Denise Mina’s characters—police detectives, forensic scientists, a reporter, a psychiatric patient—have one thing in common with their creator: they are all imperfect or messy in one way or another. “Well,” she says via Zoom from Paris, “I’m quite flawed.”
Known as the rock star of noir and the crown princess of crime, Mina is a perennial bestseller whose crime fiction—which includes the Detective Alex Morrow, Paddy Meehan, and Garnethill series, as well as numerous standalones and graphic novels—is often classified as tartan noir, a label the author happily embraces.
“To be honest,” she says, “I absolutely love it. I love the fact that here in France they call noir fiction and crime fiction the ‘bad’ genres. I love it because it’s like we’re a lower form. What a great place to talk about politics! And because it’s low art, pop art, you don’t have to have your hand on your chin or pretend you’ve only always read Homer. It’s just storytelling. Don’t take it so seriously.”
In The Good Liar, Mina’s 20th novel, out in July from Mulholland, blood-spatter expert Claudia O’Sheil’s work has put a high-profile murder suspect behind bars. But she realizes that the evidence in the case was flawed, and she’s faced with a moral dilemma: keep her concerns to herself, or tell the truth and risk her career and reputation.
The impetus for the book, Mina says, was her awareness that the popular perception of forensic science is often wildly inaccurate.
“So much of the forensic science that I’d learned about was junk,” she says. “And people were still in prison based on this junk science, like fire investigation and forensic dentistry bite marks. The serial killer Ted Bundy was convicted on the basis of bite-mark evidence, and that’s now a discredited science. If he were alive, he could be out of prison. Science is a moving discourse, and the fiction of law is that it’s static, and there’s the clash.”
Born in East Kilbride, Scotland, in 1966, Mina, who is based in Glasgow, is the youngest of two sisters. When asked about her mother’s occupation, Mina—a raucous whirlwind of a woman—is quick with a response: “Smoke and bitch and be fabulous.” The family had a somewhat nomadic life, living in Bergen, Norway; London; Amsterdam; the Hague; Glasgow; and Paris. “My father worked as an engineer in North Sea oil, so we lived in Paris with a load of Texans,” she says. “It was real blue collar, and we lived all together clustered around the English school.”
But school didn’t appeal to Mina, and when she was 16, she dropped out. “I was a convent girl, and I fucking hated it,” she says. “Lots of my girlfriends quite loved it. They liked the rules, having the sisters telling them what to do. But for me it was ‘I can’t fucking do this,’ so I left very young and did all these jobs. I worked in old folks’ homes and bars and a meat factory, and then I thought, I’d love to go to university.”
A fan of Émile Zola and French literature, Mina figured it could be an “improving” field of study. But “that was so 19th century,” she says. In the end, she went for practicality and enrolled at the Glasgow University School of Law, graduating in 1992 with honors. Though Mina has never practiced law, she did teach it while studying for her PhD at the law school at Strathclyde University. But she used her grant money to write her first novel, Garnethill, which was published in 1998, won the John Creasey Dagger for best first crime novel, and became a popular series.
And while Mina never finished that PhD, she says her path to publication was a relatively easy one. “I sent three chapters of Garnethill to three agents with a cover letter full of lies: I’ve finished writing this book; I’m very extroverted; I’ve done stand-up comedy—
I hadn’t. One agent asked me to send the rest of the book, so I wrote it in three months, and they had a deal with Transworld in a few months. It was incredible.”
The Good Liar begins as Claudia prepares for one of the most important moments of her career: a speech to a group of rich and powerful Londoners. But with the wrong person behind bars and the real murderer still at large, she must decide whether to tell the truth or keep quiet.
“As you get older,” Mina says, “you see how power works, and the compromises that are made, and a lot of bullshit, and you think, Should I call it out? What’s the right thing to do? Or should I just shut up and let people have their day? What would it feel like to betray everybody that you love or people that you empathize with?”
Though her books feature intricate, twisty plots and complex characters struggling with right and wrong, Mina says her writing process is quite simple. “I’m just blind panic. I think it’s a good process: get the money and spend it and then write the book. I have kids and one was very ill, and I was very aware of how lucky I was to be working. And you just keep going.”
As for her ongoing source of inspiration, Mina points to real-life events and her love of learning. “Education is my real passion,” she says, “so I’m always slightly obsessed with something, and it comes from that or a case I’ve seen in the papers; small things captivate me. At the moment, I’m obsessed with the Dreyfus case. Dreyfus was a French army officer accused of espionage in 1894.”
History also finds its way into Mina’s fiction. Her 2021 novel Rizzo deals with the assassination of the private secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots. “Historical fiction usually has a broad span,” Mina explains, “but I wanted to write it as crime fiction, so it takes place over one weekend.”
For now, Mina says, The Good Liar is a standalone—but she won’t rule out the possibility of it becoming a series at some point. “I’d love to revisit these characters,” she says. “I love series, but I like to make them finite because, you know, they can go on trundling along. I like series that have a dramatic arc, like them having a beginning, middle, and end. Otherwise, you can end up doing one trick for the rest of your life, and that’s quite disheartening. It’s not much of an inquiry. I know series writers who hate their characters. We spend so much more time with our characters than the reader does.”
