TARTAN NOIR

                              


                                          TARTAN NOIR: Novels by Denise Mina

Originally published in the "Record Review" as one in an ongoing series, "My Reading Life" by Elinore Standard

                  Works Mentioned: "Garnethill," "Exile," "Resolution," by Denise Mina.
                  Novels by Ian Rankin and Ken Bruen. "Prime Suspect," by Lynda LaPlante.

           

            OK, You return home so drunk you fail to notice your murdered married lover, tied to a kitchen chair, cut up and bleeding all over your living room floor. You sleep in an alcoholic coma and the next morning, you can’t really explain much to the cops who figure you as the prime suspect. The murder weapon is found in the bottom of the closet where you once hid yourself for hours, until your drug dealer brother discovered you and carried you off to the loony bin. Yes, an alibi will be a little tough to manufacture and your mental health history and current bad temper won’t help.

            Meet Maureen O’Donnell, protagonist and central character of “Garnethill,” “Exile” and “Resolution” a trilogy by Denise Mina set in Glasgow, Scotland. Maureen is one of those edgy characters we cannot love. We want to tell her to get a grip and clean up the blood spot left on the living room floorboards. She needs to stop chain smoking and for heaven sake, ease up on the booze and eat something that for a change isn’t dripping grease. She deals contraband cigarettes in a flea market there being little employment in the art history game, and due mainly to her congenital crossness, she has a lot of trouble in the human relationships department.

            Book reviews are fond of using the word “pluck” about female characters, and this is one who overqualifies. Although people hate her and several want to kill her, she survives. She has survived neglect and poverty and the worst kind of abuse. It is the childhood abuse by her own father that has haunted her into her mid-twenties. It is this cruelty that precipitated the breakdown that put her in the bottom of the closet. And it is the stigma of having been a mental patient that follows her every step, along with the spectre of her father, returning to claim her once again. If you ever want a picture of a young person’s struggle to establish independence and identity and sanity in the face of unbelievable odds, these novels by Denise Mina will provide it.

            Mina (who says a woman can’t do hard-boiled?) will be compared with Ian Rankin, whose seedy Inspector Rebus works in Edinborough and Ken Bruen, whose destructive ex-cop Jack Taylor novels are set mainly in Galway, Ireland. Mina can also be compared with Lynda LaPlante, author of graphic mysteries including “Prime Suspect” a novel later made into a TV series starring Helen Mirren.

All four are terrific writers and, if you can stand the gloom, they capture an underclass and describe lives on the margin so graphically it hurts. After slogging through Mina’s damp, grim streets and housing projects of Glasgow and listening to regional dialect sometimes needing subtitles, we emerge wanting some country air and maybe a nice, hot bath.

            Unlike other works in this genre, these three Mina novels although qualifying as mystery/thrillers, feature a snoopy young woman with something to prove instead of a private eye or a detective. Maureen just can’t leave things alone. She is about the most stubborn of literary characters and she is also about the most intelligent. Mina has made us love the unlovable and has given us Maureen and her brother, Liam, her motorcycle-driving friend, Leslie, her supremely dysfunctional family, and a large cast of memorable minor characters that live on in imagination long after we’ve stopped reading.

            The most interesting thing they do is to cast brilliantly the crazies, the junkies and the alkies. Usually, these are minor characters, set into a story to contrast with the major ones. Mina makes them all real. She gives them inner lives and insight. She gives them dimension and power and this, I think, is unusually difficult and daring for a writer in a genre that is not always taken too seriously.