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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
In the forensic science course I took at university they used photographs of dead bodies. For ballistics they showed us a guy lying on the floor, and his head had burst. Denise Mina Read Quote
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 Read Quote
With my earlier books, I got quite bored being with one protagonist all the way through. With the Alex Morrow books, I wanted to do something a bit more holistic, so there were lots of different points of view, and I wanted to look at aspects of crime that you don’t tend to look at. Denise Mina Read Quote
I’m not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It’s very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn’t always work that way. Denise Mina Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Most of the people who write to me are really clever, really engaged. They just want to say that they have read my book and liked it. Denise Mina Read Quote
There are a lot of bottlenecks to getting published. Publishers are only one of them. Having the time is another one. Feeling entitled is another one. Denise Mina Read Quote
