Denise Mina: Telling the True Crime Stories of Gritty Glasgow
“Alternative points of view, that’s what I’m really interested in,” says Scottish crime-fiction writer Denise Mina. “When I look at my career it looks kind of fractured, but I was very influenced by the Guerrilla Girls, women artists and activists who dress up in gorilla masks and campaign about women in the arts. I studied art history at university and one of the things you become very aware of, as a woman writer, is that you’re not very likely to be remembered or put in the histories. So you might as well do whatever the hell you want. Sometimes people turn things down like cooking programs because they think, ‘Well I’m a writer; I don’t want to do those other things.’ As a writer, when I started, I thought, ‘I’m just going to do projects that I fancy.’
And indeed she has. Since 1998, when her debut novel, Garnethill, was published—promptly scooping up the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasy Dagger for Best First Crime Novel—Mina has been dexterously turning her authorial hand to comic books (Hellblazer); graphic novel adaptations (Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy); documentary films (including Multum in Parvum/Much In Little, a marvelously life-affirming ode to her family); and plays (such as Peter Manuel: Meet Me, the first iteration of her newest novel The Long Drop). But for the crime-fiction author—one of the most skillful of contemporary writers when it comes to successfully injecting critical social issues into her writing—it’s prose that has her heart.
Working on comic books and graphic novels is fascinating as a writing exercise, says Mina, speaking from her home in Glasgow via Skype. “It tells you how much you can leave out, something you don’t think about in prose: in prose, you think you have to describe things. You think, ‘I’d best put it in, because maybe people won’t know that it’s implied.’ But one of the things about writing for comic books is that it’s very, very disciplined—you have to think about page position for a particular scene and you have to think about page-turning, so you’re thinking much more of the mechanics of it. Also, with comics you do imagine so much of it yourself, you know? As a reader, you have to fill in all those spaces. And you can’t have very much dialogue in comics because you’ll obscure the pictures. It’s such a tight format.”
That format, she notes, has had its impact on her own approach to novel-writing, deeply apparent in the often-circumscribed sentences of The Long Drop. “When you go back to writing prose,” she says, “you realize, that, ‘Well, if I say, “He threw the axe,” and then I say, “She fell with an axe in her,” the reader will fill that space in.’ You don’t have to describe the axe hurtling through the air, you know? It really has fundamentally changed my approach to writing, how much I trust the reader and how much I appreciate that the reader doing more work means they’ll be much more invested in your work. But it’s funny because when I started writing comics, when I started writing Hellblazer in 2004 or 2005, people thought writing comics was writing for people who couldn’t read. People felt sorry for me for writing comics—except for people who read comics, like Ian Rankin. He wasn’t sorry for me. But other people thought it was like a bar job for a writer who couldn’t make a living. And that’s changed so quickly.”
“Serial killers are idiots! The reality is that they’re psychopathic idiots!”
That openness to working in other formats, she says, has paid off; as a writer, she has always drawn from anything she finds stimulating, channeling that energy into a wide-ranging roster of writing projects. “Everything feeds my prose,” she says. “I’ve written films and for TV, and I’ve written comics and plays and documentaries, but it really all feeds back into the prose because that’s really the thing I want to do. I mean we always talk about it as if we had a business plan when we started off, but as a writer, you’re really just responding to a compulsion, aren’t you?”
That compulsion most recently led to The Long Drop, Mina’s imaginative re-telling of an infamous real-life murder trial writ large across 1950s Glasgow: in 1958, Peter Manuel was found guilty and hanged for killing seven people, including the family of businessman William Watt. Mina’s novel recreates a real encounter, a 1957 night when Watt met Manuel, and the two men spent 12 hours together, drinking, talking and colliding with Glasgow gangsters. It’s a focused, heavily researched piece of history, but the book is also full of intense moments in which real-life and the novelist’s imagination merge, bringing peripheral characters tangibly to life. This swath of people affected by casual, domestic and formal wartime violence, includes Billy Fullerton, a lifelong beater of other men and his own wife (“In a city that reveres angry men Billy Fullerton is a god.”); Maurice Dickov, an opportunistic gambling-club owner who encourages others to do his dirty work and then slimily insinuates himself safely away; a policeman investigating a murder that sets off his PTSD (“The officer cannot move. His throat throbs. He cannot swallow. This officer fought through the Low Countries with the Scots Greys. He saw bits of people, bits of children, leftover bits, burnt bits. Back then he prayed to a God he still feared but no longer loved he prayed never, ever to feel this again. But now he has.”); and, perhaps most strikingly, the pre-Clean Air Act city of Glasgow (“Above the roofs every chimney belches black smoke. Rain drags smut down over the city like a mourning mantilla.”)
“Some of those things are novelistic imaginings,” says Mina, “but a lot of them are just true. For me this was really a look at the serial-killer story. I think the most interesting thing about those stories is the people around them. It’s not the person themselves—they usually just had a brain injury or were just getting away with it, or are just sick or really unpleasant people. I’m interested in the way we respond to it, because it’s quite a new story, but it has really taken hold and there are a lot of myths within it, like the one about the killers wanting to be caught, or the way serial killers are always presented as though they know more than everyone else. They’re idiots! The reality is that they’re psychopathic idiots!”
Part of Mina’s research involved mapping the sites of the various pubs and clubs that Watt and Manuel visited on their night together, including Dickov’s Gordon Club. “That club was real and everybody went. And then it was shut down and somebody whose dad was a cop told me that the club they moved up to is what is now King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, which is a really famous music venue—it’s where Oasis were discovered. It used to be called the Saints & Sinners because it was cops and gangsters who went there. The thing about Glasgow,” Mina continues, “is that everyone tells stories, so if you listen hard enough you do hear these things.”
In fact, Mina got an earful when Peter Manuel: Meet Me debuted. “The play was on in Glasgow, about this innocent man out for a drink with the murderer of his family. But a lot of pensioners came up to me afterwards and said, ‘You’ve got that story wrong!’ William Watt, everyone always suspected that he was involved in some way—he was originally accused of murdering his family—and the whole thing just stinks to high heaven.” Listening to the older Glaswegians’ stories, Mina revisited the tale in novel form, leaning on the richness of oral histories as well as newspaper accounts of the trial.
“Glasgow is very chatty,” she says. “If you sit at a bus stop and ask an old person have you ever heard of this bar, they’ll tell you a story about it. Everyone’s got stories. It’s very important socially to be a good storyteller here. If you go to other places in Scotland, people don’t tell stories the way they do in Glasgow; it’s very much a status thing to be able to tell a story well. Sometimes, if you’re telling a story badly, people will stop you and get someone else to tell your story. My husband is English, and, when we go to visit them, I find his family very confusing. I was saying to my cousin, when I first started going out with my husband, ‘You know, they do this thing where one of them talks and then they stop and then there’s a pause and then somebody else talks.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen that custom before, the quaint English custom of listening to each other.’” She laughs. “Weird. Weirdos. Here we all just talk over the top of each other.”
If Mina gained her storytelling skills as a birthright, another contributing factor was the moment she fell in love with reading: “I went on a really awful sort of spring break holiday with some girls I worked with, and I thought we were going to look at the churches. One of the girls brought lots of books—including One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Master and Margarita and I just sat on the roof and got the best suntan of my life and read those books and fell in love.” It was an experience as spontaneous and serendipitous as other auspicious markers on her writing trajectory. “I left school at 16,” she says, “and worked. Then I went to night classes and got into university and did law, but because I was so interested in art history, I did art history as an extra subject. Then I had to drop it because I had too many subjects for law—it was just too time consuming, and I had to work as well. Then I left law: I was going into practice, and I just couldn’t do it, I just thought, ‘I’m going to die if I have to do this.’ So I dropped out and worked in a bar. And then I went for an interview as a researcher at Strathclyde Law School and they said, ‘We don’t want you as a researcher because you’re an idiot, but we’ll let you do a PhD in law and psychiatry.’ Those guys were very, very kind to me—I’m still in touch with them—and,” she cheerfully admits, “I misused my grant to write a crime novel. Strathclyde was really radical and we were all really crazy about representations in law, and this whole socio-legal area that nobody really talked about at the time. We used to talk about crime novels and representations of law in films and things like that, and so I wrote a crime novel [instead of a dissertation.]”
Two decades and multiple high-profile awards later, she’s working on her 14th novel, a work-in-progress called Wrongful Conviction that taps directly into the current podcast craze. “It’s about a woman who is listening to a podcast. Her life falls apart, and she goes off and starts trying to solve the crime in the podcast. “Listening to podcasts, asserts Mina, is “like being able to read when you need to use your eyes. It’s like you’re reading all the time—it’s fantastic! At the moment, for gardening, I like The Last Podcast on the Left—don’t listen to it because it’s really offensive, you have to work your way up to that—but I just listened to S-Town. It’s very interesting, about this tiny town in Alabama. Maybe there’s been a murder there, you don’t know, and it’s very engaging and really takes you into a completely different world.”
Perpetually immersing herself into alternative views and maintaining a deep inquisitiveness in different worlds seems to be a basic mechanism driving Mina as a writer, but she voices another key driver as well: writing as the ultimate double-helixed form of both expression and interactive communication. “I think real compulsive writers get an endorphin rush from fitting words together,” she says, in a tumble of words. “Or by finding the perfect right word, not todescribe something but to make something real. There’s just something delicious about it and there’s something really magical about fitting words together, or when you write a sentence that has a good rhythm to it or you express something that you didn’t even know was in your head. And you don’t know if anyone else is ever going to get that, you just don’t know. And then a book comes out everyone slightly misunderstands it and then five years, six years later someone sidles up to you and a book festival and says, ‘I got that,’ and then you just want cry and never let them go. You know? It’s just such a lovely thing, it’s just such a beautiful understated sort of howl into the void, really.”
Originally published in Literary Hub.
