CANR
WORK TITLE: The Long Drop
WORK NOTES: McIlvanney Prize
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/21/1966
WEBSITE: http://www.denisemina.co.uk/
CITY: Glasgow
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Scottish
LAST VOLUME: CANR 318
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/denise-mina-looks-inside-the-mind-of-a-psychopath-in-her-chilling-novel-the-long-drop/2017/05/24/149ba558-3a75-11e7-a058-ddbb23c75d82_story.html?utm_term=.d8f6330d2834
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 21, 1966, in Glasgow, Scotland; daughter of Edith and James; partner’s name Steve (a forensic psychologist); children: Fergus, Owen.
EDUCATION:Glasgow University, J.D.; Strathclyde University, postgraduate study.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, playwright, and comic book writer. Formerly worked in a meat factory, as a hospice nurse in geriatric and terminal-care nursing homes, as a bartender, as a cook, and as a university tutor in criminology and criminal law.
AWARDS:John Creasey Memorial Dagger, Crime Writers’ Association, 1998, for best first crime novel, for Garnethill; Macallan Short Story Dagger, Crime Writers’ Association, 1998, for “Helena and the Babies”; Scotland on Sunday/Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award, 2000; Martin Beck Award, 2011, Golden Crow Bar; Crimefest eDunnit Award for Best Crime eBook, 2012, and Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, 2012, Finnish Certificate of Honour for foreign mystery writing, 2013, all for The End of the Wasp Season; inducted into the Crime Writers’ Association Hall of Fame, 2014; McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year, 2017, for The Long Drop.
WRITINGS
Also author of novel Conviction, 2018, and the play Ida Tamson, an adaptation of one of the author’s short stories and produced as part of the Oran Mor “A Play, a Pie, and a Pint” series, Radio 4. Author of the play Driving Manuel and of the performance poem “A Drunk Woman Looks at the Thistle.” Contributor of short stories to anthologies, including Fresh Blood 2, Do-Not Press, 1999, and Crimespotting, Polygon (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2009; short stories and plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
The Field of Blood was filmed by the BBC and broadcast in 2011; The Dead Hour was filmed and broadcast in 2013.
SIDELIGHTS
Scottish novelist Denise Mina entered the literary scene in 1998, winning two awards from the Crime Writers’ Association, one for the short story “Helena and the Babies” and another for her first novel, Garnethill. Since 1998, she has continued to work as a novelist, producing mystery novel series and even graphic novels. In an article in the London Independent, Mina admitted that she felt like she was not a part of the mainstream group of crime-writing authors. She said that she didn’t believe that she “fit into that ‘buy this and read it on the beach’ thing.” She explained: “I mean I don’t care about whodunit, or the chasey bits in stories. But there’s always a question the reader can ask: are they going to get away with it? Did they mean it? Why did they do it? How did that happen? There are so many questions other than who did it—I think that’s really hackneyed. As a reader I don’t like that question, because to sustain it for 300 pages the writer has to withhold information, so it dampens down the intimacy.”
Set in Mina’s native Glasgow, Scotland, Garnethill draws on the author’s experiences as a nurse and a teacher of criminal law to bring a “world of drug dealers, broken families, sanctimonious healthcare workers, and debilitated victims to startling life,” explained a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Garnethill revolves around Maureen O’Donnell, a former sexual abuse victim and mental patient who, eight months after being released from a three-year stay in a psychiatric hospital, awakes to find one of her doctors murdered in her living room. O’Donnell had been having an affair with the doctor, Douglas Brady, and the police, Douglas’s mother, and even Maureen’s mother think that she must be the murderer. Maureen wants to prove her innocence, but to do that she must figure out who would have wanted Douglas dead. In doing so, Maureen uncovers a series of horrid crimes in which Douglas was involved.
The book “is not physically violent,” Katy Munger noted in Washington Post Book World, “but its emotional rawness and visceral honesty pack a punch far more potent than any boxer-turned-PI could provide.”
Exile finds Maureen working at a shelter for victims of domestic abuse and trying to ignore the intimidation directed at her by Douglas’s murderer. A client, Ann Harris, disappears. Her body is later found floating in the Thames River, and Maureen and coworker Leslie decide to investigate her murder. Ann’s boyfriend, Jimmy, who is also Leslie’s cousin, seems to be the prime suspect, but Maureen and Leslie discover that Ann was involved in a drug-smuggling ring.
“Mina … writes with absolute assurance and clarity about mean streets and hard lives,” commented Booklist reviewer Connie Fletcher, and Library Journal contributor Bob Lunn thought that Exile would be “a good suggestion for anyone who appreciates their mysteries dark.”
The third novel in the “Garnethill” trilogy, the appropriately titled Resolution, wraps up the events of Garnethill and Exile while introducing a new mystery. Angus Farrell, the psychologist who murdered Douglas Brady in Garnethill, is facing trial, and Maureen is worried that he may seek revenge for her damaging testimony. Maureen is also concerned about her ability to help care for the baby that her sister Una is expecting, especially since Maureen’s abusive father, Michael, is back in town. Maureen’s major source of income at the moment is illegally selling cigarettes in a flea market, and this job embroils her in another mystery when she agrees to help Ella McGee, a nearly illiterate merchant in a neighboring stall, fill out legal paperwork filing a complaint against Ella’s son, Simon. Then Ella is found beaten to death, and Maureen worries that Simon might come after her as well.
Like Garnethill and Exile, Resolution is “powerful, disturbing, wrenching,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. However, Times Literary Supplement contributor Natasha Cooper discerned a different side to the novel. “Mina re-creates this grim world with absolute credibility,” Cooper explained, “but also with wit and a warmth rare in even the most optimistic of cozy crime novels. There are few writers who could bring off so tricky a balancing act.”
The Field of Blood introduces new series character Patricia “Paddy” Meehan, a young female reporter on a Glasgow newspaper who battles her weight, her insincere colleagues, and her own concepts of good and evil. The eighteen-year-old Paddy has a strong moral sensibility and a keen wit, and she is particularly intolerant of injustice. Her position on the paper, however, consists of being little more than a gofer and the object of jokes and taunts by senior colleagues and practicing reporters.
A brutal murder involving three young boys involves her in a dangerous investigation. Three-year-old Brian Wilcox is dead, having been lured to his death in a remote field by two slightly older boys, ten and eleven years old, who beat him to death and left his body on a train track. Shaken by the nature of the crime, she is further shocked to realize that one of the boys involved in the murder is related to her fiancé, Sean Ogilvy. Paddy inadvertently tells another reporter, Heather Allen, about the connection, and Heather does a story on it, causing Paddy some conflict with her own family. Drawn in by the personal connection and convinced that the police are not doing their job, Paddy joins up with fellow reporter Terry Hewitt, known to be particularly scornful of Paddy’s weight, and takes up her own investigation into the sensational crime. In pursuing her investigation, Paddy does not mind impersonating the blonde, beautiful Heather Allen on the phone, but this masquerade eventually has deadly consequences. In the background, another case unfolds: that of another Paddy Meehan, a criminal recently released from seven years in solitary confinement.
“Mina is a ruthlessly accomplished surgeon of souls who can strip her living characters as bare as Patricia Cornwell does her corpses,” commented a Kirkus Reviews critic. She “spins the complexities in the rough music of her working-class Scots, unsparing of brutal details, but unfailingly elegant in her humanity,” remarked a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Throughout Mina’s story, “the character development is lovely and the eye for Glaswegian detail wonderful,” commented Daniel Fierman in Entertainment Weekly.
Paddy Meehan returns in The Dead Hour. Now a crime reporter for the Scottish Daily News, she still takes abuse about her weight and her junior status from her older, more jaded newspaper colleagues, who call her such names as “wee hen.” Paddy inadvertently becomes involved in bribery when she investigates a domestic disturbance report during her rounds. Arriving at the scene at an upscale residence, Paddy sees the police take a bribe from the man who answered the door. As she works to ask a few questions, Paddy sees an obviously abused woman standing behind the man. Abruptly, he presses a bloody fifty-pound banknote into her hand and shuts the door. Bewildered, Paddy leaves with the much-needed money, but realizes afterward that it will look like she has taken a bribe to back off from the story. She fears she will lose the job that supports her family if her editor finds out about the bribe, and there is little comfort for her in the fact that the police also accepted hush-money. Paddy’s worry turns to guilt when the battered woman she saw is found dead, her teeth extracted and the back of her head bashed in. When the police decide that a dead man they pull from the river is the killer, Paddy realizes that the drowned suicide is not the same man who gave her the money and in all likelihood is not the murderer. Determined to find the truth and bring the killer to justice, Paddy strikes off on her own focused and single-minded investigation.
In her second appearance, Paddy “holds up as a refreshingly realistic character that readers will eagerly embrace—warts, neuroses, and all,” observed Booklist reviewer Frank Sennett. A Publishers Weekly contributor called Paddy “one of the most entertaining reporter sleuths in recent crime fiction.” This novel, noted Janet Maslin in the New York Times, “takes its heroine a long way. She is nobody’s hen by the end of the story. With regret but determination, she has edged at least part of the way out of the Meehan nest. And she is moving into the boys’ club dominated by her male colleagues.” As a writer, Mina “meticulously creates a bleak, Dostoevskian world abandoned by light and spirit, populating it with sharply drawn characters,” commented a Kirkus Reviews critic.
Slip of the Knife, published in England as The Last Breath, takes place ten years later and finds Paddy nearing thirty, still battling her weight, and writing a popular column for her newspaper after paying her dues in lesser positions. Paddy is now an unwed mother with a five-year-old son, Peter. She has moved out of the home of her Irish-Catholic family (a minority in Glasgow) and into a shared apartment with her friend Dub McKenzie. Her brothers have gone to England, and her guilt-ridden sister Mary Ann has entered the convent. Paddy is weary of the sermons and intrusions into their lives by the parish priest.
Paddy learns from the police that Terry Hewitt, with whom she had a relationship, has been killed—found naked, shot in the head, and dumped in a ditch. The IRA (Irish Republican Army) is suspected but denies responsibility. When Terry’s photographer friend Kevin Hatcher is also found dead, allegedly of a drug overdose, and the police refuse to initiate an investigation, Paddy begins one of her own.
Terry has left Paddy his country house, which contains his papers, clippings, photographs, and notes, and she hopes to find clues in these that will link his death to the IRA. The photographs were to be used for a book, and someone is also after them. Paddy is roughed up, the life of her son is threatened, and another death occurs, this time it is a woman who is stabbed. Callum Ogilvy, the child murderer, is released from prison, perhaps now more dangerous than ever. Paddy receives warnings from a “Michael Collins” (Michael Collins, 1890-1922, was an Irish revolutionary), who wants the photographs in Paddy’s possession.
Reviewing Slip of the Knife for the International Noir Fiction Web site, Glenn Harper noted that the emphasis of this story is on family. Harper wrote that the “mother-son relationship is the center of the novel, rather than the plot itself: this is not a novel of action but of character portraits of tense, threatened people (well drawn and entirely believable).” A Publishers Weekly contributor concluded: “This gripping read, with its intricate plotting and realistic regional dialogue, will leave even the most astute reader guessing until the end.”
Writing for the January website, M. Wayne Cunningham commented: “With the subtlety and intensity of a dervish wielding a dentist’s drill, Meehan bores into the lives of the people around her who threaten her serenity.” Cunningham continued: “Even when the reader of Slip of the Knife knows, or at least thinks he or she knows, what will happen next, it is impossible not to read voraciously on in order to discover the meticulously specific details that author Mina is about to reveal. This book’s conclusion, in which Paddy confronts Terry Hewitt’s killer, is a particularly chilling example of how the reader can be snared by the author’s prose.”
In contrast to the “Garnethill” novels, Deception (published in England as Sanctum ) is set in middle-class Scotland, where, again, the topic is murder. Lachlan Harriot’s wife, Susie, a forensic psychiatrist, has been convicted of murdering a serial killer who was in her care, and Lachlan is going through her papers trying to build an appeal both to the murder conviction and to the accusation that Susie had a sexual relationship with the man. The story is told through Lachlan’s diaries and through documents that he finds in Susie’s study, including e-mails, newspaper stories, and records of court proceedings. As he pores through Susie’s papers and other materials, Lachlan uncovers more and more unpleasant secrets about his wife, yet neither the protagonist nor the narrator are sure if these secrets are true. Mina also recounts the couple’s early life together and how Lachlan gave up his job to become caretaker for their daughter, Margie. His efforts to find material that will prove his wife’s innocence are diverted by a fling with the couple’s au pair, Yeni.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer described Lachlan as a “charming, comic, intelligent narrator,” someone who “might happily see his wife rot in prison, not for murder, but for the greater sin of rejecting him.” Lachlan “is a wonderfully, engrossingly, unreliable narrator,” Heather O’Donoghue wrote in Times Literary Supplement, adding that he “is an extraordinary creation, a mixture of raw, touching frankness and hilarious creepiness; but heartbreaking at the same time.” O’Donoghue continued: “Mina’s tour de force is a daring and perfectly unequivocal shift of emphasis away from the question of who did the murder” and toward Lachlan’s increasing suspicion that his wife loathed him. With Lachlan as the focus, the book is “as much an intriguing character study as it is an expertly plotted mystery,” observed Ellen Shapiro in People. A Kirkus Reviews critic named Deception “a memorable portrait of a foundering marriage, as well as an unnervingly accomplished puzzler: the best yet from a still-rising star.” Entertainment Weekly reviewer Ken Tucker styled it a “stand-alone shocker that’s exhilarating in its energetic, witty sordidness.” Mina’s novel is “simply brilliant,” declared a reviewer for the London Observer.
Mina, who has also written for comics, published her first stand-alone graphic novel with the 2010 A Sickness in the Family. The work features the Usher family, who, as Keir Graff wrote in Booklist, “put the dys in dysfunctional.” Each of the family members is troubled in his or her own way and bickering is the order of the day, but things become even worse in the household when members of the family begin dying in unusual circumstances. Young Sam, the adopted son of the family and the only one to demonstrate human compassion, investigates, only to be confronted with dark evil.
Barbara M. Moon, writing in School Library Journal, called this a “suspenseful tale of a haunted house, a dysfunctional family, and, ultimately, horror.” Graff also noted that Mina’s “plotting and pacing … kick this into high gear.” Similarly, a Publishers Weekly reviewer termed A Sickness in the Family a “creepy, taut tale of family greed that leads to murder.”
Mina inaugurates a new series featuring Glasgow police inspector Detective Sergeant Alex Morrow with Still Midnight. Two thugs hired to kidnap a man named Bob seriously mess up their commission when they invade a suburban Glasgow home, take a Ugandan-born owner of a failing convenience shop, and shoot the man’s teenage daughter in the hand. Now they are demanding a two-million-pound ransom as a sort of revenge for Afghanistan. The problem is that the shopkeeper is named Aamir Anwar and not Bob, and he seems to have no connection to Afghanistan. The case goes to DS Grant Bannerman when in fact Alex is next in line. But Alex digs into the case anyway, providing clues to her archenemy, Bannerman, clues he happily tosses aside. Alex’s home life is not much better than her professional one, with a husband who blames her for his failures.
Writing in Booklist, Thomas Gaughan found the novel a “stunning portrait of transcendent bleakness,” as well as “grim but compelling.” Similarly, a Kirkus Reviews contributor felt that this novel provides “little suspense, less mystery, but a startling exploration of characters who stubbornly refuse to stay in the boxes they’ve been assigned.” Further praise came from a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who thought that Mina “laces this potent crime thriller with colorful Scottish slang and delivers a sucker-punch climax.”
DS Alex Morrow investigates again in The End of the Wasp Season. Pregnant with twins, Alex is faced with numerous murders almost at once. First comes the death of Sarah Errol, kicked to death in her home in an upscale Glasgow suburb. At first it seems that this might be a burglary gone wrong, for the police find over half a million euros hidden in the home. Alex has little time to wonder about this, however, for soon news comes of another death: Lars Anderson, a wealthy banker, has been found hanging from an oak tree outside his posh estate. Alex tries to find the connection between these two cases, learning more about Sarah in the process: it seems she earned her money as a high-class prostitute, and that she and Anderson were lovers. To make things even more complicated for Alex, her private life again intrudes when her father dies. Soon suspicion falls on Anderson’s fifteen-year-old son in this second installment of the “Alex Morrow Mystery” series.
Booklist contributor Allison Block offered a mixed assessment of this series addition, noting that while Mina is a “master of psychological suspense, … her latest offering is a bit long on psychology and short on suspense.” A Kirkus Reviews writer similarly noted that The End of the Wasp Season is “not exactly a model of plot construction.” However, the writer went on to note that readers come to Mina for novels that take you “so deep inside her troubled characters that long after you turn the last page, you wonder if you’ll ever get out again.” Higher praise came from a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who dubbed it “stellar” and a “memorable police procedural.” Likewise, Marilyn Stasio, writing in the New York Times Book Review, described the series as “realistically gritty procedurals … featuring a gutsy cop named Alex Morrow,” and called Mina’s work “extraordinarily rich and unpredictable.”
The third novel in the “Alex Morrow Mystery” series, Gods and Beasts, was published in 2013. Strathclyde’s police department finds itself in a rut after two police officers are filmed stealing money from a random driver. Meanwhile, a robbery goes wrong when a retiree is shot and a local MP is caught with an underage girl. With some trouble, Alex wades her way through each case, linking them in the end.
Reviewing the novel in the London Independent, Doug Johnstone remarked that “one of the best things about her crime novels is her natural tendency to duck out of the way of the genre’s clichés. So there are no maverick cops playing by their own rules here.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews suggested: “Though the final surprise doesn’t have the snap of logical inevitability, it’s depressingly realistic.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly called the novel “excellent.” Booklist contributor Block claimed that the author “once again demonstrates her command of the police procedural, creating a compelling cast of characters.” In a review in Library Journal, Annabel Mortensen commented that “fans of smart, character-driven procedurals will want to snatch this one up.”
Mina published the novel The Red Road in 2014. Fourteen-year-old prostitute Rose kills her pimp and another man but is saved from any serious jail time by lawyer Julius Macmillan. She later becomes Julius’s assistant and nanny to his grandchildren. Meanwhile, Michael Brown is shadily implicated in the killings and serves a long prison term, only to be released as a career criminal. Julius has since died, his son Robert is missing, and a charitable aid worker has been found stabbed to death in his Red Road apartment. While managing her one-year-old twins, Alex gets involved in each of these cases.
Writing in the Vancouver Province, Tracy Sherlock opined that “ The Red Road mystery is a compelling story in its own right, but it’s Mina’s insightful and incisive view into human frailty that makes her stories so perceptive and astute.” In a review in the Scotsman, Allan Massie noticed: “Remarkably, in the dark world Mina portrays with bitter relish, there is a place for love. … If The Red Road is, as I say, a disturbing novel, this is because Denise Mina never allows the reader to attain the comfort of having a settled view of her characters. You might say her subject is the complexity of human nature.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews found that “in addition to the usual indelible character studies, Mina provides the most compelling plot of Alex’s four cases to date.”
Alex appears again in Blood, Salt, Water, and this time she is investigating a woman suspected of insurance fraud. Alex has been tailing Roxanna Fuentecilla in search of evidence that she stole and laundered millions through her insurance company. Then Roxanna goes missing, and cell phone records reveal Roxanna’s last known location, the small town of Helensburgh. Alex teams with Detective Constable Howard McGrain and heads to Helensburgh to investigate, and they unearth secrets that go far beyond insurance fraud.
A Publishers Weekly critic praised the novel, asserting that it “exposes the bleakness of small-town Scotland as skillfully as it does the bustling mean streets of Glasgow.” Christine Tran, writing in Booklist, was also impressed, and she announced that “Mina’s gift at unveiling the relatable quandaries, desires, and missteps that create criminals provides an irresistible hook.” Indeed, London Guardian columnist Stuart Kelly felt that “Mina is one of the most fiercely intelligent of crime writers, and in her hands, the crime novel becomes an indictment rather than an entertainment. That the murderer we meet on the first page turns out to be one of the few characters the reader feels sympathy for is testament to how brilliantly intricate and psychologically complex her books are.”
Mina explores the mid-twentieth-century world of Glasgow in The Long Drop. “The story, narrated in the present tense,” declared Roland Person, writing Library Journal, “alternates chapters between the end of 1957 … and … May 1958.” It features William Watt, a Glasgow businessman whose wife has just been horribly murdered, his lawyer Laurence Dowdall, and a criminal named Peter Manuel. Watt is a suspect in his wife’s murder, and he and Dowdall believe that Manuel has evidence that could exonerate him. “With knifelike precision,” wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “Mina flicks between the bizarre 12 hours Watt and Manuel spend together getting drunk.” Months later, Manuel is on trial for the murder, but it has become evident that Watt himself is somehow complicit. “The [final] answer matters less than the method,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “as women’s lives are degraded, publicly and privately, physically and spiritually, to preserve the ranks of those hard men.”
Critics celebrated Mina’s work. “This stand-alone thriller,” said Christine Tran in Booklist, “showcases Mina at her best, capturing the nuanced psychological suspense and ethical shadows of her Alex Morrow series.” “The narrator of The Long Drop sees far beyond the daily grime and grisly events of the late 1950s and, yet, mostly keeps mum, leaving readers to stumble with detectives through the fug of half-truths and lies that enshroud the story of Peter Manuel and his patsy or prey or possible partner-in-crime, William Watt,” concluded Maureen Corrigan in the Washington Post Book World. “The Long Drop takes readers on a suspenseful tour into the past, through psyches and situations far grimmer than even those sooty Glasgow streets.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 1999, Budd Arthur, review of Garnethill, p. 1483; January 1, 2001, Connie Fletcher, review of Exile, p. 925; July, 2004, Connie Fletcher, review of Deception, p. 1825; June 1, 2005, Connie Fletcher, review of The Field of Blood, p. 1761; May 1, 2006, Frank Sennett, review of The Dead Hour, p. 36; December 15, 2007, Allison Block, review of Slip of the Knife, p. 30; February 15, 2010, Thomas Gaughan, review of Still Midnight, p. 44; September 15, 2010, Keir Graff, review of A Sickness in the Family, p. 56; September 15, 2011, Allison Block, review of The End of the Wasp Season, p. 28; December 1, 2012, Allison Block, review of Gods and Beasts, p. 28; October 15, 2015, Christine Tran, review of Blood, Salt, Water; February 15, 2017, Christine Tran, review of The Long Drop, p. 33.
Books, Christmas, 2002, review of Sanctum, p. 21.
Boston Globe, February 11, 2008, Clea Simon, review of Slip of the Knife.
Entertainment Weekly, August 20, 2004, Ken Tucker, review of Deception, p. 133; July 15, 2005, Daniel Fierman, review of The Field of Blood, p. 79; July 1, 2006, Adam B. Vary and Will Boisvert, “In the Corpse of Human Events,” review of The Dead Hour, p. 83; February 15, 2008, Jennifer Reese, review of Slip of the Knife, p. 68.
Guardian (London, England), June 11, 2011, Joanna Hines, review of Resolution; July 20, 2012, Alison Flood, “Denise Mina Wins Crime Novel of the Year Award”; August 12, 2015, Stuart Kelly review of Blood, Salt, Water.
Hollywood Reporter, June 12, 2006, Jerry Bartell, “Women, Take Your Mark,” review of The Dead Hour, p. 14.
Independent (London, England), August 6, 2009, Barry Forshaw, review of Still Midnight; July 28, 2013, Doug Johnstone, “Denise Mina: The Inside Track on an Outsider”; July 29, 2012, Doug Johnstone, review of Gods and Beasts.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1999, review of Garnethill, p. 334; May 1, 2002, review of Resolution, p. 620; June 15, 2004, review of Deception, p. 560; May 15, 2005, review of The Field of Blood, p. 566; June 1, 2006, review of The Dead Hour, p. 551; December 1, 2007, review of Slip of the Knife; February 15, 2010, review of Still Midnight; August 1, 2011, review of The End of the Wasp Season; January 1, 2013, review of Gods and Beasts; February 15, 2014, review of The Red Road; February 15, 2017, review of The Long Drop.
Library Journal, March 15, 1999, Bob Lunn, review of Garnethill, p. 110; February 15, 2001, Bob Lunn, review of Exile, p. 202; May 15, 2002, Bob Lunn, review of Resolution, p. 126; July, 2004, Michele Leber, review of Deception, p. 72; June 15, 2005, Bob Lunn, review of The Field of Blood, p. 59; June 15, 2006, Jane la Plante, review of The Dead Hour, p. 64; January 1, 2008, Jane la Plante, review of Slip of the Knife, p. 86; August 1, 2010, Annabelle Mortensen, review of The End of the Wasp Season, p. 85; December 1, 2012, Annabel Mortensen, review of Gods and Beasts, p. 81; February 1, 2017, Roland Person, review of The Long Drop, p. 75.
MBR Bookwatch, May 1, 2008, Melissa LaMunyon, review of Slip of the Knife.
New York Times, July 17, 2006, Janet Maslin, “Learning to Dance through the Ethical Quicksand,” review of The Dead Hour, p. E6; July 22, 2006, Dinitia Smith, “The Writer Who Is Raising the Bar on Scottish Fiction,” profile of Denise Mina, p. B7.
New York Times Book Review, June 3, 2001, review of Exile, p. 31; June 23, 2002, Marilyn Stasio, review of Resolution, p. 18; July 10, 2005, Marilyn Stasio, review of The Field of Blood, p. 31, and Ihsan Taylor, review of Deception, p. 32; November 6, 2011, Marilyn Stasio, review of The End of the Wasp Season, p. 22.
Observer (London, England), December 29, 2002, review of Sanctum, p. 16.
People, August 23, 2004, Ellen Shapiro, review of Deception, p. 49; August 1, 2005, Joe Heim, review of The Field of Blood, p. 43; July 10, 2006, “Summer’s Hottest Reads,” review of The Dead Hour, p. 51.
Province (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), February 20, 2014, Tracy Sherlock, review of The Red Road.
Publishers Weekly, March 1, 1999, review of Garnethill, p. 63; January 1, 2001, review of Exile, p. 70; April 29, 2002, review of Resolution, p. 45; July 26, 2004, review of Deception, p. 39; May 9, 2005, review of The Field of Blood, p. 37, and Nancy Weber, “Tartan Noir,” interview with Denise Mina, p. 40; May 8, 2006, review of The Dead Hour, p. 46; December 3, 2007, review of Slip of the Knife, p. 49; January 25, 2010, review of Still Midnight, p. 93; August 30, 2010, review of A Sickness in the Family, p. 36; July 25, 2011, review of The End of the Wasp Season, p. 25; December 3, 2012, review of Gods and Beasts, p. 57; November 4, 2013, review of Gods and Beasts, p. 26; October 19, 2015, review of Blood, Salt, Water; March 13, 2017, review of The Long Drop, p. 59.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, April 1, 2005, review of Deception.
School Library Journal, March, 2011, Barbara M. Moon, review of A Sickness in the Family, p. 191.
Scotland on Sunday, April 23, 2006, Mark Fisher, “Careful with that Axe …,” interview with Denise Mina.
Scotsman (Edinburgh, Scotland), July 1, 2013, Allan Massie, review of The Red Road.
Times Literary Supplement, December 14, 2001, Natasha Cooper, review of Resolution, p. 20; January 17, 2003, Heather O’Donoghue, review of Sanctum, p. 20.
Washington Post Book World, June 20, 1999, Katy Munger, review of Garnethill, p. 6; May 24, 2017, Maureen Corrigan, “Denise Mina Looks Inside the Mind of a Psychopath in Her Chilling Novel ‘The Long Drop.'”
ONLINE
BBC News Online, http://news.bbc.co.uk/ (March 10, 2007), “Denise Mina.”
BookLoons, http://www.bookloons.com/ (February 18, 2009), Hilary Williamson, review of Slip of the Knife.
Bookreporter.com, http://www.bookreporter.com/ (February 18, 2009), Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum, review of Slip of the Knife.
Contemporary Writers, http://www.contemporarywriters.com/ (March 10, 2007), “Denise Mina.”
Crime Time, http://www.crimetime.co.uk/ (March 10, 2007), “Sexual Slavery in Glasgow: Denise Mina on Her Work, Resolution.”
Curled Up with a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/ (February 18, 2009), Luan Gaines, review of Slip of the Knife.
Denise Mina Website, http://www.denisemina.com (October 20, 2017), author profile.
Euro Crime, http://www.eurocrime.co.uk/ (February 18, 2009), Amanda Brown, review of The Last Breath.
International Noir Fiction, http://internationalnoir.blogspot.com/ (June 1, 2008), Glenn Harper, review of Slip of the Knife.
January, http://januarymagazine.com/ (February 18, 2009), M. Wayne Cunningham, review of Slip of the Knife.
Literary Hub, http://lithub.com/ (May 23, 2017), Daneet Steffens, “Denise Mina: Telling the True Crime Stories of Gritty Glasgow.”
Mostly Fiction, http://www.mostlyfiction.com/ (April 9, 2008), Poornima Apte, review of Slip of the Knife.
Petrona, http://petronatwo.wordpress.com/ (April 17, 2010), review of Still Midnight; (November 30, 2011), review of The End of the Wasp Season.*
Series
Garnethill
1. Garnethill (1998)
2. Exile (2000)
3. Resolution (2001)
Paddy Meehan
1. The Field of Blood (2005)
2. The Dead Hour (2006)
3. Slip of the Knife (2007)
aka The Last Breath
Alex Morrow
1. Still Midnight (2009)
2. The End of the Wasp Season (2011)
3. Gods and Beasts (2012)
4. The Red Road (2013)
5. Blood, Salt, Water (2015)
Novels
Sanctum (2002)
aka Deception
The Long Drop (2017)
Conviction (2018)
Collections
Crimespotting (2009) (with Lin Anderson, Kate Atkinson, Margaret Atwood, Chris Brookmyre, John Burnside, Isla Dewar, A L Kennedy, Ian Rankin and James Robertson)
Shattered (2009) (with Lin Anderson, Allan Guthrie and Louise Welsh)
Bloody Scotland (2017) (with Lin Anderson, Chris Brookmyre, Ann Cleeves, Doug Johnstone, Stuart MacBride, Val McDermid, Peter May, Craig Robertson and Sara Sheridan)
Graphic Novels
A Sickness in the Family (2010)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Book 1 (2012)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Book 2 (2013)
The Girl Who Played with Fire (2014)
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (2015)
Series contributed to
John Constantine, Hellblazer
Empathy is the Enemy (2006)
The Red Right Hand (2007)
Elsewhere (with Julia Donaldson and Michael Morpurgo)
4. Everywhere (2012)
Bibliomysteries
Every Seven Years (2015)
Denise Mina
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Denise Mina
Born
1966 (age 50–51)
Glasgow, Scotland
Nationality
Scottish
Genre
Crime fiction
Website
www.denisemina.co.uk
Denise Mina (born 1966) is a Scottish crime writer and playwright. She has written the Garnethill trilogy and another three novels featuring the character Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, a Glasgow journalist. Described as an author of Tartan Noir, she has also dabbled in comic book writing, having recently written 13 issues of Hellblazer.[1] Since 2006, she has had two plays performed with unsuccessful reception.
Mina's first Paddy Mehan novel, The Field of Blood, was filmed by the BBC for broadcast in 2011, and stars Jayd Johnson, Peter Capaldi and David Morrissey.[2] The second, The Dead Hour was filmed and broadcast in 2013.[3]
Contents [hide]
1
Biography
2
Awards and honors
3
Bibliography
3.1
Novels
3.2
Comics
3.3
Plays
3.4
Radio plays
3.5
Comic collections and graphic novels
4
Notes
5
External links
Biography[edit]
Denise Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966. Her father worked as an engineer. Because of his work, the family moved 21 times in 18 years: from Paris to The Hague, London, Scotland and Bergen. Mina left school at sixteen and worked in a variety of low-skilled jobs, including: bar maid, kitchen porter and cook. She also worked for a time in a meat processing factory. In her twenties she worked in auxiliary nursing for geriatric and terminal care patients before returning to education and earning a law degree from Glasgow University.[4]
It was while researching a PhD thesis on the ascription of mental illness to female offenders, and teaching criminology and criminal law at Strathclyde University in the 1990s, that she decided to write her first novel Garnethill, published in 1998 by Transworld.
Mina lives in Glasgow.
Awards and honors[edit]
1998 John Creasy Dagger for Best First Crime Novel, Garnethill
2011 The Martin Beck Award (Bästa till svenska översatta kriminalroman), The End of the Wasp Season[5]
2012 Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, The End of the Wasp Season[6]
Bibliography[edit]
Denise Mina signing books at the Edinburgh International Book Festival
Novels[edit]
Garnethill trilogy
Garnethill (1998)
Exile (2000)
Resolution (2001)
Patricia "Paddy" Meehan novels
The Field of Blood (2005)
The Dead Hour (2006)
The Last Breath (2007) - published as Slip of the Knife in America
Alex Morrow novels
Still Midnight (2009)
The End of the Wasp Season (2010)
Gods and Beasts (2012)
The Red Road (2013)
Blood, Salt, Water (2014)
Other novels
Sanctum (2003) (published as Deception in the US in 2004)
The Long Drop (2017)
Conviction (2018)
Comics[edit]
Hellblazer, # 216-228 (DC Comics, 2006–2007)
"Empathy is the Enemy" collected Hellblazer issues 216–222
"The Red Right Hand" collected Hellblazer issues 223–228
Plays[edit]
Ida Tamson (2006)
A Drunk Woman Looks at the Thistle (2007), inspired by Hugh MacDiarmid's long modernist poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, and first performed by Karen Dunbar.
Radio plays[edit]
The Meek, BBC Radio 3, 7 March 2009
Comic collections and graphic novels[edit]
Hellblazer
Hellblazer: Empathy Is the Enemy. Vertigo. 2006.
Hellblazer: The Red Right Hand. Vertigo. 2007.
A Sickness in the Family. Vertigo Crime. Vertigo. 2010. ISBN 978-1401210816.
Millennium
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Millennium Trilogy. 1st. Vertigo. 2012. ISBN 978-1401235574.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Millennium Trilogy. 2nd. Vertigo. 2013. ISBN 978-1401235581.
Denise Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966. Because of her father's job as an engineer, the family followed the north sea oil boom of the seventies around Europe, moving twenty one times in eighteen years from Paris to the Hague, London, Scotland and Bergen. She left school at sixteen and did a number of poorly paid jobs: working in a meat factory, bar maid, kitchen porter and cook. Eventually she settle in auxiliary nursing for geriatric and terminal care patients.
At twenty one she passed exams, got into study Law at Glasgow University and went on to research a PhD thesis at Strathclyde University on the ascription of mental illness to female offenders, teaching criminology and criminal law in the mean time.
Misusing her grant she stayed at home and wrote a novel, 'Garnethill' when she was supposed to be studying instead.
'Garnethill' won the Crime Writers' Association John Creasy Dagger for the best first crime novel and was the start of a trilogy completed by 'Exile' and 'Resolution'.
A fourth novel followed, a stand alone, named 'Sanctum' in the UK and 'Deception' in the US.
In 2005 'The Field of Blood' was published, the first of a series of five books following the career and life of journalist Paddy Meehan from the newsrooms of the early 1980s, through the momentous events of the nineteen nineties. The second in the series was published in 2006, 'The Dead Hour' and the third will follow in 2007.
She also writes comics and wrote 'Hellblazer', the John Constantine series for Vertigo, for a year, published soon as graphic novels called 'Empathy is the Enemy' and 'The Red Right Hand'. She has also written a one-off graphic novel about spree killing and property prices called 'A Sickness in the Family' (DC Comics forthcoming).
In 2006 she wrote her first play, "Ida Tamson" an adaptation of a short story which was serialised in the Evening Times over five nights. The play was part of the Oran Mor 'A Play, a Pie and a Pint' series, starred Elaine C. Smith and was, frankly, rather super.
As well as all of this she writes short stories published various collections, stories for BBC Radio 4, contributes to TV and radio as a big red face at the corner of the sofa who interjects occasionally, is writing a film adaptation of Ida Tamson and has a number of other projects on the go.
Denise Mina: Telling the True Crime Stories of Gritty Glasgow
On Fictionalizing the Infamous Peter Manuel Murders
May 23, 2017 By Daneet Steffens
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“Alternative points of view, that’s what I’m really interested in,” says Scottish crime-fiction writer Denise Mina. “When I look at my career it looks kind of fractured, but I was very influenced by the Guerrilla Girls, women artists and activists who dress up in gorilla masks and campaign about women in the arts. I studied art history at university and one of the things you become very aware of, as a woman writer, is that you’re not very likely to be remembered or put in the histories. So you might as well do whatever the hell you want. Sometimes people turn things down like cooking programs because they think, ‘Well I’m a writer; I don’t want to do those other things.’ As a writer, when I started, I thought, ‘I’m just going to do projects that I fancy.’
And indeed she has. Since 1998, when her debut novel, Garnethill, was published—promptly scooping up the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasy Dagger for Best First Crime Novel—Mina has been dexterously turning her authorial hand to comic books (Hellblazer); graphic novel adaptations (Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy); documentary films (including Multum in Parvum/Much In Little, a marvelously life-affirming ode to her family); and plays (such as Peter Manuel: Meet Me, the first iteration of her newest novel The Long Drop). But for the crime-fiction author—one of the most skillful of contemporary writers when it comes to successfully injecting critical social issues into her writing—it’s prose that has her heart.
Working on comic books and graphic novels is fascinating as a writing exercise, says Mina, speaking from her home in Glasgow via Skype. “It tells you how much you can leave out, something you don’t think about in prose: in prose, you think you have to describe things. You think, ‘I’d best put it in, because maybe people won’t know that it’s implied.’ But one of the things about writing for comic books is that it’s very, very disciplined—you have to think about page position for a particular scene and you have to think about page-turning, so you’re thinking much more of the mechanics of it. Also, with comics you do imagine so much of it yourself, you know? As a reader, you have to fill in all those spaces. And you can’t have very much dialogue in comics because you’ll obscure the pictures. It’s such a tight format.”
That format, she notes, has had its impact on her own approach to novel-writing, deeply apparent in the often-circumscribed sentences of The Long Drop. “When you go back to writing prose,” she says, “you realize, that, ‘Well, if I say, “He threw the axe,” and then I say, “She fell with an axe in her,” the reader will fill that space in.’ You don’t have to describe the axe hurtling through the air, you know? It really has fundamentally changed my approach to writing, how much I trust the reader and how much I appreciate that the reader doing more work means they’ll be much more invested in your work. But it’s funny because when I started writing comics, when I started writing Hellblazer in 2004 or 2005, people thought writing comics was writing for people who couldn’t read. People felt sorry for me for writing comics—except for people who read comics, like Ian Rankin. He wasn’t sorry for me. But other people thought it was like a bar job for a writer who couldn’t make a living. And that’s changed so quickly.”
“Serial killers are idiots! The reality is that they’re psychopathic idiots!”
That openness to working in other formats, she says, has paid off; as a writer, she has always drawn from anything she finds stimulating, channeling that energy into a wide-ranging roster of writing projects. “Everything feeds my prose,” she says. “I’ve written films and for TV, and I’ve written comics and plays and documentaries, but it really all feeds back into the prose because that’s really the thing I want to do. I mean we always talk about it as if we had a business plan when we started off, but as a writer, you’re really just responding to a compulsion, aren’t you?”
That compulsion most recently led to The Long Drop, Mina’s imaginative re-telling of an infamous real-life murder trial writ large across 1950s Glasgow: in 1958, Peter Manuel was found guilty and hanged for killing seven people, including the family of businessman William Watt. Mina’s novel recreates a real encounter, a 1957 night when Watt met Manuel, and the two men spent 12 hours together, drinking, talking and colliding with Glasgow gangsters. It’s a focused, heavily researched piece of history, but the book is also full of intense moments in which real-life and the novelist’s imagination merge, bringing peripheral characters tangibly to life. This swath of people affected by casual, domestic and formal wartime violence, includes Billy Fullerton, a lifelong beater of other men and his own wife (“In a city that reveres angry men Billy Fullerton is a god.”); Maurice Dickov, an opportunistic gambling-club owner who encourages others to do his dirty work and then slimily insinuates himself safely away; a policeman investigating a murder that sets off his PTSD (“The officer cannot move. His throat throbs. He cannot swallow. This officer fought through the Low Countries with the Scots Greys. He saw bits of people, bits of children, leftover bits, burnt bits. Back then he prayed to a God he still feared but no longer loved he prayed never, ever to feel this again. But now he has.”); and, perhaps most strikingly, the pre-Clean Air Act city of Glasgow (“Above the roofs every chimney belches black smoke. Rain drags smut down over the city like a mourning mantilla.”)
“Some of those things are novelistic imaginings,” says Mina, “but a lot of them are just true. For me this was really a look at the serial-killer story. I think the most interesting thing about those stories is the people around them. It’s not the person themselves—they usually just had a brain injury or were just getting away with it, or are just sick or really unpleasant people. I’m interested in the way we respond to it, because it’s quite a new story, but it has really taken hold and there are a lot of myths within it, like the one about the killers wanting to be caught, or the way serial killers are always presented as though they know more than everyone else. They’re idiots! The reality is that they’re psychopathic idiots!”
Part of Mina’s research involved mapping the sites of the various pubs and clubs that Watt and Manuel visited on their night together, including Dickov’s Gordon Club. “That club was real and everybody went. And then it was shut down and somebody whose dad was a cop told me that the club they moved up to is what is now King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, which is a really famous music venue—it’s where Oasis were discovered. It used to be called the Saints & Sinners because it was cops and gangsters who went there. The thing about Glasgow,” Mina continues, “is that everyone tells stories, so if you listen hard enough you do hear these things.”
In fact, Mina got an earful when Peter Manuel: Meet Me debuted. “The play was on in Glasgow, about this innocent man out for a drink with the murderer of his family. But a lot of pensioners came up to me afterwards and said, ‘You’ve got that story wrong!’ William Watt, everyone always suspected that he was involved in some way—he was originally accused of murdering his family—and the whole thing just stinks to high heaven.” Listening to the older Glaswegians’ stories, Mina revisited the tale in novel form, leaning on the richness of oral histories as well as newspaper accounts of the trial.
“Glasgow is very chatty,” she says. “If you sit at a bus stop and ask an old person have you ever heard of this bar, they’ll tell you a story about it. Everyone’s got stories. It’s very important socially to be a good storyteller here. If you go to other places in Scotland, people don’t tell stories the way they do in Glasgow; it’s very much a status thing to be able to tell a story well. Sometimes, if you’re telling a story badly, people will stop you and get someone else to tell your story. My husband is English, and, when we go to visit them, I find his family very confusing. I was saying to my cousin, when I first started going out with my husband, ‘You know, they do this thing where one of them talks and then they stop and then there’s a pause and then somebody else talks.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen that custom before, the quaint English custom of listening to each other.’” She laughs. “Weird. Weirdos. Here we all just talk over the top of each other.”
If Mina gained her storytelling skills as a birthright, another contributing factor was the moment she fell in love with reading: “I went on a really awful sort of spring break holiday with some girls I worked with, and I thought we were going to look at the churches. One of the girls brought lots of books—including One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Master and Margarita and I just sat on the roof and got the best suntan of my life and read those books and fell in love.” It was an experience as spontaneous and serendipitous as other auspicious markers on her writing trajectory. “I left school at 16,” she says, “and worked. Then I went to night classes and got into university and did law, but because I was so interested in art history, I did art history as an extra subject. Then I had to drop it because I had too many subjects for law—it was just too time consuming, and I had to work as well. Then I left law: I was going into practice, and I just couldn’t do it, I just thought, ‘I’m going to die if I have to do this.’ So I dropped out and worked in a bar. And then I went for an interview as a researcher at Strathclyde Law School and they said, ‘We don’t want you as a researcher because you’re an idiot, but we’ll let you do a PhD in law and psychiatry.’ Those guys were very, very kind to me—I’m still in touch with them—and,” she cheerfully admits, “I misused my grant to write a crime novel. Strathclyde was really radical and we were all really crazy about representations in law, and this whole socio-legal area that nobody really talked about at the time. We used to talk about crime novels and representations of law in films and things like that, and so I wrote a crime novel [instead of a dissertation.]”
Two decades and multiple high-profile awards later, she’s working on her 14th novel, a work-in-progress called Wrongful Conviction that taps directly into the current podcast craze. “It’s about a woman who is listening to a podcast. Her life falls apart, and she goes off and starts trying to solve the crime in the podcast. “Listening to podcasts, asserts Mina, is “like being able to read when you need to use your eyes. It’s like you’re reading all the time—it’s fantastic! At the moment, for gardening, I like The Last Podcast on the Left—don’t listen to it because it’s really offensive, you have to work your way up to that—but I just listened to S-Town. It’s very interesting, about this tiny town in Alabama. Maybe there’s been a murder there, you don’t know, and it’s very engaging and really takes you into a completely different world.”
Perpetually immersing herself into alternative views and maintaining a deep inquisitiveness in different worlds seems to be a basic mechanism driving Mina as a writer, but she voices another key driver as well: writing as the ultimate double-helixed form of both expression and interactive communication. “I think real compulsive writers get an endorphin rush from fitting words together,” she says, in a tumble of words. “Or by finding the perfect right word, not to describe something but to make something real. There’s just something delicious about it and there’s something really magical about fitting words together, or when you write a sentence that has a good rhythm to it or you express something that you didn’t even know was in your head. And you don’t know if anyone else is ever going to get that, you just don’t know. And then a book comes out everyone slightly misunderstands it and then five years, six years later someone sidles up to you and a book festival and says, ‘I got that,’ and then you just want cry and never let them go. You know? It’s just such a lovely thing, it’s just such a beautiful understated sort of howl into the void, really.”
Denise Mina wins crime novel of the year award
Scottish author takes prize for her 'hugely atmospheric and haunting' story The End of the Wasp Season
'I didn’t even have to practise my good loser’s face' … Denise Mina on winning crime novel of the year. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
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Alison Flood
Friday 20 July 2012 10.59 BST
First published on Friday 20 July 2012 10.59 BST
Denise Mina's story of suicide and murder during the financial crisis, The End of the Wasp Season, has won the Theakstons Old Peculier crime novel of the year award, beating John Connolly, Christopher Brookmyre and SJ Watson to take one of the UK's top crime fiction prizes.
Described as a "thoroughly deserving winner and a great example of 'tartan noir'," the Scottish author is the first woman to have won the Theakstons award since 2008 for what judges called a "hugely atmospheric and haunting book". The End of the Wasp Season is the story of the heavily pregnant DS Alex Morrow's investigation into a savage murder in a wealthy Glasgow suburb, which turns out to be linked to the suicide of a millionaire banker in Kent.
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"It's about the financial crisis, it's about tectonic shifts in society," Mina said on Friday about her ninth book. "I think it's quite a surprising book – it talks a lot about suicide, and the meanings of suicide, which is not something that is talked about much. The idea of suicide is of a very set narrative, as if killing yourself is a definitive statement. But it can be just as meaningless as throwing a stone in a river."
The novelist, who left school at 16 before returning to study law at Glasgow University and writing her first novel while doing a PhD, said she was "quite stunned" to win a prize that has previously been awarded to Mark Billingham, Val McDermid and Lee Child. "I dragged my arse down here, I thought I'd go and be nice about the winner – I didn't even have to practise my good loser's face," she said. "I thought John Connolly would win, and SJ Watson was my hedged bet."
Collecting her £3,000 prize, and a handmade oak cask, at the Harrogate crime writing festival on Thursday night, Mina said: "I was really blown away by being on the shortlist. I'm so astonished I can't even swear … There's something lovely about the collegiate attitude of crime writers and together it makes us ballsier."
She was chosen as winner by mix of a public vote and a panel of experts including the author and Harrogate chair Mark Billingham, Theakstons executive director Simon Theakston and DI Tom Thorne actor David Morrissey. Thursday night's ceremony also saw the presentation of the Theakstons Old Peculier outstanding contribution to crime fiction award to Inspector Morse creator Colin Dexter.
After a peripatetic childhood in Glasgow, Paris, London, Invergordon, Bergen and Perth, Denise Mina left school early. Working in a number of dead end jobs, all of them badly, before studying at night school to get into Glasgow University Law School.
Denise went on to study for a PhD at Strathclyde, misusing her student grant to write her first novel. This was Garnethill, published in 1998, which won the Crime Writers Association John Creasy Dagger for Best First Crime Novel.
She has now published 12 novels and also writes short stories, plays and graphic novels.
In 2014 she was inducted into the Crime Writers’ Association Hall of Fame.
Denise presents TV and radio programmes as well as regularly appearing in the media, and has made a film about her own family.
She regularly appears at literary festivals in the UK and abroad, leads masterclasses on writing and was a judge for the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction 2014.
The Long Drop
264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p59.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* The Long Drop
Denise Mina. Little, Brown, $26 (240p) ISBN 978-0-316-38057-7
In this outstanding standalone, set in late-1950s Glasgow, from Edgar-finalist Mina (Blood, Salt, Water), William Watt stands accused of butchering his wife, daughter, and sister-in-law, but he vehemently proclaims his innocence.- Only ace attorney Laurence Dowdall saves him from prison, but public sentiment is against him, forcing Watt to take on the mantle of amateur crime-solver. This is how he meets Peter Manuel, career criminal, convicted burglar, suspected rapist. The two form a strange alliance after Manuel promises to show Watt where the murder weapon is hidden--but for a price. With knifelike precision, Mina flicks between the bizarre 12 hours Watt and Manuel spend together getting drunk in Glasgow bars, and Manuel's later trial, where's he's on the dock not only for the murder of the Watt family but also the slaughter of another trio, asleep in their beds. The question of guilt or innocence is irrelevant, and the gray of the in-between reigns supreme. And while Mina's usual tough female protagonists are absent, the presence of women presses as near as the crush of bodies eager to attend Manuel's trial. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Long Drop." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 59. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485971622&it=r&asid=dc6a138ca49f26541194f5d6e2705055. Accessed 5 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485971622
The Long Drop
Christine Tran
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p33.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* The Long Drop. By Denise Mina. May 2017. 240p. Little, Brown, $26 (9780316380577): e book, $13.99 (9780316380584).
In 1957 Glasgow, the grisly home-invasion murders of William Watt's family are rare enough to capture rapt public attention, which guarantees that Watt's reputation is destroyed once police think enough of his oddly dispassionate behavior to investigate him. Watt survives the detectives' scrutiny without arrest but can't bear the sudden halt in his social climb. So, in a desperate bid to rescue his reputation, Watt announces a reward for information leading to his family's killer. Peter Manual, a criminal with a history of vicious attacks on women, offers a new suspect and the location of the murder weapon in exchange for the reward. Their meeting begins legitimately enough, arranged by Glasgow's most famous criminal lawyer in a conspicuously reputable restaurant, but shifts into something altogether different when Watt and Manual conspire to ditch their attorney chaperone. As the pair ricochet through Glasgow's underworld hangouts, Manual spins his promised tale, and Watt's motivations begin to appear much less straightforward. The emerging story is an intricate and suspenseful unveiling of a murderer's mind while taking readers on a compelling journey through Glasgow's historic underworld, the long-extinct but legendary Gorbals tenements, and the city's famous High Court. This stand-alone thriller showcases Mina at her best, capturing the nuanced psychological suspense and ethical shadows of her Alex Morrow series as well as the electric dialogue and tangible grit of her Paddy Meehan novels.--Christine Tran
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tran, Christine. "The Long Drop." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442515&it=r&asid=89d8bd714b3d5d2361e125479c3c6661. Accessed 5 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485442515
Mina, Denise: THE LONG DROP
(Feb. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Mina, Denise THE LONG DROP Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 5, 23 ISBN: 978-0-316-38057-7
Hard men work their will in 1950s Glasgow.Though somewhat unlike Mina's usual thrillers in many ways, this study of a serial killer shares her persistent themes. Mina has penned three series of novels, each featuring a female protagonist (Blood, Salt, Water, 2015, etc.) struggling against both active criminals and pervasive misogyny. In this story she omits the female protagonist but remains grounded in the casual victimization of Scotland's women. William Watt's family (wife, daughter, and sister-in-law) is slaughtered, and at first Watt is charged with the crimes. Feeling the police are not investigating energetically enough, he reaches out to the Glasgow underworld--and finds Peter Manuel, who claims to know where the gun is buried and much more. In the course of a December evening he and Watt spend drinking together, much that is repellent about Manuel is slowly revealed. Then another family is murdered. Eventually Watt is exculpated, and Manuel is charged with eight counts of murder. The story alternates mostly between that December night of drinking and the subsequent trial. Manuel is delusional, possibly psychotic; but is he alone responsible for the deaths of Watt's family? Watt is a man of some substance, involved in political and real estate machinations that will transform Glasgow. He has a mistress. Do the hard men close ranks around him? Is Manuel, beyond the control of the men who rule his world, sacrificed to preserve one of them? In the end, the answer matters less than the method, as women's lives are degraded, publicly and privately, physically and spiritually, to preserve the ranks of those hard men. In more than one sense, Manuel takes the fall. A terrific exploration of crime and oppression.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mina, Denise: THE LONG DROP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480921960&it=r&asid=5f19fb1659e4988d34daa0c57eee6825. Accessed 5 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480921960
Mina, Denise. The Long Drop
Roland Person
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p75.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Mina, Denise. The Long Drop. Little, Brown. May 2017. 240p. ISBN 9780316380577. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780316380584. F
In Glasgow in December 1957, successful businessman William Watt hires noted defense lawyer Laurence Dowdall to defend him against charges he murdered his wife, sister-in-law, and daughter. The two men meet with recently released criminal Peter Manuel, who claims to have information--the location of the gun used in the killings--that will exonerate Watt. Manuel and Watt spend the evening together drinking and talking, but no gun is produced. Six months later, Manuel is on trial for these and five other murders, and Watt has been called to testify as a witness. The story, narrated in the present tense, alternates chapters between the end of 1957 when these characters first interact and the trial in May 1958, which decides the fate of both Watt and Manuel, effectively portraying a grimy, gritty Glasgow of 60 years ago. VERDICT Award-winning Scottish author Mina's (Blood, Salt, Water) stand-alone is a disappointment. Unfortunately, there is no sympathetic main character and little fulfillment at the end. Readers will be left wondering at the stylistic devices and wishing for a better resolution. [See Prepub Alert, 11/21/16.]--Roland Person, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Person, Roland
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Person, Roland. "Mina, Denise. The Long Drop." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 75. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301216&it=r&asid=2165afde7e9ce442bdbae4a3aa8ba95e. Accessed 5 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301216
Book World: Denise Mina looks inside the mind of a psychopath in her chilling novel 'The Long Drop'
Maureen Corrigan
(May 24, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Maureen Corrigan
The Long Drop
By Denise Mina
Little, Brown. 235 pp. $26
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On a rainy Glasgow night, two men go on a pub crawl. There's nothing unusual about that, but, the subject of their conversation is indeed something singular: a triple murder. One of the men, William Watt, is accused of slaughtering his wife, daughter and sister-in-law in their beds. He has a solid alibi, but the police aren't buying it. The other man, Peter Manuel, intimates that he knows who the real killer is and he's willing to locate the incriminating murder weapon - or even find a joe to take the rap - for cash. The catch is that Manuel himself is a hardened criminal with a trail of sex crimes and murders to his name. As the increasingly drunken men drive and stumble their way through various pubs and clubs, it becomes clear that Manuel himself is familiar with the interior of the Watt house, the site of the gruesome triple murders. Oh, and there's one more disquieting thing about this pub-crawl: It actually happened.
"The Long Drop" is Denise Mina's first foray into a suspense story deeply indebted to a true crime. Celebrated for her Garnethill suspense trilogy, as well as for her Alex Morrow police procedural series, Mina has now trained her moody sensibilities on an actual episode from the career of Scotland's most infamous serial killer.
Peter Manuel committed seven grisly murders (and was suspected of two more) before he was hanged on the gallows of Barlinnie prison in 1958. (That's the "long drop" of Mina's title.) Manuel was an exceptionally cold-blooded murderer: His last set of victims was the Smart family (mother, father and their 10-year old son). After Manuel shot them on New Year's Day 1958, he lived in their house for a week, even feeding the family cat. But, Mina's novel focuses on the Watt family triple-murder case because it's the one that still raises vexing questions - the kind of questions a psychologically inquisitive novelist like Mina feasts on.
Here are the facts: On the night of Sept. 17, 1956, Marion Watt, her 16-year-old daughter, Vivienne, and her sister, Margaret Brown, were shot to death in their beds inside the family's suburban villa. The police suspected the patriarch of the family: William Watt. A prosperous businessman, Watt was unfaithful to Marion; furthermore, his alibi (an overnight fly-fishing trip on which he conveniently brought along the family watchdog) seemed too neat. When two witnesses - a ferryman and a motorist - came forward to testify that they had seen Watt in his car in the dead of night, he was formally charged. Out on bail, Watt offered a reward to anyone who could provide information about the real killer.
Enter Peter Manuel, a convicted sex offender and all-around bad seed who (unbeknownst to the authorities) had already murdered one young woman. Watt and Manuel met on the night of Dec. 2, 1957, and talked for 11 hours. Of course, no tape of that conversation exists, which leaves Mina plenty of room for speculation. Was Watt looking for his family's murderer or in the market for a fall guy? Was Manuel toying with Watt or did he bond over whiskeys with a fellow monster? And what malevolent forces would impel Manuel or (perhaps) Watt or anyone to commit such gruesome crimes?
It's hard to top that macabre pub-crawl around Glasgow for drama, but Mina has plenty of other provocative historical material here to flesh out - including the transcripts of Manuel's murder trial that took place the following year. During that trial, Manuel dismissed his own attorney, took up his own defense, and - get this! - called William Watt to the stand to testify about their boozy night together.
In "The Long Drop," Mina wants to take her readers on another sort of night journey, deep into the dark and disordered mind of a psychopath (or two), as well as into the shadow lands where the grieving families of the murder victims find themselves exiled. Here, for instance, is a passage where Mina's omniscient narrator enters into the mind of the father of another one of Manuel's victims - a 17-year-old girl named Isabelle Cooke who never returned from a school dance. After his testimony at Manuel's murder trial, Isabelle's father feels cheapened by the easy empathy of some onlookers in the courtroom:
"Angry, he looks up and catches the eye of a woman. ... She is weeping openly, tears coursing down her cheeks, her hands clutched together as if she is holding his dead daughter's cold feet to warm them. ...
Mr. Cooke thinks of the weeping woman in the gallery. His unique desolation was all he had left of his Isabelle. Now the crying woman has taken that as well. He has been robbed again."
Even Glasgow itself, which is Mina's signature setting, seems darker, more opaque in this novel. No doubt it's all the soot, which is both a literal fact of life in the Glasgow of the late 1950s and a metaphor for the morally compromised atmosphere that blankets the area:
"Above the roofs every chimney belches black smoke. Rain drags smut down over the city like a mourning mantilla. Soon a Clean Air Act will outlaw coal-burning in town. Five square miles of the Victorian city will be ruled unfit for human habitation and torn down, redeveloped in concrete and glass and steel. ... Later, the black, bedraggled survivors of this architectural cull will be sandblasted, their hard skin scoured off to reveal glittering yellow and burgundy sandstone. The exposed stone is porous though, it sucks in rain and splits when it freezes in the winter."
As that description indicates, the narrator of "The Long Drop" sees far beyond the daily grime and grisly events of the late 1950s and, yet, mostly keeps mum, leaving readers to stumble with detectives through the fug of half-truths and lies that enshroud the story of Peter Manuel and his patsy or prey or possible partner-in-crime, William Watt. "The Long Drop" takes readers on a suspenseful tour into the past, through psyches and situations far grimmer than even those sooty Glasgow streets.
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Corrigan, the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air," teaches literature at Georgetown University.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Corrigan, Maureen. "Book World: Denise Mina looks inside the mind of a psychopath in her chilling novel 'The Long Drop'." Washington Post, 24 May 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA492670168&it=r&asid=7bbd1ba0fed8b6d2d581afbfe9c2a8b8. Accessed 5 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492670168