Don't insult me with 'unionist'

Interesting times, uncomfortable times.  That’s how the writer Denise MIna recalls the Scottish independence referendum.

She voted No, went on Radio 4 to explain her position and was rewarded by endless vitriol on social media from Yes-supporting keyboard warriors.  She hated the abuse, she hated the flag-waving in the streets and she still hates how the terms of the debate, even the terminology, are laid down by the Yes side, five years later.   

“What the f*ck is a ‘unionist’ anyway?” Mina demands. “I grew up in Paris, I grew up in Norway, I’m an internationalist.

“‘Unionist’ is just an insult, a straw man argument, gathering everyone who disagrees with you into one bundle, and discrediting them by association with the Orange lodge, that’s what that’s about.” 

Mina, it’s obvious, is spiky all the way south of her wild haircut.  Best known as a crime writer, she’s in Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum theatre, where she has been watching her adaptation of Mrs Puntilla and Her Man Matti, by Berthold Brecht,  a playwright whose politics chime with hers. 

The production switches the action from rural Finland of the 1940s to a present-day Highland estate, but  - and this is the nub of the issue - it is not a bit about twee nationalism.

Instead the helpless local staff and immigrant hirelings are at the mercy of the pitiless inconsistency of Mrs Puntilla, a fabulously wealthy drunk played by Elaine C Smith.   The chauffeur, Matti, is the Everyman figure who explains what it’s all about: the age old tyranny of capital over labour.   

That’s why ‘unionist’ is such an insult, says Mina. “Brecht was an international socialist. He saw the central division as haves and have-nots.”

This outlook is ingrained in her.  Mina, born in East Kilbride, owes her peripatetic childhood to her father, an engineer, whose work took his family around Europe.  Her teenage years were in Bromley, south London (“Do you know it? It’s a suburban shit-hole”) and she arrived in Glasgow, studying criminology in her early 20s.

She broke away from a PhD to write Garnethill (1998), set in her newly-adopted home city.  It laid a pattern for the rest of her crime-writing career, by winning a prize and foregrounding a put-upon, flawed heroine, an abuse survivor with a history of psychiatric illness.    

About a dozen books later, The Less Dead comes out in August. It began as a true crime investigation of a series of murders in Glasgow and is rooted in her interest in  “deserving” and “undeserving” victims, a distinction made, she maintains, by the public at large, rather than by the police or the media.

The setting is the 1990s, recalled by the author as  a “crazy time” in Glasgow when a spike in heroin addiction coincided with a surge in the number of women on the city streets. Emma Caldwell, 27, became the best known victim in a spate of killings  of sex workers. 

Mina explains: “Emma Caldwell was covered in a particular way because her family were lovely, and gave interviews.  She herself was very sympathetic, she was a ‘good’ victim.  

“The women before that - and I remember following those murders at the time - were not sympathetic, they were not seen as lovely and many grew up in foster care or children’s homes.  They didn’t have anyone to stand up for them.”

The more she researched, the more troubling her true-crime project became. “I realised I couldn’t really talk about these women, a lot were really kids, without repeating the offence and making it a gory book about the awful things that happened to people.” So, she says, she wrapped it up in fiction. 

She remains fascinated by the central moral conundrum: why do the public, and even many feminists, have so little compassion for sex workers and other “invisible” people?

“One of the tropes of crime fiction when I was starting out was if you had a sex worker murder, you had to have five and they had to be killed in interesting ways,” she says. “If the victim was, say, a minister’s daughter, one was enough.  The assumption was the audience didn’t care (about sex workers).

“At the same time, particularly with those Glasgow murders, what was so interesting was the fact the feminist movement did not feel ownership over those women. They were like an aberration.   

“Even using the term ‘sex worker’ is controversial, because you are suggesting it is legitimate work.  It’s so controversial, most people just stay out of it. It’s like trans rights - you hear people say, ‘I don’t know what I’m allowed to say about that.’ 

“That kind of fighting about words is a way of stopping people caring.  In the meantime there are other human beings dying in the street, or behind closed doors.  Those women who died will just be forgotten because people say, ‘It’s prurient to talk about them.’  Well, I’m glad crime writing is prurient.”

Ian Rankin, the author of the best-selling Inspector Rebus series, often argues for crime-writing to be accepted as serious literary fiction. Mina disagrees.  

“I like low art forms. I like the notion of someone picking up my book because it’s fun.  The fact it isn’t taken seriously means you don’t have the social status but you do have a real engagement with your readers.  

“In Glasgow, people have come up and said, ‘Read your last book, hen. It was shite.’ I love it.  I bet Salman Rushie doesn’t get that.”

Mrs Puntilla  and her Man Matti, Edinburgh Royal Lyceum, until March 21; Glasgow Citizens Theatre from March 25, 2020

A version of this article first appeared in The Times Scotland edition, March 7, 2020