Interview: Denise Mina, author

Published on Monday 25 April 2011 12:57

Denise Mina explains why she wants readers to feel empathy for two rich public schoolboys who may have killed a call girl.

A friend of mine, an investigative journalist in Baltimore who sees more than his fair share of violent crime, has no time at all for crime writers. Real crime isn't a story, he'll say. Real crime is random, pointless, stupid, unplanned, absurd, often motiveless. You can't write a novel about it.

I'm in Denise Mina's kitchen, chatting to her about her new novel, The End of the Wasp Season. It's every bit as accomplished as we have, over the last 13 years, come to expect from her, but I begin by asking her whether my friend is right. What, I add, about that case just the other day about a man who murdered someone just because he wasn't allowed to go to the toilet? How could you ever get 300 pages out of that?

Oh, but you could, she says, her eyes lighting up. "You could show how the murderer thought. You could show how he felt normal rules didn't apply to him. And why not? Because he'd had the kind of childhood that he felt no-one else could possibly understand. Maybe he'd have a self-pitying mindset like that: it's classic. I bet he used a gun, didn't he?" I nod. "Well, where did he get the gun from? Easily? And what does that show about our society?"

I'm not, I realise, going to win this one. With other crime writers, I possibly could, but not with Mina. Because this is a former criminology PhD student who knows full well that my friend is actually right about crime's stupidity and randomness, but wrong when he goes on to say that fiction can't do anything with it.

How wrong is something she has spent the last nine novels trying to demonstrate, ever since she gave up that PhD and wrote her award-winning debut novel Garnethill instead. There, and ever since, she has immeasurably widened the scope of Scottish crime fiction, dragging its clichs out of the dark alleys and beating them to death in broad daylight.

At first sight, this appears to be happening less in her new novel, The End of the Wasp Season, than it has in her other books, such as 2005's The Field of Blood, which will be screened next week in an excellent BBC adaptation starring Jayd Johnson as would-be investigative journalist Paddy Meehan.

In that book, Meehan is drenched in moral ambiguity by a fast-moving plot involving child-killing. At the same time she is emotionally pummelled from all angles - ignored by her family, dropped by her boyfriend, fighting at work and all this while forever risking the sack and struggling with obesity.

In The End of the Wasp Season, that moral ambiguity is more lightly sketched. True, Mina's protagonist, DS Alex Morrow, has the family link to organised crime that was outlined in 2009's Still Midnight, and yes, this time she is heavily pregnant with twins. She is abrasive, individualistic, not out to make friends, and remains just as credible as ever.

The surprise this time is who we're supposed to feel empathy for. From the start, we think we know that a murder has been committed by one of two public schoolboys at a Perthshire boarding school. It's a horrendous crime involving the mutilation of a call girl, so it's almost as though Mina is stacking the decks, making it as hard for herself as possible. Both boys have mega-rich parents: when the father of one of them hangs himself, his son is annoyed that he isn't flown home in the flashier of the family's two planes. This suicide has put the family firmly on its uppers: they'll really have to economise, they are warned, now that there's only 300,000 a year coming in.

All of which is not, I venture, her fiction's natural territory.

She looks at me quizzically, her right eyebrow curling into a question mark. "Oh, is it not? No?"

I'm thinking of Maureen O'Donnell, the protagonist of Garnethill, heavy-drinking worker in the Glasgow Women's Centre, brother of a charming drug-dealer and defender of abused women. But Mina's having none of it. "In the Garnethill trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O'Donnell's dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did law, but no-one ever thinks they're middle-class - they're just working class because they speak with accents.

"I'm always represented as a bit of a class warrior - a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I'm actually very fond of men and am middle-class. I even went to boarding school in Perthshire.

"What I was really doing was looking at how all those seismic shifts since the credit crunch have affected people. What are people like now that they have lost so much but still have the same sense of entitlement? So I was interested in how the fallout from the financial collapse affected these children and what sense they made of their parents' houses being daubed with paint.

"Where the book really started, though, was in trying to humanise a sex worker. I wanted to make someone doing that job seem really human, to make them as sympathetic as possible. Then I realised that you couldn't always do this. But I'd started from a deliberately political position and then the story just ran off on its own."

Already, you can perhaps see why Ian Rankin calls Mina "the most exciting crime writer to have emerged in Britain in years". Who else would take the risk of trying to make the reader empathise with a couple of spoilt public schoolboys who are the most likely culprits of a horrendous murder? How many other crime writers would feel confident enough to base so much of the story on character rather than plot? And how many would be driven to make the prostitute victim recognisably human, to give her a family she loved and a genuine reason to earn fast bucks the way she did?

The other way of looking at Mina's writing is that it's not a risk at all. Or at least it's not provided you can get enough of the feel of the streets, shade characters in more subtly than the genre normally allows, and tune your ear to catch the rhythms of different voices and classes. Do all of that, and you're half way to nudging crime fiction back towards true crime.

Unlike many writers, Mina is a huge fan of true crime stories. "A lot of people think it's a pariah form of writing, beneath contempt, the last taboo. I love it and think we need more of it."

True crime writing is, often, just another word for journalism. Mina baulks at the idea of working in an office, but she'd have made a great journalist. "I always wanted to work at Take A Break magazine, you know, just to inject a little bit of politics into their stories. I applied for a job there after I'd done my law degree and didn't even get an interview. I only wrote Garnethill because I didn't get that job!" She still remembers the pull-out quotes in which whole lives were encapsulated in the magazine's "Letter to the Heart" column. "When I showed you your rooms, you broke down and wept on the stairs," she recites from memory. "See? It's found poetry with its own rhythms. Somebody's whole life too …"

Around that time, she was working as a waitress at the Ubiquitous Chip. These were still the days of rebel hairdos: the mohican with blue eye shadow on the side was a thing of her recent Glasgow Uni law student past, but she still had a bleached and dyed flat-top ("from the front it was like a colour chart that went all the way from blonde to red - a really cool haircut"). She met a whole load of journalists in those halcyon days of long liquid lunches and unquestioned expenses, and they seemed an even more exotic species than she must have looked herself.

Later, Mina's Paddy Meehan novels would chart the changes in newspapers as the booze-ridden autodidacts stumbled out and the suits moved in, but the hacks' fascination with true crime stories lives on in her.

Perhaps, she concedes, it's something to do with living in Glasgow. It's a city with an average annual murder rate of 74 (Edinburgh has five); pervasive organised crime (ask any taxi driver: they all seem to know the Mr Bigs); the most important city in the country for laundering the 4 billion in drugs money that Scottish criminals process every year. "Our biggest industry," Mina adds. Odd, that: I can't remember anyone mentioning it in the election campaign.

Private-hire taxis are often used to launder drug money, says Mina; everyone knows that. And then there are nurseries …" My eyes widen. I didn't realise criminals were cashing in on the nation's childcare. She tells me how that scam works, with shadowy corporations and "ghost" children. Then we talk about how Alex Morrow's next case will be based on a charismatic politician not a million miles from Tommy Sheridan. Naturally, the next half hour disappears into unsubstantiated gossip.

Though we're supposed to be talking about her new novel, we end up drifting back to the adaptation of The Field of Blood. There are echoes of true crime - the Jamie Bulger and Mary Bell child-killing cases - in the central drama, as well the real-life miscarriage of justice case involving convicted safeblower Paddy Meehan.

"Walking into the set was like walking into my head. Really freaky. And Jayd Johnson looks exactly like me and all my cousins, and she just comes from round the corner in Rutherglen. I said to her, ‘I don't think I can touch you because I'd break the space-time continuum.' She's got massive eyes, a snub nose, her chin goes straight into her neck, she's got black hair. She really looks like she's one of us."

I've seen a preview of the Field of Blood, and it's almost as good as the book. There's a repeated scene in which Jayd Johnson, as 18-year-old would-be journalist Paddy Meehan, walks to work through the Glasgow streets to her job at the newspaper, with the hits of the early Eighties on her headphones.

And perhaps the space-time continuum is indeed broken, because in my mind, she morphs into Mina, strolling contentedly through the city whose true crimes she will one day turn into fiction that goes round the world.

l The End of the Wasp Season will be published by Orion, on 12 May, priced 12.99. A new edition of The Field of Blood has also been published to tie in with the screening of the TV version, with Jayd Johnson and Peter Capaldi earlier that week.