Scottish detective fiction, or Tartan Noir as it’s called, with its brooding sensibility, brutal humor and fixation on the nature of guilt and punishment, has more in common with the Russian novel than it does with traditional detective writing. And Denise Mina, author of The Dead Hour, published this month by Little, Brown & Co, is one of a crop of contemporary Scottish writers, like Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Louise Welsh and Christopher Brookmyre, who have made detective fiction Scotland’s best-known literary form.
Mina’s new novel is the second in a five-book series about Paddy Meehan, a spunky female reporter from Glasgow’s Irish Catholic working class, surrounded by a garrulous group of mostly Protestant, and drunken, male colleagues at the fictional Scottish Daily News. They refer to Paddy, who is plump and always dieting, as “wee hen” or “fat cow.” But she fights back. “Did ye lie awake last night, Shug, staring down at your fat, ugly wife in the dark,” she snarls, “wondering why your kids grew up to hate ye?”
“She’s a nippy bitch,” said the gamin-like Mina, 39, over breakfast recently at the Warwick Hotel in Midtown — adding, with her nicely rounded “r’s,” “She’s quite rude.”
In the first Paddy book, Field of Blood, Paddy (for Patricia) was a trainee who helped solve the murder of a three-year-old. In The Dead Hour, she is promoted to “night calls”: crimes and accidents. She glimpses a blood-covered woman through a doorway, but a man gives her a ?50 (US$93) note to go away. Later, the woman is found murdered. Paddy is guilt-ridden. Though she is being stalked, she is determined to find the killer.
Crime fiction sells better in Scotland than literary fiction, said Andrew Diamond, the crime fiction buyer for a Waterstone’s bookstore in Glasgow, where The Dead Hour was a best seller this summer. “Literary fiction tends to be seen as English,” he said, referring to the long history of conflict between Scotland and England.
Scotland, the birthplace of Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, has a tradition of the detective novel. The efflorescence of Tartan Noir began in the late 1970s amid renewed debates about Scottish independence from Britain, McDermid said, with William McIlvanney’s novel Laidlaw.
“The Scottish started to question who we are, and the idea of having a Scottish Parliament reared its head again,” she said. “Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.”
Mina stands out because of her focus on the Catholic underclass, McDermid said. “Denise is a great channeler of the voices normally despised and disregarded.”
Mina’s books are also political and social commentaries. A feminist with a law degree, she has written about abused women in the legal system. Her female characters are flawed but strong. The heroine of her first novel, Garnethill, is a sexually abused former mental patient. In a later book, Deception, the heroine is a forensic psychiatrist accused of murdering a serial killer.
Her writing is imbued with a keen sense of place — in the Paddy books, the ruined landscape of mid-1980s Glasgow. Once a major industrial city, Glasgow had much of its economy destroyed during the Thatcher years. Tensions festered between impoverished immigrant Irish Catholics, confined to housing “schemes” or projects, and Protestants. In recent years the city has undergone a revival and is filled with galleries and boutiques. “Bigotry is more a feature of soccer now,” Mina said.
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