Tommy Sheridan: The sex, the lies, and now the novel

Published on Friday 15 April 2011 17:59

THE plot is familiar although the approach is novel. Award-winning crime-writer Denise Mina's new work is based on a charismatic male Scottish politician who is accused of having an affair and ends up suing a newspaper.

In the latest case of art imitating life, Mina's new book will chart the downfall of an MP whose fictional fate mirrors that of former Scottish Socialist Party leader Tommy Sheridan, who was jailed earlier this year for perjury.

Mina, one of the country's best-selling authors, says she is now half way through the novel - Gods and Beasts - and plans to publish it next year with the main character called Davie Gillespie. With her novels already being adapted for the small screen, a movie is unlikely to be far behind.

"It's about a guy who has been a folk hero who becomes an MP and there are allegations about him having an affair," Mina said. "He won't admit it to his wife and to get him to admit it, she challenges him to sue the newspaper."

The author says that she has made some changes to her fictional character to differentiate him from the real-life Sheridan and his wife Gail, who was cleared of perjury by the High Court in Glasgow in December. "They're just too similar - they have the same background, went to the same school, and they're both from the same class," she explained.

Mina - hailed by fellow author Ian Rankin as "the most exciting crime writer to have emerged in Britain for years - is no stranger to writing fiction based on real characters.

Next month, BBC Scotland will screen a two-part adaptation of her 2005 novel The Field of Blood, which has echoes of the Mary Bell and James Bulger child-killing cases as well as more direct references to the miscarriage of justice case in which career safecracker Patrick Meehan was jailed for a murder he didn't commit. The two-parter, which was filmed late last year, stars Jayd Johnson as newspaper copygirl Paddy Meehan and Peter Capaldi and David Morrissey as two journalists with whom she works.

Authors have written fictional accounts of the lives of real people before. David Peace wrote The Damned United - inside the mind of Brian Clough, the renowned football manger, Joyce Carol Oates wrote Blonde about Marilyn Monroe and Joe Mercurio penned An American President around the story of John F Kennedy, but the principal characters have usually been deceased.

Mina's book, by contrast, will tackle a subject in very recent Scottish legal history. Sheridan won damages of 200,000 in a defamation case brought against the News of the World in 2006, which alleged he had attended a sex club in Manchester and had had an affair. But in 2009, the former MSP and his wife were indicted on charges of perjury.In December, Sheridan was convicted of lying in three respects about an SSP meeting in 2004 when he admitted attending a sex club, of lying about making a trip to the sex club with others in 2002 and of lying about an affair with a female activist. He was jailed for three years in January.

Mina did not attend the trials but she has met Sheridan, interviewing him for a newspaper profile when he was an up-and-coming Glasgow councillor. "I did think he was sincere," she says. "In fact, I still do. But some people are heroes for defying poll tax warrant officers but they are not cut out for the office.

"As you become a bit famous, it's really interesting what it does to you. It makes you regard yourself from the outside. This is something I've experienced as well.

"I think Tommy became obsessed with his image as a folk hero, and he needed some private space and that's where the sex thing came in. The same thing applies to Clinton (former US president Bill Clinton, who was alleged to have performed a sex act with a female intern in the White House) as well.

"But you know what? It's the lying about it, the calling all the other members of his party liars. That's the issue."

Gods and Beasts will be Mina's third book featuring DS Alex Morrow, a Glasgow cop with family links to organised crime yet also a keen sense of social injustice.

In the second book in the series, The End of the Wasp Season, which will be published next month, a heavily pregnant Morrow is called away from her father's funeral to investigate the vicious killing of a high-class call girl.

Mina's novels have won critical acclaim for their refusal to go along with the lazy stereotypes that bedevil so much crime fiction. Morrow, for example, isn't the stock, cynical investigating officer but a combative, sometimes unreasonable policewoman whose own traumas often intrude on the investigation.