Denise Mina
Denise Mina
Denise Minais a Scottish crime writer and playwright. She has written the Garnethill trilogy and another three novels featuring the character Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, a Glasgow journalist. Described as an author of Tartan Noir, she has also dabbled in comic book writing, having recently written 13 issues of Hellblazer. Since 2006, she has had two plays performed with successful reception...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionWriter
journalism process
Journalism is a Darwinian process.
sophisticated enough reader
Novelisation doesn't imply the truth. Readers are sophisticated enough to know that.
confused spring hate
I hate it when I'm reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what's going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation.
thinking negative flaws
I think the negative traits are what makes us love other human beings, the foibles and the flaws.
nice air people
We don't really go in for big family dinners, but Scottish people are famously confrontational. It's a cultural thing, so maybe we don't need to have them to clear the air. Also, traditional family food isn't as nice here so there's no payoff for traveling hundreds of miles.
school warrior men
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.
brother kids female
Crime is a very hard genre to feminise. If you have a female protagonist she is going to be looking after her mum when she gets older; she is going to be worried about her brother and sister; she will be making a living while bringing up kids.
witty real crime-novels
There's a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels.
book mean writing
Because I write a book a year, I always want to do one other project every year that's stimulating in a different way. It means you can be working but not using up your prose juice, you know?
wings guy fiction
I'd read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy - I thought there must be another approach.
children book reading
There's always these giant baffling books, like 'The Da Vinci Code.' People say it's not as well written as 'Midnight's Children.' Why aren't people reading 'Midnight's Children?' Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they're great.
strong opinion default
To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person's intellect. It becomes your default position.
art brother dad
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.
filthy house school writers
It's all chaos and the house is occasionally filthy but I get to stand at the school gates. Writers are so lucky to have that flexibility.