The Next ChapterWhat books shaped the ‘Queen of Scottish crime fiction’?
While Scottish crime fiction writer Denise Mina has penned 20 mystery novels to date, she only became a reader in her late teens.
Growing up between Paris, London, Glasgow, The Hague and Perth, Mina didn’t think books and libraries were for her.
“It was usually full of good kids who had done homework,” she told Antonio Michael Downing on The Next Chapter. “And I was like, ‘I don’t belong here.'”
But on a girls holiday with her friends in Greece, she found herself bored when her companions were just going to discos and “copping off with guys.”
She picked up two books that one of them had brought — One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov — and the rest was history.
“I just sat on the flat roof, got the tan of my life and read for a week.”
She’s since been an avid reader, and has written everything from stage plays to TV scripts to graphic novels. But her crime fiction novels, the most recent being The Good Liar, is her claim to fame.
To celebrate its release, Mina joined The Next Chapter to discuss the books that shaped her as an author.
The book she gives to others
A Dog’s Heart is a book by Mikhail Bulgakov. (Penguin Classics)
Following her Greece trip and her introduction to Russian novelist Bulgakov, Mina read his other work, and chose the novel, A Dog’s Heart, for her first pick.
A Dog’s Heart is about a surgical experiment a professor performs on a dog stray that turns him into a human-canine hybrid creature. When the hybrid creature begins to work and demands housing rights and union wages, the professor tries to turn him back into a dog.
“It’s an analogy for the revolution, obviously. But it is so funny,” Mina said.
In fact, Mina says that it’s a book she gives to people all the time because of its universal themes.
“The thing about [Bulgakov]’s writing is it’s about stuff that really matters. It really speaks to the reader,” she said.
“It’s not speaking to professors who taught him English literature. It’s speaking to the reader, which is so immediate, feels really new, and it feels fresh all the time.”
A graphic memoir that resonates
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant is a memoir by Roz Chast. (Bloomsbury, Bill Franzen)
Mina’s next pick is Roz Chast’s memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant, which shares Chast’s experience caring for her elderly parents.
Mina and her cousins bought the book for each other since they were going through the same thing in real time.
“We’re all at that stage where we’re looking after elders and trying to navigate the tenderness and the infuriating nature of trying to look after somebody who’s a bit vulnerable and feeling quite alone in it,” she said.
Mina, whose mother died at home during the pandemic, was moved by Chast’s illustrations and representation of caring for a loved one as they get older.
“I just think I haven’t read anything else about seeing somebody to their death like that,” she said.
“Everyone’s always very vital in books. Everyone’s in their 20s. But [Chast] really gets the tenderness of that, of looking after someone who’s quite exasperating, of looking after someone who’s slightly fading.”
A newfound historical obsession
The American Civil War is a book by John Keegan. (Vintage, Jerry Bauer)
Mina’s third book, The American Civil War by John Keegan, sent her spiraling into more reading and research about that historical time period.
“I credit that book with giving me a whole world to be obsessed with,” she said, joking that once you get to age 53, suddenly you find yourself among the people interested in the American Civil War.
She says she’s impressed by Keegan’s book because it covers such a major topic in an accessible way — and he’s not afraid to admit when he doesn’t know things.
“It’s such a huge topic and it’s so easy to get lost in it,” said Mina. “But [Keegan]’s such a great writer. He not only boils down to the point, but it’s still true that he makes it comprehensible by focusing, I think, on individuals.”
Art without traditional publishing
Perhaps surprisingly, Mina’s final pick is a fanzine dedicated to actor Nicholas Cage. It’s called Nic Cage Actor for Hire by cartoonist Raechel Leigh Carter.
She came across the zine at the Nicholas Cage festival in Scotland, Cage-a-Rama, and thought it was “fabulous” — not only for its content, but because it reminded her that traditional publishing isn’t the only way for smart and talented creatives to get their work out.
“It really sort of took me back to that real punk aesthetic of making things,” she said. “Fanzines are a wave of people taking back storytelling and saying, this is what I want to say.”