Like Paddy’s, Mina’s roots are Glasgow Irish Catholic. Her father, James, escaped anti-Catholic discrimination by educating himself as an engineer and moving his family all over the world as he rode the crest of the new oil prosperity.
Also like Paddy, Mina was a rebel. In the late 1980s she had a Mohawk and piercings and, though she received a law degree, decided not to finish the subsequent training and dropped out. Working in a bar frequented by drunken journalists, she gathered material for her future novels.
Still ambivalent about a law career, she studied for a doctorate in law and psychiatry and won a grant for a thesis proposal on “differential ascription to male and female offenders.” But reading the work of the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida taught her how subjective language was. She realized that her ideas would reach a wider audience if they were in a story. So, she said, “I used my grant money to write a novel,” Garnethill, published in 1998.
For 10 years Mina has lived with a forensic psychologist; she won’t name him because he works with violent offenders. They have two children: Fergus, 2 1/2, and Owen, 11 months. “I’m terrified to get married,” Mina said. “I’m not getting married till my gay friends can.”
She is currently in the middle of writing 13 episodes of the DC Comics series Hellblazer. Her story is called Empathy Is the Enemy. “I’m interested in other forms of narrative,” she said, explaining that she is drawn to the dark themes of comics because she is melancholy, and because she likes to tell the kinds of tales that have not been told. “I am interested in the way stories define a life.”
Mina intends to make her Paddy novels a history of modern journalism. In the first, Field of Blood, the reporters are rough and self-educated. “Journalism is a Darwinian process,” she said, though “newspapers are a work of art.” The chief editor, Farquarson, known as the Beast Master, does his job while drunk. Meanwhile, the top reporter, JT, would “sell his mammy for a story,” Mina said. The sportswriters make up stories because “there is never enough news.”
But in The Dead Hour, journalism has changed. Farquarson is fired and the smooth, educated Ramage is hired to take the paper down-market and raise circulation. Ramage gets rid of the old gang, cuts expenses and demands increased productivity. He creates new columns, which guarantee copy and cost fewer man-hours to write.
In the third Paddy novel, Mina said, her heroine becomes a columnist. A typically discontented journalist, Paddy hates it.
“To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person’s intellect,” Mina said. “It becomes your default position. It means that she can’t weigh anything properly. This book is her search for something she really does believe in.”
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