Blood, Salt, Water by Denise Mina (Orion Books 2015)

She’d been as biddable as a heifer for the two days they had her. She came willingly when they picked her up in the van. She asked no favours, made no appeals for mercy while they waited for Wee Paul to give the final word: kill her or let her go.

The Red Road by Denise Mina (Orion Books 2013)

Morrow shrugged and looked up at the flats. The body was gone and that was good. A body was always a distraction at a murder scene. It tended to draw the eye and evoke sparks of empathy, or, for Morrow at least, distracting ponderings on why she wasn't feeling empathy. The site was so spectacular, it would be hard enough to focus on details.

The Red Road flats were twenty-seven storeys tall, five hundred yards wide and being stripped for demolition. All the walls, the casing and especially the windows were being removed before the explosives were set, to avoid a glass storm. They couldn't get into the scene of the murder before this  morning: without health and safety paperwork she couldn't even pass through the protective fencing. Morrow didn't like heights terribly much.

Early in her career Morrow had policed the crowd when the high flats in the Gorbals were demolished. The officers had to stand with their backs to the show, watching the crowd for three or so hours. People brought food, drinks, things to sit on. The fevered atmosphere was unsettling. Morrow watched the crowd swell and grow boisterous, scanning for drunks and trouble and pickpockets. Over the afternoon she listened as people tried to explain away their excitement. It's a bit of history, they said, history of the city. But that didn't satisfy, it didn't explain the buzz of anticipation running through the crowd so they began to falsify complaints against the high flats: we had damp, my auntie died there, I saw a man go out a window. Excuses, because they knew there was something venal about their lip-licking excitement. It was a modern public hanging. They were there to see something bigger than them die, to participate in an irreversible act of destruction.

Gods and Beasts by Denise Mina (Little Brown 2012)

Morrow watched her brother walk into the cafe like a mayoral candidate, waving to other customers, clamping the proprietor's hand in a two-handed shake, nodding to Morrow as he swapped pleasantries with the man's wife.

Danny suggested meeting here because this was how he wanted her to see him: popular, belonging, accepted. The cafe owner looked up to him smiling, slightly awe-struck. Morrow knew then that Danny owned part of this business or had lent the man money. The man didn't like him, he owed him. Maybe didn't register the difference.

It was positive, in a way, that he wanted her to see him as a good guy, instead of in a big car or with totems of his wealth around him, and it was probably a big deal that he came alone, or almost alone. She could see a man sitting in the driver's seat in the big car across the road, but Danny had left him out there.

Still, the cafe business was a cash business, perfect for cleaning up the vast sums of money Danny and his associates were generating every day. The drugs trade was worth more than a billion pounds a year in Scotland. Some said four billion but the source of that number was looking for more funding so she wasn't sure about that. Whatever the absolute number, it was telling that cash businessses were being taken over. Hairdressers, sunbed shops, nail bars, cafes, pubs were being either taken over or opened up to give a credible source for the tidal wave of dirty notes. Some high streets had row upon row of tanning salons right next to each other to account for various people's income. Even nurseries, Morrow had heard, even there the gangs were using businesses and claiming for fifty ghost children attending, all  doing 8-6 every day, all paid for in cash.

The Crime Interviews: Volume Two by Len Wanner (Blasted Heath 2012)

Good question. Why are you writing books?

I'm writing books to try and make a connection with a reader. It doesn't matter whether it's a reader who's on the Booker panel or a reader who's a waitress... Whenever I'm up for a prize I think: "Who the fuck are you to judge me?" And then I think: "Give me that fucking prize." Ha! You don't know these people exist until they write to you to say: "You're up for a prize. Do you want to come and have a bad hotel dinner, while feeling really nervous and wearing uncomfortable clothes, and then get up and make a cunt of yourself in front of a big audience?" What the fuck?

I mean, prizes are good marketing tools. They're shorthand for telling readers: "This is a good book." But a better way for people to come to your books is for their pals to say: "You'll like that book. It really meant something to me."

When did a book first really mean something to you?

When I was nineteen, reading Thérèse Raquin in a bedsit, being totally transported by the writing and the way two words can click together, and sitting back, thinking: "What an amazing thing to do with your life – to make that sort of connection with another person, to feel exactly what Zola was talking about, or looking at, or imagining... What an incredible connection!" And what I really love about Zola is that he was a political writer.

Do you see yourself as a political writer?

Yeah! Orwell was who I stole from the library... So it's that connection: reading A Tale of Two Cities and sweating with my heart racing at the end because it was so exciting. But I think you really have to keep your eyes on the prize, because otherwise you become bitter and disillusioned despite having everything. You're being published, you're making a living, you're spending your days in pyjamas wrestling with words, and people are writing to you saying: "I read your book and it mattered to me." How lucky is that?

(Len Wanner interviewing Denise Mina.)

The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina (Orion Books 2011)

Thomas was watching a wasp die on the window ledge when Goering came for him. The sun burned hot through the windows, a shaft of yellow like a pathway to heaven, lying low over the long lawn in front of the old house, burning in through the glass that gravity had warped and two hundred years had tinged yellow. The wasp was struggling to get onto its stomach, antennae writhing, the little comma body contracting, the essential shape of it the trap that killed it.

End of the wasp season.

Booksiwanttoread2011

Nothing like a bit good news for a Friday afternoon.
Via my google alert for Denise Mina comes news of her next book, The End of the Wasp Season. Out next May, Amazon UK carries the following blurb for the book:

When wealthy Sarah Erroll dies a violent death at her home in a posh part of Glasgow, the local community is stunned by what appears to be a truly gratuitous act. Heavily pregnant with desperately wanted twins, DS Alex Morrow is called in to investigate and soon discovers that there is more to Sarah's murder than it first seems. On the other side of town, Thomas Anderson is called into the headmaster's office at his boarding school to be told that his tyrannical father - a banker responsible for the loss of many livelihoods in the recession - has committed suicide by hanging himself from the old oak tree on the lawn of their home. Thomas returns to the family home to find his mother and sister in a state of numb shock. The head of the household is dead, yet their initial reaction is not that of grief, but relief. As Alex Morrow slowly unravels the connections between the two cases, she must also deal with the death of her own father and her brother's continuing criminal activities. Trying her hardest to disentangle herself from her family's disreputable history, she faces the challenge of an uninspired police force who have zero sympathy with Sarah Erroll, a middle-class victim who it appears was acting as an high class escort. Can Morrow solve the mystery of a cold-blooded murder without support? In THE END OF THE WASP SEASON she faces her greatest challenge yet as her work and home lives collide with potentially disastrous consequences.

As Kara asked when I told her this morning, 'Does this mean there won't be any more Paddy Meehan books?'

Denise Mina's Field of Blood

Spotted via a google alert:

"BBC Scotland is to bring the first of Glasgow crime writer Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan detective novels to the small screen next year.

The Field of Blood, written and directed by David Kane, will begin filming next month and casting of the two-part production will be announced soon.

The good news is that they're not adapting Denise Mina's Garnethill for the screen. I feel particularly precious about Maureen and Leslie, and I know in advance that I'll wince at whoever they cast for those particular parts in a screen adaptation. (I'm sure that adaptation is coming at some point, though).

That's the good news.

The bad news is that Field of Blood is being adapted for the screen by David Kane. The same bloke who brought the Rebus novels to the screen. That really doesn't bode well. And what with Scotland only having 17 working actors at any one time, we'll no doubt be seeing an overlap of actors from the Rebus adaptation in the tv version of Field of Blood.

I hate to be unduly harsh to Kane - fingers crossed he's not one of those types who look themselves up on the internet - 'cos I love his original work for tv and film. His self-penned This Year's Love; Dream Baby; and a Shadow On The Earth were all wonderful but I had to switch Ken Stott's Rebus off after seven minutes. (It would have been five minutes but I had pins and needles at the time.)

Fingers crossed. Happy to be proved wrong some time next year.

Here's to you, Mr Robinson

Finally, a review of Denise Mina's latest novel, Still Midnight, that's longer than forty three words.

Hat tip to Bookshelves Of Doom blog.

Still Midnight by Denise Mina (Orion Books 2009)

Alex and Danny met on their first day at school. They looked like twins, everyone said so, it was an innocent joke. They were sweethearts for their first term of school but it all ended abruptly when their mothers met at the gates. The most vivid memory of Alex's early life was walkig home through a park, blood dripping from her sobbing mother's mouth onto the grey path. She'd ripped her blouse in the fight and everyone could see her bra strap.
People didn't move schools in those days. Danny and Alex went all the way through primary school together, and secondary. And all the time there was the ever present threat of their mothers fighting, of the other boot falling.

Bulgakov? Check.

If I can waste 117 minutes with Pineapple Express, you can spare a minute for Denise Mina.

The Road to Colchester

Bastard godlike. The hairs on the back of my neck are tingling at the brilliance of this YouTube clip.

Who thought the nearest I would ever get to a religious experience this side of Denise Mina answering one of my emails would be from watching a black and white clip from an acoustic set performed at the Colchester Arts Centre?

I'm actually jealous of that (seemingly) disembodied foot away in the audience. How's that for a personification of going soft in the head?

Info accompanying the YouTube clip is as follows:

"Martin Newell performs Julie Profumo, in an excerpt from the 1st Golden Afternoon. Recorded live at the Colchester Arts Centre in the summer of 2003. Martin is joined by Nelson on mandolin & backing vocals. The film was produced & directed by Michael Cumming."

There's another 5 or 6 YouTube clips from the same performance that you should also check out but it's Newell singing 'Julie Profumo' that does it for me. A well played mandolin banjoes me every time. Put it down to early exposure to an alternative universe Rod Stewart where he used to be good.

You don't love this clip as much as me? Fuck you cloth ears. (My God is definitely Old Testament.) As penance you can check out this fascinating 49 minute interview with Martin Newell, where he catalogues his life and times, and which comes courtesy of Cherry Red Records Web TV. Yep, that Cherry Red.

I'm saying it's a form of penance but in fact Newell is a witty and entertaining motormouth in the interview. The interviewer, Iain McNay, hardly gets a word in edgeways for forty odd minutes, and Newell takes you on an autobiographical journey that starts in the backwoods of early seventies Essex, careering on to the nascent punk scene in mid-seventies London to selling out tours in Germany but selling sod all back in Britain. Throw in a mention of dodgy dock pubs in Ipswich, Captain Sensible, the cassette culture of the early eighties to Newell at one point being the best selling living British poet - and it all being told with a garnish of wit and Newell's bullshit detector firmly in place - and you'll come to realise that my God has a bit of the New Testament in her as well. Just a smidgeon. That's all you need.

The Hope That Kills Us edited by Adrian Searle (Polygon 2003)

I mind seein him playin for the Huns in a European match on Sky wan night. Some bunch ae German basturts that were far tae guid for the Huns, eh. 4-3 doon on aggregate, and Tam gets the ba aff their star midfielder like sweeties aff a bairn and gans doon the inside right channel. And I'm stannin in this pub in Ferrytoon, and I'm shoutin at Laudrup, 'Make the run! Make the fuckin run!' Cause I can see where Tam wants tae play it, I can see it openin up.

So Laudrup makes the run, but the sweeper's right oan tae him, ken, Laudrup's left it tae late. So the ba goes out and the camera pans ontae Tam's pus, and he's got this expression, like, Ah cannae dae anythin wi this cunt. Ah wis pishin masel laughin in this pub. Me and Brian Laudrup! Neither of us guid enough for Tam!

[From Andrew C Ferguson's 'Nae Cunt Said Anythin']

Garnethill by Denise Mina (Carroll & Graf Mystery 1998)

"Marie was the eldest. She moved to London in the early eighties to get away from her mum's drinking, settled there and became one of Mrs Thatcher's starry-eyed children. She got a job in a bank and worked her way up. At first the change in her seemed superficial: she began to define all her friends by how big their mortgage was and what kind of car they drove. It took a while for them to realize that Marie was deep down different. They could talk about Winnie's alcoholism, about Maureen's mental-health problems, and to a lesser extent about Liam dealing drugs, but they couldn't talk about Marie being a Thatcherite. There was nothing kind to be said about that. Maureen had always assumed that Marie was a socialist because she was kind. The final breal between them came the last time Marie was home for a visit. They were talking about homelessness and Maureen ruined the dinner for everybody by losing the place and shouting, 'Get a fucking value system,' at her sister."

The Faking of Pelham One Two Three

On the first Wednesday in the month, this much I pretend to know

Livingston's only deadhead is roaming around Kerala. My sitemeter has informed me of this fact.

Denise Mina's latest novel, The Last Breath, was reviewed recently over at Huffington Post. I can call it 'The Last Breath' rather than 'Slip Of the Knife' (its American title) because Kara and myself are such Mina devotees that we got the book on import when it was originally released in Britain.
"Released?" Paddy Meehan noir is the new rock'n'roll. You will only read that bold statement here.

JC over at Vinyl Villain music blog has finally resumed his 45 45s at 45 series. He's been holding out for a few weeks but he's now down to his top ten.
In at number ten is Friends Again's 'Sunkissed'. Nice enough record but I of course don't have the same sort of back story as JC for reasons to truly love this song. I best know Friends Again for James Grant, and his follow up band, Love and Money.

There's a bastard load of monster trucks and trailers in the neighbourhood at the moment, as self-important people with loud voices and flourescent bibs are currently doing a bit of filming in the area over the next few days. For reasons I can't quite fathom - outside of the sound of the 'kerching' at a cash till - Hollywood has decided to do another remake of the classic 'The Taking of Pelham One Two Three'. And let's not bullshit here: the 1974 film was a bona fide classic.
The remake is being directed by Tony Scott, and will star Denzel Washington in the original Walter Matthau role and John Travolta will step into the late Robert Shaw's shoes as Ryder. I bet it will be shite. I'll go further than that. Sylvester Stallone miscast as Jack Carter will come to be seen as inspirational film making by comparison.

"Mel Gibson? He can't be in another film, I'm sure I saw him get his head chopped off in Braveheart." The Man who fell to sleep has still got it.

According to the iTunes recently played list on the computer, The Sparks track, 'Here in Heaven', is track 180. OK, fair enough. Kimono My House is a fine album.

So it looks like Barack Obama has finally secured the Presidential nomination for the Democratic Party. Speculation is now rife on whether or not Hillary Clinton will get to be his running mate.
One cynic has suggested that Barack will opt for Hillary for not only her very obvious political qualities, but because it will also be the best guarantee against any possible assassination attempt against himself.

If you skush some Ajax antibacterial orange scented washing liquid into hot water, it smells like Irn Bru. If you try and drink it, it tastes more like Orange Fanta.

It's taken me 24 years to reach a definitive position but I've finally decided that my favourite Police single was the one that was written by Stewart Copeland.

I was only saying to Kara the other week that I would like to read more British novels that are set in Thatcher's Britain or are contemporaneous of that period. I had this particular epiphany whilst watching the opening titles of Starter For Ten, and realising that, whilst the film itself is rather mediocre, I bet that the novel it is based on is so much better.
If nothing else, it has given me an excuse to hunt down the old Adrian Mole books from the 80s.

People can scoff all they bloody want, but Sue Townsend's books were amongst the handful of books that I actually got round to reading during that lost decade. It was through those books that I first heard of Tressell's 'Ragged Trousered Philanthropists', Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' and the Norwegian Leather Industry.

It seems to like another world to think that the author of the best selling new novel of the eighties was an unreconstructed Bevanite, and that one of the best loved fictional characters from that period was a curmudgeonly communist by the name of Bert Baxter.

A few weeks back I was going to spew out a ranty post about Ann McElvoy's recent Radio 4 programme, The Jam Generation, where assorted political hacks such as Cameron, Milliband, Osborne, Clegg, Cooper and Purnell congratulated themselves on being so different from past political generations. All this was going on whilst the music of The Jam was being played in the background, 'cos - sit tight - they were all of an age when The Jam were the biggest band in Britain. Geddit? Some of the preening numpties were even referring to themselves as 'The Jam Generation' whilst being interviewed. You couldn't make this shit up.
I'm glad I said nowt at the time 'cos I'm quickly cottoning onto the fact that it's not them who is out of step, it's me. First Weller gets interviewed in the Torygraph and now it's John Lydon who's getting the Torygraph treatment.

Will Rubbish was kind enough to pass on the link and, he's right, it's a good interview, but what the hell next: free GG Allin CDs given away with the Mail on Sunday? It don't seem right.

Mark Hughes has joined Man City? Sparky has gone down in my estimation by about 750%. I hope he fucking chokes on Thaksin's dirty money.

He may not get elected to the Michigan's state board of education, but I bet socialist/green party candidate candidate, Dwain C Reynolds III, has the fanciest smanciest website of all the candidates standing for office. There may be a few too many flashing lights and whistles on his website for my liking, but I was impressed that a candidate from a minor political party could come up with something so professional looking.

Over at his MySpace page, Attila the Stockbroker has blogged his ten favourite Half Man Half Biscuit songs. His number seven, 'Dead Men Don't Need Season Tickets', is a lost classic, but I would have also included '24 Hour Garage People' and 'National Shite Day' in my HMHB top ten.

As part of its forthcoming European Championship football coverage, ESPN has this past week been broadcasting highlights of previous European Championship finals. (To clarify: the actual finals themselves.)
I absentmindedly forgot to watch the 1984 final between the great French team and Spain, and kicked myself black and blue when I discovered my foolishness but I have been able to check out the finals from 1980, 1988, 1992 and 1996 so far.

Do you want to read something heretical, and I don't care if it does cause a coronary in old Utrecht.

Everybody (understandably) bangs on about that Van Basten goal when they refer to the '88 final. The perfectly controlled volley from an impossible angle . . . a stunned Dasayev stumbling back in astonishment as he's the last person in the stadium to realise that the ball is in the back of the net . . . and that look of unalloyed joy on the face of Rinus Michels when he knows that the trophy has gone Dutch, but it has to be stated for the record that the game itself was one of the most piss-poor games of football I've ever had the misfortune to sit through.

It was nothing more than ninety minutes of pedestrian play by blokes sporting perms, with the ball ricocheting around the pitch as each outfield player took it in turn to either miscontrol the ball or overhit a pass. For the life of me, I can't understand how people can make a just comparison between the '88 team with those brilliant Dutch national sides from the 70s.

As an antidote to that disappointment, tonight I thoroughly enjoyed watching the highlights of the '96 final between the Czech Republic and Germany. The Czech Republic were a fine side, and on another day they would have deservedly won the title. I really had forgot how good Karel Poborský was back in the day. I guess if you were going to sport that hairstyle in '96, you had to be the dogs bollocks to back it up.

Finally got round to seeing Juno the other week. I had similar feelings towards it to what I had towards the last 'indie' film to generate the Oscar baubles, Little Miss Sunshine: it's good, but not as good as I was expecting. Saying that, I liked both the skewed happy ending and the Sonic Youth line.

Stumbled across the Irish songwriter Mike Cleare recently, who hides behind the monicker of My Brother Woody.
Excellent stuff. Think Luke Haines with a girlfriend, a Beach Boys fixation and a prozac prescription.

I really must get the links thing sorted. It's got beyond a joke. Apart from anything else, I bet Volty over at Shiraz Socialist thinks I'm cyber-stalking him because he's getting so many hits from Brooklyn. 'fraid the truth is more prosaic than that: I just happening to be using blogroll whilst my one has gone awol.
Because of my procrastination, even Morph is quickly losing patience with my present predicament. He wants to give me the finger in this latest pic but Aardman animators won't supply him with the necessary fingers for the full effect. Thank you Nick Park. You're a gent, and I'll get that blogroll sorted.

Denise Mina and Foot Fetishism

It's amazing what a google alert can sometimes throw your way. There's me - honest - on the look out for the New Yorker's belated review of the Garnethill Trilogy when what I get instead is a series of flickr pics from a photographer in Texas who recently photographed Denise Mina at a book signing.

Now, with regards to the title of the post, I'm not casting any aspersions on the motives of the photographer: I'm shamelessly going for the brilliant novelist/unhealthy obsession google market.

I can't be the only person who has Denise Mina on google alert, can I?

On The Skids

Found via a Denise Mina google alert:

"The last gig I went to was The Skids in Dunfermline. I realised the last time I saw The Skids was in that very hall, in 1979. I’m sure the punters were the same as in 1979 except older and fatter: they could pogo for a few minutes before they broke sweat and had to stop." [Ian Rankin's favourite culture snacks.]

Glasgow, England

Strange List.

Hurry up and review 'The Last Breath'

Via google alerts for Denise Mina comes a couple of good reviews by the Grumpy Old Bookman blog of the first two Paddy Meehan books:

The Field of Blood

The Dead Hour

I like how Michael Allen (G.O.B) cuts to the chase when writing about 'The Field of Blood':

As an evocation of time, place, and atmosphere, this book is, I am sure, the equal of any Booker shortlisted book, but it is also, fortunately, much more. Because it's a crime novel we have a good strong narrative thread, and we are spared the arty-farty fancypants bullshit."

What the review does not pick up on, and something that I still have difficulty getting my head around is Denise Mina's insistence that the Catholic community in Scotland was still experiencing as late as the early eighties an institutionalised discrimination that was so deep rooted in Scottish society that even Paddy Meehan becoming a 'copyboy' on a newspaper was seen as something out of the ordinary.

I'm not suggesting that such a bigoted culture didn't exist, merely acknowledging that I'm perhaps too young to fully recognise that time and noting how far we've come between then and now.

I'm looking forward to Allen's future review of 'The Last Breath', which has already become my favourite book in the Paddy Meehan series.

Kailyard Kommentary

Pay no heed to the title of this post. I'm just trying to be clever, and failing miserably. Some links with a Scottish angle for your delectation:

In the aftermath of Scotland performing a smash and grab raid in Paris last Wednesday - cheers lads for buggering up my intended 'Domenech Bliss' post - came the debate at the Guardian's football blog about whether or not this was Scotland's greatest ever result.
Granted, there isn't much competition but the obvious counter-candidate is Scotland beating England 3-2 at Wembley in '67. Kev at the The Scottish Patient is nicely on cue by posting the nine and half minute YouTube clip of the game.

Sadly, being YouTube, the footage is grainier than a cheap snow globe and there's no sign of Jim Baxter playing keepie-uppie or sitting on the ball, but you have to check out six minutes into the clip. Denis Law tries the most audacious of chips and Gordon Banks has to pull off a brilliant save to deny him. Trust me, if Law had scored that goal nobody but Danny Baker and Chris Evans would have given a flying fuck about Gazza's lucky punt against Scotland in '96.

F.I.S sticks a well-deserved boot into the Andrew Carnegie myth over at the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Republic blog.

Found via google alert is a not so recent - but don't let that stop you from reading it - interview with Denise Mina over at Powells.Com.
Kara will especially like this quote from the interview:

Really what I'm doing is writing feminist stories in a really accessible medium. That is what I'm really interested in, just getting those sort of feminist stories out there, because I don't see representations of women in a lot of literature that I recognize as the real experience of women.

On matters relating to Denise Mina and Kara; did I ever mention that Kara and I attended an excellent event back in April, where Denise Mina, Ian Rankin and Allan Guthrie spoke on the subject of 'Tartan Noir'? It was part of the Tartan Week events that takes place in New York every Spring. The only real crime in evidence that night was when Kara grabbed my copy of the 'Dead Hour', and got Denise Mina to inscribe 'To Kara - from Denise Mina' in the inside front cover.

And, finally, back to Kev at the Scottish Patient. I've never been one for the Welsh; I'm more of a Legge man, but I did like Kev's latest post, where he reviews Irvine Welsh's latest novel - and Welsh's entire back catalogue - via a trip down Easter Road.
But what's with the front cover of Welsh's latest book? If I'm not mistaken that wee subbeto guy's wearing Motherwell colours. And what's with the cigarette in hand, empty beer cans, handcuffs and novelty boxer shorts? Did they get Andy Goram's permission before they were allowed to use his image as a subbuteo figure for their front cover? That's the only guy I can think of off-hand who played for both Hibs and Motherwell. It can't be Chic Charnley; he never played for Motherwell, and they'd have needed a bigger base to support the weight of his subbeteo figure.