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.”
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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.
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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