Book review: Still Midnight

EVERYONE LIKES DENISE MINA. Every journalist, even the most cynical, who has rung the doorbell of her quietly spectacular flat in Glasgow's West End seems to have left with her as their new best friend. They then go back to their offices and write up interviews in which they bang on about how well the two of them have got on. As if anybody cared.

So as soon as we are settled down at her kitchen table, I slide a copy of her new novel, Still Midnight, across it for her to sign. I tell her she's going to have to change her image. She looks up at me. She's beautiful, in a green-eyed gamine way, and when she doesn't understand something she raises an eyebrow so it turns into half a question mark. Like now.

"What do you mean?" she asks.

Well, I say, I've just read all the cuttings and I'm tired of hearing about this Glasgow crime writer who's always down-to-earth, feisty, funny, nice, and all the rest of it. She smiles, signs the book, and slides it back.

"To David," it says. "F*** YOU! Denise Mina."

She watches me reading it, throws her head back and laughs.

THE mean streets of crime fiction are filled with clichs. Walk down them, as Mina does, with a full ammunition belt of radical feminist theory and there are plenty of easy targets, like alpha males who shoot first and ask questions later and women who slot all too neatly into the passive victim role. Add to that a twist of gritty Glaswegian realism, a keen eye for detail, plots with a stab at psychological credibility, and you have the essential ingredients in the Mina mix.

Studying criminology at Strathclyde taught her all she needed to know about how crime fiction gets real crime completely wrong. "So many crime novels finish with the bad guy getting shot without having a trial," she says. "That kind of thing makes me so angry. It's just so wrong. Real life isn't like that."

It's the same, she argues, with the way many crime novelists write about killing prostitutes or glamorise criminals. "In form (in mainstream crime fiction] you can kill as many prostitutes as you want. The reader won't think of them as human beings. You can cut the face off and stick it on a dog, it doesn't matter. And that whole idea of criminals not being like us, that's another one. The more people read these things the more those attitudes seep into the culture."

In Still Midnight, the Mina mission to de-clich crime fiction begins with her protagonist, Alex Morrow, a detective sergeant in the Strathclyde force. This is the first time Mina has had a detective in the lead role, but from the start she was determined Morrow would be different.

"I was rather hoping people wouldn't like her," she says. "Women are always warm and empathetic in crime novels, but I thought that to have worked in such a macho place and to have overcome what she has had to do in life, she would be a bit of a cow.

"She knows that people aren't always going to like her and she doesn't even try. She's not out to make friends, she'll play office politics by putting herself in a good light with her boss and insisting on taking the credit. She's out for herself, not always approval-seeking. I thought that was the type of character I hadn't read about before, very different from most female protagonists."

Morrow's complexity – "She knows the difference between good and bad. She's just not sure which she prefers any more" says the blurb on the book – is central to the book's purpose and rooted in her family background. "The old good/bad simplicities of crime fiction are irrelevant these days," says Mina. "All that matters is that your characters have depth."

Morrow certainly does. The case she has to solve involves the abduction of an elderly Asian man, taken at gunpoint from his family home by two blundering criminals whose ineptitude reaches levels you don't often find outside the pages of Elmore Leonard.

"But that's how many criminals really are," Mina insists. "A lot of them get dignified as bogeymen but they're really nothing of the kind. It's quite normal for them to fall out with each other or have doubts whether they should stick together or even whether to be involved in a big job in the first place."

The bungled abduction of Aamir, an Asian shop owner – right family, wrong family member – allows Mina to open up the story far beyond Glasgow. As he is bundled, his head covered by a pillowcase, around a series of seedy South Side flats, his mind flits back to the other time his life was at risk, in Uganda in 1970 when Idi Amin was brutalising the country's Asian population. All of this is convincingly handled – as indeed is the minutiae of Aamir's daily life running the family shop.

"One of the reasons I wanted to write about Asians, is that I just saw so many parallels between my generation of Irish Catholics and young Muslims now," she says. "A tiny minority were committing terrorist offences and the rest of us weren't. But we were all totally alienated because we knew that if you were Irish, or your name was Irish, you could be arrested, held without limit of time, tortured or framed for something you hadn't done. We didn't believe what was on the TV news because we could see it was biased.

"Then we all went back to Ireland thinking at last we were going home, only when we were there we realised how Scottish we were and so it seemed that we didn't belong anywhere. And I think that's what's happening to young Muslims now, and in this search for identity you get people going back to religion."

Sometimes I have worried that Mina's emphasis on "issue" fiction was in danger of eclipsing her natural gifts as a writer: by the end of her Garnethill trilogy, in Resolution, for example, the lack of non-abusive, non-rapist, non-exploitative male characters was beginning to grate. In Still Midnight, that charge would be impossible to make: it's a far more nuanced ensemble piece, with Mina writing just as credibly from inside her male protagonists's heads as from inside her women's.

The book isn't as violent as I expected: only one corpse, and even that killing not lingered over. When I put the point to her, she sounds almost disappointed. "I love violence," she laughs. "I don't think there's half enough violence in books. I'm not one of those crime writers who are squeamish about writing violence and who just write stories about people robbing jewels from hotels instead. I've read lots of crime novels in which I've thought, 'That's not really violent enough for me!' Here, I hope there's a threat of violence running all the way through the book, so you never quite know when it's going to break out."

As if to defend herself against a charge of going soft on violence, she takes me through to her study, where she wrote the first of her two Hellblazer graphic novels. There isn't, to put it mildly, any shortage of violence on any of its pages – but the storyline imagines a world in which a hellish amount of death is brought about purely through empathy: when we are allowed full insight into each other's lives, it turns out, we are unable to bear the pain we all keep trapped inside us and turn, instead, to violence.

The engine flooding the world with such bloody empathy, it turns out, is nowhere other than the buildings on the Glasgow street in which Mina herself lives. Fanciful it may be, but as I made my way back to the office to write up the interview, it was this odd combination of death and empathy that lingered longest in my brain. Along, of course, with memories of meeting an author who really is as feisty, funny, down-to-earth, friendly and everything else that all the other hacks always said she was.

• Still Midnight by Denise Mina is published by Orion, priced 12.99. Denise Mina will be at the Edinburgh book festival on Tuesday 18 August.