Third Time’s a Charm

In just a decade--since the publication of her first novel, Garnethill--Scottish crime fictionist Denise Mina has gone from being unknown to being celebrated. And busy. Not only has she continued to pen novels, but she’s also moved into the composition of comic books, graphic novels, and plays. “How does she do it all?” Mina asks on her Web site, echoing a question that many of her readers might raise themselves. “Well, her personal grooming is shameful, her house is filthy and her children run wild in the fields. She found a mushroom in the shower the other day. What sort of woman is that?”

I guess it’s the sort who can produce thoroughly engaging, reliably dark stories about people in turmoil and trouble. Of her latest book, Slip of the Knife (or The Last Breath, the name under which it was published last year in the UK), critic M. Wayne Cunningham writes today in January Magazine:

Knowing of Mina’s stints as a comic-book writer and graphic novelist, and her passion for Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, it is easy to discern the foundations of the visual, visceral and literary influences that predominate in Slip of the Knife. And while the style here is clear and clean, with fresh and evocative imagery, the substance of this novel is complex and challenging, creating an entertainment for the mind as well as a massage for the emotions.

Mid-40s Paddy Meehan is a reporter with Glasgow’s Daily News, where “[s]he was a name now, drew a big wage ...” She brushes off office talk about her being a lesbian, and is proud as hell of her “vanity car, bought to show the world of men she moved among that she was doing well and had the readies to buy a big motor.” She is also mother-tiger protective of her 6-year-old son, the result of an out-of-wedlock liaison (described in a previous novel) with George Burns, a cop turned stand-up comic, who’s not “a particularly warm father” and “a nightmare to negotiate with,” but “at visiting time, [is] the clay and the mould.” Perpetually rebellious of the Catholic faith on which she turned her back when she was just 7, the still-unwed Paddy lives with her current male partner and pays lip service to Church traditions in order to mollify her mother, who sees her as “a bad girl who made the baby Jesus cry.”

On the job, Meehan liberally curses out and cuts up her male colleagues; and she longs to get back to the hardcore reporting of her earlier days, when she helped solve, in The Field of Blood, the brutal murder of a child and later, in The Dead Hour, the demise of an abused wife. It’s a wish that’s soon granted, when the child murderer from Field of Blood, Callum Ogilvy, now 19 years old and in Paddy’s view “a car crash waiting to happen,” is set to be released from prison--and to once more become an integral part of this newspaper columnist’s life.

You can read all of Cunningham’s review here.