Denise Mina’s Glaswegian crime novels eschew “everything’s awful” endings, portray sex workers as full human beings and even let us know at the start whodunnit.
Denise Mina is a Scottish crime writer who likes to subvert the conventions of her own genre. For example, Mina – just announced as one of the authors coming to Wellington in March for Writers and Readers Week – likes to write happy 
endings for her current series of books featuring Glasgow policewoman Alex Morrow.
“I’m trying to give all the Alex Morrow books an upbeat end, I’m a bit bored with the ‘everything’s awful’ endings,” says Mina, speaking quickly, with an engaging Scottish lilt and frequent laughter.
“It’s really dissonant to have a good character have something nice happen to them at the end. So I’m trying to shock the audience into paying attention, so there is some justice or some small good things.”
Mina’s most recent novel, The End of the Wasp Season, doesn’t fit the whodunnit mould: you know straight away the names of the two boys who murder Sarah Erroll.
Erroll turns out to have been a sex worker. Morrow knows that means her team will think the woman was worthless, and tries to make them treat the dead woman with respect.
“The whole thing was really a ruse against a lot of crime fiction,” says Mina. “If there’s a sex worker in it, they assume the reader will not sympathise with her, so they have really elaborate ways to have them dying, whereas if it was a vicar’s daughter who was knocked off her bike, that would make you indignant.
“So I wanted to write a book about a sex worker who was a full human being and the thing about Alex is that she does see her as a real person, she doesn’t just see her as, collateral damage. And the Alex Morrow books, they were never really supposed to be all about Alex Morrow; they are supposed to be a broad look at crime, with the victim’s family, the perpetrator and the police, while she’s the consistent character.”
Like so many fictional police officers, Morrow is abrasive, although unlike most she seems reasonably happy with her lot. “I like that she’s nippy – does that translate? She’s quite a rude woman. I don’t think she’s that bothered about being popular or having lots of friends. It’s quite refreshing – most of my friends are quite pro-social, so when I meet people who just don’t give a stuff, it’s quite nice. And also I think she’s on this kind of quest for justice; she has a very strong sense of right or wrong, and what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate.”
Some of Mina’s sympathy for the underdog can be traced back to when she left school at 16 and spent five years working in a meat factory, as a barmaid, kitchen porter and cook, and then in auxiliary nursing for geriatric and terminal-care patients.
“I think everybody should be made to do those jobs – not those specific jobs, but serving jobs. They’re very humbling and it makes you mind your manners when you’re older.
“My parents were splitting up and basically I just wanted to get out. I wanted to flat so I needed to work. In hindsight, I had done very well at school, I’d got lots of exams, but I didn’t think I was doing well. I was just ready to leave; some people are just ready to leave at that age. And I knew I was going to go to university, I just didn’t want to be there then.”
At 21, she did go to university, studying law, and got as far as researching a PhD thesis at Strathclyde University, on the ascribing of mental illness to female offenders. She taught criminology and criminal law but did not finish the PhD, preferring to stay home and write a novel called Garnethill – which won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Dagger for best first crime novel. She now has a honorary doctorate from Glasgow University.
Why did she decide to write crime fiction? “I think for a lot of people it’s quite difficult to justify writing a novel and I think a lot of people write in the crime genre because they can say they’ll entertain and they [the readers] want to know what happens and that’s a good way of justifying it to yourself.
“I wanted to write about complex social ideas. I wanted to communicate them through a really accessible medium because as a member of the feminist movement at that time [I felt] one of the real problems was that the feminist movement was middle-class white academics arguing with other middle-class white academics and it just wasn’t doing any good for anybody.
“I thought, ‘This is a good way to disseminate ideas,’ and it has been. It’s not just that crime fiction sells; it’s the way it’s read by open-minded people. It’s not a dialogue between people from the same social class – everybody reads crime fiction, it’s very accessible and people stop reading it if it’s rubbish.
“I really think it is the new social novel. I think it’s much more complex than we give it credit for. The really good stuff that’s being written, they’re just books, they’re not defined by a genre.”
Before the Alex Morrow novels, Mina wrote a series featuring journalist Patricia “Paddy” Meehan. She starts as a copy boy in the first novel, set in the early 1980s, and advances to become one of Scotland’s top columnists. Mina regards the three Meehan books as a sort of history of the British newspaper industry, what she sees as the demise of the print media. Journalists at that time were idealists, many of them self-educated working-class people, but the industry became very brutal and disenchanted idealists either left or just stayed on for the money.
“I was working in the bar at that time and those guys were like aristocrats, they were heroes of the working class. And they were real intellectuals, they made their living writing. And then within about five years all those guys disappeared and were replaced by university graduates in suits who were producing like four pages of copy a day and it was just press releases they were publishing.”
The first Paddy Meehan novel, The Field of Blood, has been turned by the BBC into a TV series – two one-hour episodes – and Mina is delighted with the result. “It’s up for lots of Baftas. In fact, in the category of best performance all three of the nominees were in the show. The script was written by David Kane, and he directed it.
“I expected it to be shite, I really did – you think nine out of 10 things are rubbish, you expect it to be crap. I thought I’d take the money and shut my eyes. And it was made on a shoestring, with no money, and it’s brilliant. It’s really about what journalists were like at that time – all those old guys with drink problems and that shelf of smoke and the women journalists in the corner with pictures of kittens. You can’t smoke on a film set in Scotland so they had to invent a new method of creating a layer of smoke!”
Not content with writing nine novels – with another Alex Morrow book nearly finished – Mina has also written two plays and a graphic novel, and for more than a year wrote the Hellblazer horror comic books.
“DC [Comics] wrote to me and asked me if I’d like to write Hellblazer and I said I would eat my own guts to write Hellblazer. I said to them, ‘If you think the scripts are rubbish, tell me, because I don’t want to do bad work,’ and they loved them so I did them for a year and a bit and then went on to write a graphic novel for them.”
Mina (pronounced “Miner”; the family think it is a corruption of “Minogue”) lives in the centre of Glasgow with her psychologist husband and two children, aged six and eight. Glasgow still has a rather grim reputation but Mina says things are different now.
“The weather is awful but really it’s a lovely city because the decay peaked in the 80s and Glasgow was the first city in Europe to regenerate itself through the arts. They cleaned up all the architecture and it’s a really beautiful town. A lot of artists live there and we have this big prize called the Turner Prize and at one point five of the six nominees all lived in Glasgow. Nearly everyone’s in bands and it’s a great place to live, actually.”
Her interests include running, cycling, obscure Japanese films and good food. She enquires anxiously about the quality of coffee in Wellington and, reassured on that point, says she is very much looking forward to her first visit to New Zealand.
WRITERS AND READERS WEEK, March 9-14, part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival, February 24-March 14; THE END OF THE WASP SEASON, by Denise Mina (Orion, $29.99).
Visit www.listener.co.nz for Arts & Books editor Guy Somerset’s Listening In