Well, Mina is not writing rock operas any time soon, but her most recent novel, The Dead Hour, did receive a glowing, full-page review by Janet Maslin in the New York Times Book Review, something not often accorded to the 'low class' mystery genre. While I won't stoop to saying she 'transcends the genre,' (which would only make her eyes roll) I can say that Mina writes some of the most compelling and satisfying mysteries out there.

With her first novel Garnethill, Mina won the 1998 John Creasey Dagger, and followed with another two novels that all together formed what became known as the Garnethill Trilogy. After the gripping stand-alone thriller, Deception, Mina began a new series starting with Field of Blood. Her second novel in this series is The Dead Hour, and I'd venture this is possibly her best novel yet.

I spoke to Mina on the phone; her accent is thick with Glaswegian charm, a warm giggle accompanies nearly everything she says, and her mercurial and erudite mind made the interview a pure delight.
 

The Dead Hour: A Novel by Denise Mina "In her second outing, Paddy holds up as a refreshingly realistic character that readers will eagerly embrace — warts, neuroses, and all." Publishers Weekly "Mina meticulously creates a bleak, Dostoevskian world abandoned by light and spirit, populating it with sharply drawn characters." Kirkus Reviews List Price $24.99 Your Price: $17.50 (Used - Hardcover) More about this book/ check for other copies Field of Blood by Denise Mina "As Ms. Mina grippingly reveals the implications of these events, it's clear that she is something more than a crime writer. Like Dennis Lehane with Mystic River, she describes a close-knit, secretive community in a substantial novel that happens to be centered on a crime." Janet Maslin, The New York Times List Price $7.50 Your Price: $4.95 (Used - Mass Market) More about this book/ check for other copies Garnethill: A Novel of Crime (Garnethill Trilogy #01) by Denise Mina "A groundbreaking book that should help finally establish women writers as a credible faction within the hard boiled genre....Its emotional rawness and visceral honesty pack a punch more than any boxer-turned PI could provide." Washington Post Book World More about this book/ check for other copies Deception by Denise Mina "Denise Mina — as though feeling liberated from her highly praised yet assiduously downbeat Garnethill trilogy — has written a stand-alone shocker that's exhilarating in its energetic, witty sordidness. (Grade: A-)" Entertainment Weekly List Price $13.95 Your Price: $9.50 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies

Georgie: The Dead Hour is your sixth novel. Does the writing process get any easier from one to another?

Denise Mina: I think it does. You know, I always get to the point where I think, "Oh my god, I don't know what I'm doing. I can't do this!" But then I think, "Well, you have done it before, so you'll probably get there." So, you do reach the point of despair, but each time is a bit more superficial.

Georgie: The Dead Hour is the second in a proposed five part series, and I have read that you want to set these stories against pivotal moments in Glaswegian history. Can you give us a feel for how Glasgow has changed in the years you have lived there?

Mina: Well, world history really. For a reason, I didn't want to make it too obvious, you know, Paddy covering the strike at the Gdantz shipyards or the miners' strike. I wanted it to be real history, the way history happens on the ground. So in Field of Blood someone is talking about doing a story about a fire in Deptford which is what set off the Brixton riots, and also in that one people are always phoning from Poland because it was the start of the solidarity movement. So I wanted to make it not that obvious but there if you are aware of it, in the way history unfolds for most people.

Georgie: Paddy Meehan, the heroine in Field of Blood and The Dead Hour, is a very different character with a different background to Maureen O'Donnell, protagonist of the Garnethill trilogy, although they share similarities in their class, location, and gender. How much of you, Denise Mina, do you think is in either woman?

Mina: I think I'm quite bad tempered sometimes, so there is that. Although, you know, Maureen is from quite a middle-class background; her dad was a journalist, who got the sack for being a drunkard (which was pretty unusual in those days), but yes, they were a family on their uppers. People often think I write about working class people but actually Maureen was from a very middle-class background; she went to university and did history of art, which is pretty middle class.

Georgie: Well, yes, you are right. Sorry about that.

Mina: No, no, everybody thinks that because she didn't have the money behind her. And in Glasgow, especially in those times, very few people had much money, so the class differentials are more about what you think is possible rather than how much money is in your family.

But anyway, I think I'm quite like the both of them in that I'm a bit of a cheeky cow, never really had a proper job for a long time, and stuff like that. But Paddy's background is a lot more like mine in that she is from a big, Catholic sprawling family from Rutherglen, which is where all my family is from. The funeral at the beginning of Field of Blood is my Aunt Kate's funeral and everyone in my family recognized it, because it was really old-fashioned to walk a coffin down Main Street. So everyone recognized it because we did that with my aunt Kate.

Georgie: I was going to ask you about whether you came from a Catholic background, and if Paddy's experiences with her faith were similar to yours.

Mina: I was convent educated, but like a lot of convent educated women, went to the bad quite quickly. I was a very bad convent girl; I basically didn't go in for the last two years of school, and the nuns didn't even come looking for me because they were a bit frightened of me.

Georgie: Bit relieved you weren't there, eh?

Mina: Yeah, that is the benefit of a private school — they don't come looking for you.

Georgie: And like Paddy, did you have a sister who became a nun?

Mina: No, but I did have a cousin who became a Carthusian monk, and the Carthusians are really hard-core; a silent order. They are the ones who make Chartreuse. He left the Jesuits because he didn't think they were hard-core enough. My family are a bit disappointed with me really. I live with my partner and have children but I'm not married, and I don't go to church, and I'm not sorry.

Georgie: The persecution of Catholics is really prevalent in Field of Blood. Although I'd been aware of the persecution of the Catholics in Ireland I was unaware until now of the impact on Glasgow. I was amazed at the job advertisements you mention, to which Catholics could not apply.

Mina: Yeah, 'Catholics need not apply.' Oh yes, and only certain jobs were open to them. It was very hard to get work in the shipyards, which was one of the only types of work that was well-paid. You could work in the steel foundry, which was where my grandfather worked. And there were some mines you could work in. My grandfather also worked in the mines in Rutherglen, but these jobs were hard to come by. And it was very hard to find housing in the private sector.

It was really just a fear of immigrants, which I think we've all got going now in Europe. That fear that they are going to come and take over our jobs. It was just that local protectionism, and it goes on generation to generation, and nowadays everyone is suspicious of Somalians and other immigrant groups.

Georgie: What are the immigrant groups you are seeing experiencing this now in Scotland?

Mina: They would be immigrants from countries who have recently joined the EU: Turkey, Poland and Eastern Europe, probably. It always seems to rumble on, whatever the latest group is. They are talking about limiting the number of Romanians when they join.

Georgie: I read with great relish your article for the British Council on crime writing. You expressed thoughts I've had, and more, so articulately and beautifully.

Mina: Thank you. I was just talking to Ian Rankin about that article just recently actually.

Georgie: What were his thoughts?

Mina: Well, he thinks that it is about genre, and the fact that it sells, and that it is an entertainment, and that is where the distinction for him comes in. He was quite shocked to find himself a crime writer because he always thought he was just a writer. He had written a book and then it was marketed as crime and he was quite shocked at the way he was treated.

Georgie: What about you? Did you set out to write a crime novel?

Mina: I did. And I knew how crime writing was treated and I'm delighted to be a crime writer. I think people read crime without any intimidation; if it doesn't work they throw it aside or give it to Oxfam. I think people should read literature with that sort of empowerment and that sense of valuing their own opinion. Really what I'm doing is writing feminist stories in a really accessible medium. That is what I'm really interested in, just getting those sort of feminist stories out there, because I don't see representations of women in a lot of literature that I recognize as the real experience of women.

Georgie: I agree. One of the most endearing things about Paddy is her continual fear of her weight. And yet, funnily enough, when I picture her, for some reason I don't imagine her to be terribly big. Is that just me?

Mina: I'm so pleased you said that! You know, I don't even know if she is fat.

Georgie: I agree. She just thinks she is fat.

Mina: Yes, that is right, she just thinks she's fat, and everybody thinks they are fat. I met a woman at a book reading in LA and she said, "When I started reading this I thought that Paddy was fat and then about half way through I realized she's not fat." I could've kissed her! I have met so many people who have read this and you are the only two people who have got that. Actually I'm in a quandary at the moment, because they're making a TV series of it, and I don't want to make her thin because that just looks like a cop-out.

Georgie: Can you just make her normal?

Mina: That is the problem — she will be fat on TV if she is normal, because no one on telly is normal size. So they don't know whether to make a feature of the fact that she is fat or skate over it. I'm so pleased you got that, though. That is lovely you got that.

Georgie: I just read a terrific article in the Guardian the other day and it quotes some insane number like 98% of women hate their bodies, and it zeroed in on the continually challenging media images of razor-thin women.

Mina: If you look at the world, there's a lost history about diets; of women defining their life by diets, all the diets we've been on. A whole lost history of that, and women striving to be okay and accept themselves and be thin enough to think they are okay, and that is totally lost in this whole maelstrom of "nobody's good enough" and it ties in so much to what women think of themselves today.

Georgie: As a feminist book it is very powerful; Paddy is already an underdog because of her class and religion but she is also up against so much additionally just because she is a woman.

Mina: And she also does all sorts of bad girl things. You read these stories with heroines in them and they are all good girls. They have all looked after relatives or something, but she is a bit of a selfish cow. And she is ambitious — which is what women 'must not be,' ambitious for herself and to do good work, and that is a total forbidden thing, you know.

Georgie: She makes strong sexual choices as well.

Mina: She does [giggle]. She shags about, and she has good sex.

Georgie: There have been many opinions expressed about Gunter Grass's recent revelations, and one of the things that I tend to think to myself is his age when he joined up. Seventeen! What stupid things we do when we are seventeen! Paddy is nineteen in Field of Blood and only a few years older in Dead Hour. Have you consciously explored the moral choices made by one of that young age?

Mina: I think she is quite an old nineteen, but then, I think we don't change all that much. I think the story with Gunter Grass is not really about the fact that he was that age, it's about the fact that everybody was in on it. My partner's family is all Viennese Jews, and his uncle says he would have joined the Hitler youth if he hadn't been a Jew, because they got to go away on the weekend, and they got a snazzy uniform. And you had to be there to know what was going on. It wasn't a political party people were choosing to be a part of; it was just all there was. And who are we to judge with the benefit of distance? He wasn't going to work in the crematorium.

Georgie: He has certainly written much criticizing German attempts to downplay their history.

Mina: What else can you ask of somebody? I think it is brilliant that he came out and said it; I think it is really courageous. Because the Nazis aren't others. That was the point of the Milgram experiment; that they are us — if we aren't vigilant they are us. The point was that people will follow orders.

Georgie: Hmmm… I don't think Paddy would.

Mina: No, she probably wouldn't, but I think she is pretty exceptional. It is pretty hard to swim against the tide -- very hard to go against your family's values -- but she does it.

Georgie: In the article I mentioned earlier you discuss the implications of crime writing becoming the focus of academics, weeding out the worst and highlighting the best, but as a result, "Writers will take longer to produce novels and inevitably books will no longer reflect our mores and moral conundrums." How much, then, do you think crime novels bear a responsibility to reflect such things?

Mina: Well, what is interesting academically is not what is interesting about crime writing. What is interesting academically is something you can write a thesis on with a lot of references. And I speak as someone who did a PhD. Academia determines what is valuable in literature but it shouldn't really. Sometimes you read what has been labeled "the best book of the year" and it is tedious, and you think, "I'm wrong to find it tedious," but you're not, it is tedious. Books are entertainment, it is about good story-telling. It doesn't become a good story because an academic can get a lifetime's work out of it. We shouldn't kid ourselves — we're not engaged in a voyage into the human soul necessarily. It is an entertainment, and the value of stories is not to make jobs for academics. It is about storytelling and that is so important, that it is immediate and it speaks to people, not that some academic can find a job in it.

Georgie: I've been disappointed with some recent literary books that are receiving high-praise over here myself — not necessarily "book of the year" stuff, but there was a debut novel in particular which I was reading and found to be very long-winded and self-satisfied.

Mina: Ah well, a debut; you've got your whole lifetime in that. I often review books for Radio Four and I find a lot of the literary novels dull and self-involved, and I will come out and say that in my review. A lot of the ones lauded here have a case of the Emperor's New Clothes; "Ah, he writes for the Sunday Times, he must really know his stuff. He mentioned Foucault in that so he must be brilliant." And you know, it is load of pants. A piece of nonsense.

Georgie: How important is the "Tartan Noir" Scottish crime-writing community to you?

Mina: Well, it is important to my social life. We're all a bunch of dweebs when we get together. I've been writing comics, part of the Hellblazer series, and now Ian Rankin is going to be writing some. He is so into comics and when I got this work he was so excited; he has been reading Hellblazer for twenty years now. And Christopher Brookmyre is really into comics too and he is going to be doing something soon with DC comics. So we get along really well, going out for dinner, and sometimes we have summits where we talk about work. We're going to have one soon in between Glasgow and Edinburgh for some neutral territory. To be honest, at the moment, if you chucked a brick in a busy street you'd hit someone who was working on a crime novel here. Everybody's doing it — it's brilliant! And so much good work is coming out of here right now.

Georgie: I know! I'm in the middle of Louise Welsh's new one right now, and loving it.

Mina: Oh she is great - we were at University together and she was at the launch party of Garnethill. Louise and I have known each other forever.

Georgie: You're friends with Val McDermid as well?

Mina: Val's a great pal. Val has been fantastic. She is so supportive of young writers. And wherever she goes in the world — she tours constantly — she always mentions other people whose work she likes, people who don't have deals yet. I'm awfully fond of Val.

Georgie: And finally, because I can't ask Ian Rankin this, I'll ask you -- in your opinion who makes a better Rebus — John Hannah or Ken Stott?

Mina: Ken Stott without a shadow of a doubt. He is great; so weighty and grave; he can carry anything off.