Denise Mina
Denise Mina
Denise Minais 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. Since 2006, she has had two plays performed with successful reception...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionWriter
people want sells
None of us know what is going to sell or what people want to read.
clever book writing
Most of the people who write to me are really clever, really engaged. They just want to say that they have read my book and liked it.
book mean writing
Because I write a book a year, I always want to do one other project every year that's stimulating in a different way. It means you can be working but not using up your prose juice, you know?
journalism process
Journalism is a Darwinian process.
wings guy fiction
I'd read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy - I thought there must be another approach.
children book reading
There's always these giant baffling books, like 'The Da Vinci Code.' People say it's not as well written as 'Midnight's Children.' Why aren't people reading 'Midnight's Children?' Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they're great.
class parent odd
My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.
gay married terrified
I'm terrified to get married. I'm not getting married till my gay friends can.
feet fiction crime
I respond very well to rules. If there are certain parameters it's much easier to do something really good. Especially when readers know what those are. They know what to expect and then you have to wrong-foot them. That is the trick of crime fiction. And readers come to crime and graphic novels wanting to be entertained, or disgusted.
strong opinion default
To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person's intellect. It becomes your default position.
art brother dad
In the 'Garnethill' trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O'Donnell's dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did law, but no-one ever thinks they're middle-class - they're just working class because they speak with accents.
classic complete crime feels fiction flows happens start stuff ties work
I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.
certainly cut glasgow hard highest maybe people rate
It's very hard to be cut off in Glasgow because it's such a small city. You know, we have the highest rate of per-capita imprisonment, certainly in Britain, maybe in Europe. We have a very high murder rate here. So most people will know someone who's been to prison.
course forensic guy head science took university
In the forensic science course I took at university they used photographs of dead bodies. For ballistics they showed us a guy lying on the floor, and his head had burst.