Denise Mina

• Born: August 21, 1966
• Place of Birth: Glasgow, Scotland

TYPES OF PLOT: Amateur sleuth; psychological; hard-boiled

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Garnethill, 1998-2001; Patricia “Paddy” Meehan, 2005-2007; Alex Morrow, 2009-2014; Anna & Fin, 2019-2022

Contribution

Denise Mina is often cited alongside Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre, and Val McDermid as a leading writer of Scottish crime fiction, popularly known as tartan noir. Tartan noir is a reference to film noir, a genre known for its bleak point of view and focus on corruption. Tartan noir typically features dark humor, profanity, and realistic, flawed characters whose behavior raises questions about the distinction between innocence and guilt.

Mina’s fiction reveals a strong social conscience; her characters experience poverty, religious conflict, unemployment, workplace discrimination, addiction, and the ugliness of life on the wrong side of the law, all within the framework of the traditional murder mystery. Mina goes beyond puzzle-making to write realistically about young women’s lives in the poorer urban neighborhoods of Glasgow. However, some critics note that Mina’s highly detailed and often grim settings can overwhelm her novels’ central crimes.

Mina’s heroes are unconventional for the genre: young, working-class Scottish women who have suffered or witnessed the effects of childhood sexual abuse, rape, domestic violence, and mental illness. These characters are complex and deeply affected by these experiences but intelligent and proactive; they have been exposed to brutal violence and can even behave violently themselves. They become psychologically stronger over time, develop and maintain relationships with family and friends, defy religious and social expectations, and overcome legacies of abuse.

Biography

Denise Mina was born into a Catholic family in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1966. Her father, a self-educated oil engineer, traveled frequently, and the family moved twenty-one times while Mina was young. She attended convent schools across Europe. Mina left school at sixteen and worked in London as a server, bartender, cook, meat factory worker, and then as a nurse in a home for the elderly and terminally ill. Caring for people who had lived through World War II, Mina developed an appreciation for their life stories; she was particularly moved by older women who had once been independent, holding responsible positions in the workforce.

In 1986, Mina returned to Glasgow. At twenty-one, she passed examinations that allowed her to enroll in Glasgow University’s School of Law. After graduating, she taught classes in criminology and criminal law. At the University of Strathclyde, she began research for a doctoral degree on why women offenders were often considered as having mental health issues but spent more time working on her first novel, Garnethill (1998), about a former mental health patient who becomes a suspect in a murder.

Published when Mina was thirty-one, Garnethill won the John Creasey Gold Dagger Award from the Crime Writers’ Association, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Scotland for television. Two subsequent novels in what became known as the Garnethill trilogy, Exile (2000) and Resolution (2001), were also bestsellers in Europe.

A psychological mystery published after the Garnethill series, Sanctum (2002) (released as Deception in the United States), brought Mina greater success in the United States. Inspired by Mina’s academic research on women who develop relationships with men who have committed violent crimes, Deception somewhat humorously traced one man’s efforts to understand his wife’s involvement with a convicted murderer.

Field of Blood (2005) followed, the first in a planned five-part series featuring young Glasgow news reporter Paddy Meehan. Mina was pregnant with her first child while writing Field of Blood. Although friends had warned Mina that pregnancy and motherhood would diminish her interest in gruesome stories of human corruption, Mina portrayed with disturbing realism the novel’s central crime, the murder of a toddler by two older children. Mina felt writing about a shocking crime involving children as perpetrators would allow her to examine problems with Scotland’s treatment and rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. Mina followed Field of Blood with another Paddy Meehan story, The Dead Hour (2006). She ended the series with The Last Breath in 2007. 

Mina deliberately limited the Meehan series so contractual obligations would not force her to keep characters alive after she (or her readers) had tired of them. She had found with the Garnethill trilogy that continually writing about mental illness, drug abuse, and domestic violence had somewhat depressed her.

Mina has continued to write throughout the twenty-first century. In 2009, she introduced a female detective named Alex Morrow, whose professional and personal life Mina would explore in five novels, including Still Midnight (2009), The End of the Wasp Season (2010), Gods and Beasts (2012), The Red Road (2013), and Blood, Salt, Water (2014). Mina also wrote two novels in her Anna & Fin series: Conviction (2019) and Confidence (2022). 

Mina’s work also includes comic books in DC Comics’ Hellblazer series, feature articles, short stories, and plays for live theater and radio. Mina contributed to the graphic novel editions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. She has also written stand-alone novels. She has frequently provided radio and television commentary on film and the arts for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Analysis

In both her Maureen O’Donnell and Paddy Meehan series Denise Mina follows many conventions of mystery and detective fiction. A murder occurs early in each novel and then clues are discovered and compiled until the murderer’s identity is revealed. The reader has the opportunity to notice and interpret clues along with the main character, and they often have additional information that adds to the puzzle but has yet to be discovered by the amateur sleuth.

Both series are set in Glasgow and characterized by authentic, gritty descriptions of the city’s seamy lower-class neighborhoods. Mina often links her characters’ activities and moods to their observations of, and familiarity with, Glasgow’s streets, architecture, and weather. Mina’s use of dialogue enhances the specificity of her local setting, as her characters frequently use slang peculiar to Glasgow residents.

Mina heads each chapter with a cryptic title, the significance and humor of which are revealed in the text. These chapter headings may sum up the main character’s experience and emotional response or focus the reader’s attention on an apparently insignificant detail.

The O’Donnell and Meehan stories are told primarily from the young female protagonists’ points of view. Maureen O’Donnell and Paddy Meehan are not conventionally successful or attractive. Still, their low social positions and frequent lack of regard for their safety allow them to discover facts beyond the reach of professional investigators. Both women tell lies easily and are capable of physical violence, and both are deeply loyal to, and frequently misunderstood by, their families.

Garnethill Trilogy

Maureen O’Donnell is the hero of the three Garnethill novels (Garnethill, Exile, and Resolution). The series follows Maureen, an alcoholic and former mental patient, through the aftermath of her married boyfriend’s murder. She tries to solve the crime while coping with suspicious investigators, shielding her beloved drug-dealing brother from police scrutiny, and struggling with the aftereffects of the sexual abuse she endured as a child.

The series departs from the traditional detective story format in that it contains two story arcs resolved throughout three novels. One involves the central murder mystery. Maureen confronts the killer at the end of the first novel; the official police investigation provides a subplot in the second, while Maureen pursues an unrelated crime; and the murder storyline is resolved in the third, again as a counterpoint to a more traditional mystery.

The second story arc concerns Maureen’s struggles as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and mental illness. In Garnethill, she is recovering from mental health issues; in Exile, her alcoholism becomes more serious, and the rift with her family becomes more acute when she learns that her long-absent abusive father is in Glasgow. Finally, in Resolution, Maureen confronts her fears, makes peace with her family, and seeks sobriety.

Mina explores the effects of sexual abuse on the individual in Maureen’s nightmarish visions of her abusive father, Michael, and her conviction that he is watching and waiting for her. Mina also examines how Maureen’s family responds to her accusations, even though they found her hiding after an incident of abuse, and Michael abandoned the family shortly afterward. Maureen’s mother retreats into alcoholism, and her sisters deny the abuse, even insisting on allowing their father access to Maureen’s baby niece.

Mina reveals Maureen’s addictive personality in her constant need for alcohol and cigarettes and the comfort they give her, only addressing Maureen’s alcoholism as a naked need near the end of the series when her friends attempt an intervention. Although Maureen is a damaged character, she is sympathetic because she feels compassion and responsibility toward others who have been victimized, cares about justice, and maintains close friendships throughout the series.

Paddy Meehan Series

Paddy Meehan is a young newspaper reporter in 1980s Glasgow. Overweight and self-conscious, Paddy constantly wonders what the men in the news office think of her. She is often treated with disdain but holds her own, sparring verbally with male coworkers. Mina created Paddy as a character who would grow and change over time; she also wanted to illustrate the evolution of the male-dominated newspaper industry. Mina planned the series to cover three decades of Paddy’s reporter life.

In the opening pages of Field of Blood (2005), two children murder an even younger child. The crime was based on the 1993 murder in England of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-olds. Paddy’s fiancé Sean is related to one of the murderers, giving Paddy, a gofer at her newspaper, a chance to scoop the real reporters. Paddy ignores the story to protect Sean’s family but relays it to a young woman journalist who prints it. Blamed for the public disgrace and shunned by her family and Sean’s, Paddy involves herself recklessly in the case, interviewing possible witnesses under a false name, planting evidence, and inadvertently leading the murderer to one of her coworkers before the truth behind the murder is revealed.

Sean is a nice Catholic boy who thinks Paddy’s ambitions are too manly and her sexual desires inappropriate for an unmarried woman. Paddy clings to Sean, thinking no one else will have her, but realizes she would rather pursue her career than marry and have children. In Field of Blood, Paddy loses her virginity to a reporter who helps her investigate the child murder; in The Dead Hour (2006), she has sex with a police officer and, in a cliffhanger ending, discovers she is pregnant.

Paddy often makes mistakes that she fears will cost her a relationship or career. In The Dead Hour, Paddy, now working as a real reporter, tries to interview a man at the scene of an apparent domestic dispute, sees a woman with blood on her face in the home behind him, and walks away after the man pushes money into her hand. Paddy tells herself she has no choice but to accept the bribe but expects to lose her credibility and job when it is discovered.

Throughout the series, Paddy pursues an interest in Patrick “Paddy” Connelly Meehan, a real-life safecracker who was falsely convicted of a 1969 murder and later pardoned largely because of the efforts of a journalist who investigated his case. Paddy has been drawn to his story since she was a child and heard his name, just like her own, on the news. She has never believed in Catholicism and feels she substituted Patrick Meehan for Jesus, taking as her inspiration Meehan’s story of injustice and retribution. In The Dead Hour, Paddy is trying to write a book about Patrick Meehan but cannot begin.

Principal Series Characters:

• Maureen O’Donnell, a Glasgow native in her twenties, has survived sexual abuse and a mental breakdown. Once an art history student, Maureen works menial jobs and drinks too much, haunted by memories of her abusive father and struggling to cope with her unsympathetic mother and sisters. She becomes involved in a series of police investigations when her married boyfriend is found murdered in her apartment.
• Patricia “Paddy” Meehan is a young woman from a working-class Irish Catholic family in 1980s Glasgow. She pursues a career in journalism, first as an office gofer and then as a night-shift reporter. Her sharp tongue and fearlessness help her gather information and earn her colleagues’ respect. Overweight, always dieting, and wishing she were more stylish, Paddy is engaged to a conservative Catholic boy who she fears is the only man who will have her, but she decides to forgo marriage in favor of her career.
• Alex Morrow is a female police detective working in Glasgow. She has a fulfilling personal and family life but experiences strife at work due to workplace politics. Morrow solves complex crimes involving themes of corruption and power. 

Bibliography

“Biography — Denise Mina.” Denise Mina, www.denisemina.com/biography. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Clandfield, Peter. “Putting the ’Black’ into ’Tartan Noir.’” In Race and Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story, edited by Julie H. Kim. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005.

“Denise Mina Takes on Philip Marlowe and Chandler's Los Angeles.” CrimeReads, 4 Aug. 2023, crimereads.com/denise-mina-marlowe-interview. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Mina, Denise. “PW Talks with Denise Mina: Tartan Noir.” Interview by Nancy Weber. Publishers Weekly, vol. 252, no. 19, May 2005, p. 40.

Rafferty, Terrence. “Tartan Noir.” GQ: Gentleman’s Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 12, Dec. 2002, p. 184.

Smith, Dinitia. “The Writer Who Is Raising the Bar on Scottish Fiction.” The New York Times, 22 July 2006, p. E6.