Denise Mina had a peripatetic childhood following the career of her father who worked in the oil industry. Her family hail from Scotland, however, and it was in their native Glasgow that she returned to settle in 1986.
Amazingly for an award-winning writer, by that stage she hadn’t caught the reading bug, “I didn’t read at all, I couldn’t read til I was about nine,” she explains, “then I went on a really bad holiday with some girlfriends and I sat and read fantastic books on the beach.”
Those first books weren’t your typical holiday reads, though, she remembers discovering Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude and the Master and Margerita by Mikhail Bulgakov while soaking up the sun but those stories pulled her in. “I just came home and started splitting my giro between all the black-spined Penguin books. I remember Zola all of Evelyn Waugh (although they had an orange spine!) and a lot of Graham Greene.”
She went to night classes to do her Highers and then studied for a Law Degree as a mature student. “I was very aware that it was a privilege to be at university,” she recalls, “If you are grateful to get the chance to study you’ll get more from it than if your parents feel inadequate and you need something to boasts about,” she notes, wryly.
With a PhD in the bag, she then took the plunge to follow her dream of writing for a living. “I thought that everybody wanted to be a writer but I was never really committed to being an academic,” she recalls, “so I thought ‘try to be a writer, fail and you go and get on with being an academic.”
An oral tradition
For Denise, crime fiction was a natural choice, linked with her Glasgow storytelling roots, “I do think crime fictions comes from an oral tradition rather than a written tradition,” she points out. “There is a lot of class overlay in what you are doing.” Of her own writing, she modestly claims, “it’s not as hard as you think if you’re prepared to chance your arm. If you think, ‘I have information to impart to the world: I can tell a better story.’” She says that there s a lot of luck involved and that timing can also be important, “at the time there was a wave of feminist crime fiction. I was just very, very lucky. I saw my chance and took it and it worked!”
Natural talent
Of course her modesty is utterly misplaced and her talent and affinity with the written word resulted in Garnethill, which won the CWA Dagger for Best First Crime Novel.
Her latest novel is a departure from her usual crime writing: a novella commissioned by James Crawford of Birlinn as part of the Darklands series. Rizzio retells the events of one dramatic weekend in the life of Mary Queen of Scots and Denise relished the chance of writing in the novella form: “It is a one sit read.” she enthuses, “I think that books are getting too fat – the books I really love are the books that were written when there was paper rationing. Now If it doesn’t reach 350 pages it doesn’t feel right in your hand.
Told from the perspective of several of the characters involved, the story focuses on a 1566 plot to kill Mary, Queen of Scots’ friend and private secretary David Rizzio. Denise captures the dramas of the sixteenth century intrigue but is glad to link to more contemporaneous themes. “There are so many resonances,” she points out. Not least that, “there is no justice that can reach you if you are rich.”
Denise also loved the idea that she was able to write about the Scottish queen in her own right. “It was nice to tell a story where she isn’t a sidekick to Elizabeth!”
An enigmatic queen
Although people the world over are fascinated by the character of Mary Queen of Scots and loving the time she spent researching the plot for Rizzio, Denise maintains that, “I don’t think you could ever know her. The world around her is fascinating and I was astonished that anyone was interested in the book! I was astonished that people didn’t have difficulty with it and that people went with it – not with the facts so much but with the style.”
Rizzio will be the subject of Denise’s online event for Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s Winter Words later today and she is looking forward to hearing from members of the audience in the Q&A. She admits in person happenings, though, I love meeting members of the audience afterwards. Amazing things happen like people who come up and say we were at school together.”
Later in the year, her new novel Confidence is set for publication. This time she has decided to delve into the world of urban exploring with someone breaking into a chateau and discovering proof of the resurrection.
- Denise Mina will appear via Zoom at Winter Words tonight. 8.30pm.
- Rizzio is out now, £10, Birlinn Ltd.
