I always wanted to work at Take A Break magazine, you know, just to inject a little bit of politics into their stories. I applied for a job there after I'd done my law degree and didn't even get an interview. I only wrote Garnethill because I didn't get that job!

Denise Mina

Categorized in : Jobs Law Degrees

Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.

Denise Mina

crime social fiction

I think the negative traits are what makes us love other human beings, the foibles and the flaws.

Denise Mina

flaws negative thinking

Crime is a very hard genre to feminise. If you have a female protagonist she is going to be looking after her mum when she gets older; she is going to be worried about her brother and sister; she will be making a living while bringing up kids.

Denise Mina

female brother kids

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.

Denise Mina

crime feet fiction

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.

Denise Mina

dad brother art

To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person's intellect. It becomes your default position.

Denise Mina

default opinion strong

I grew up in London under Thatcher and that really was disgusting. A feeding frenzy.

Denise Mina

feeding london grew-up

I hate it when I'm reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what's going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation.

Denise Mina

confused hate spring

I came from this very traditional background and I benefited hugely from feminism. I felt privileged going to university and doing a PhD. Most people of my background don't get to do that.

Denise Mina

phds feminism people

I'm terrified to get married. I'm not getting married till my gay friends can.

Denise Mina

terrified married gay

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.

Denise Mina

odd parent class

Novelisation doesn't imply the truth. Readers are sophisticated enough to know that.

Denise Mina

sophisticated reader enough

I love Mikhail Bulgakov. He is very original and takes the story to unexpected places. I didn't realise political writing could be so funny.

Denise Mina

political stories writing

If you went for a job interview in a Glasgow law firm, they used to ask you what school you went to. And that was a way of finding out what religion you were.

Denise Mina

law jobs school

We don't really go in for big family dinners, but Scottish people are famously confrontational. It's a cultural thing, so maybe we don't need to have them to clear the air. Also, traditional family food isn't as nice here so there's no payoff for traveling hundreds of miles.

Denise Mina

nice air people

Usually when I'm trying to establish character, I try and find out where they live.

Denise Mina

trying character

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.

Denise Mina

reading book children

I'm always represented as a bit of a class warrior - a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I'm actually very fond of men and am middle-class. I even went to boarding school in Perthshire.

Denise Mina

warrior men school

In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there's no real way of having an inner voice without it taking over the entire story.

Denise Mina

voice real thinking

I just got an honorary degree from Glasgow University, and I had to wear around very painful shoes so that I didn't laugh all the way through the ceremony because I felt like an outlaw.

Denise Mina

shoes laughing way