatures like ‘Malky the Alky’. Hugh McAskill is a rare sympathetic copper, himself attending a survivor’s group for incest victims.
In Exile, the starting point is the discovery of a Glasgow woman’s body in the Thames, who may have been a drug courier or ‘mule’. Maureen follows her hunch that the pathetic arrested husband was not the killer. As she catches the night bus to London, she once again feels herself ‘on the edge of her life, trapped on the spur by all the big questions’. The book’s most memorable scene still takes place in Glasgow, at ‘The Clansman’, a truly appalling low-life pub in which ‘hard men jostled with cardboard gangsters’. Maureen meets the acne-ridden Mark Doyle there, who later on (in Resolution) unwittingly assists Maureen’s act of revenge against her father. In this final volume, the progress of the killer’s trial alternates with an investigation into a local brothel’s sadistic use of Eastern European women, and the death of the owner’s mother. By the violent denouement, Maureen is finally able to put aside her victim status, realizing ‘that mantle was the negation of all the wonder in life’.
Sanctum (2002), is equally highly sexualized, but is rather more of a conventional crime entertainment, set in a city that ‘glowered, every dark corner and deep shadow became a moist and needy mouth waiting to swallow the careless’. This psychological thriller is presented in the form of a ‘true crime’ story, whose details have been acquired, along with an old computer, by the author herself. On closer examination, however, it is in the mode perhaps most associated with Minette Walters. An unreliable narrator tells us that ‘motive is the most slippery of truths’, and gradually unravels layers of deception surrounding a female forensic psychiatrist’s conviction for the sadistic murder of a recently-released serial killer. The ‘detective’ is her husband, who begins looking at the files on her computer in a desperate attempt to challenge the conviction. The twist is that as he gets closer to identifying the real killer, his relationship with the imprisoned wife changes, particularly when he finds out about her lesbian affairs. Meanwhile, the charms of their young Spanish au pair begin to obsess him: ‘her bum looks like two jumbo plums quivering in a silk hankie’. Denise Mina’s grasp of the crime thriller form is assured: all the ingredients of suspense, forensic details and a constant sense of threat are maintained, the race-against-time element choreographed towards the finish. Once there, she allows us a sense of relief, even a sense of epiphany, after all that tension. We are like Maureen O’Donnell, who eventually finds that ‘talking like Bette Davis always means it’s time to put the glass down and go to bed’.
Dr Jules Smith, 2004
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