Denise Mina / ‘Edgar Allan Poe is so good I feel sick with jealousy’

 

Denise Mina

Books

that 

made me

Denise Mina: ‘Edgar Allan Poe is so good I feel sick with jealousy’

This article is more than 4 years old

The Scottish crime writer on being inspired by Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and why Harper Lee was right not to keep publishing

Denise Mina

Friday 21 May 2021

The book I am currently reading
A Crack in the Wall by Claudia Piñeiro, a fantastic Argentinian crime writer and my new literary crush. She is a wonderful writer and a great storyteller, two things that don’t always go together.

The book that changed my life
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I was raised in a very Catholic environment and the Pontius Pilate section resonated with me deeply because I’d written a musical about him at school and been “spoken to” by the head nun. I read the book when I accidentally went on an Ibiza Uncovered-style holiday in Corfu in 1985. It made me want to be a writer.

The book I wish I’d written
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is so spare and modern and well-paced that I was almost sick with jealousy the moment I finished it. Envy is the truest compliment any writer can give another, and although Poe is often uneven and a bit gothic for my taste, that short story is one of the best bits of crime writing I’ve ever read. Damn his eyes!

The book that had the greatest influence on me
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I’m still in thrall to the idea that a writer can address the unspeakable by wrapping it up in an engaging narrative. I think Lee was right not to keep publishing. Each book is a snapshot of a moment in time, an interaction between an editor, a writer and a publisher, and the follow-up Go Set a Watchman makes me think that something magical happened in the original dynamic. I’ve had editors who suggested changes to my books that made them infinitely better.

The book I think is most underrated
I cannot understand why everyone hasn’t read Jane Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy: these novels are classics, with glorious writing, stylistic courage and humour. You can’t steal from Gardam, she’s just too particular. I avoid reading the interviews she gives because I love her books so much I don’t want to know anything about her.

The book that changed my mind
Not a book but a play: Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Sommeshook me out of a lifelong prejudice against Ulster loyalists. It made me realise that there was a whole other side of the history of partition that I had been oblivious to, a fascinating and tragic one.

The last book that made me laugh
This was laughter of recognition rather than cheery joy: Maria Konnikova’s The Confidence Game is a great nonfiction breakdown of the methods and moves of con artistry. I was reading it just as Donald Trump was losing the election and it read as a roadmap of what he was going to do.

The book I couldn’t finish
The Devils by Dostoevsky. I’ve started it three times and cannot get the hang of the patronymic system: every scene appears to have 50 different characters floating in and out.

The book I give as a gift
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Its structure shouldn’t work – it’s ill-paced and uneven but completely beguiling and one of the most explicitly sensory books I’ve ever read. I found myself sweating while I was reading it. In Glasgow. In November. I used to buy people Heart of a Dog by Bulgakov, a political metaphor for what happens when the underclass get power. I’ve stopped because not many people could match my enthusiasm. I was phoning up in the middle of the night to ask if they’d read it yet.

 Denise Mina’s Costa-shortlisted novel The Less Dead is out in paperback (Vintage).

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/21/denise-mina-edgar-allan-poe-is-so-good-i-feel-sick-with-jealousy

THE GUARDIAN

An interview with Denise Mina

 

Denise Mina

An interview with Denise Mina about crime writing and low art.

By Kim Fay

March 19, 2016

A PLAYWRIGHT, graphic novelist, and crime fiction writer, Denise Mina defies category. But she is perhaps best known for her incisive crime novels, with countless recognitions including induction into the Crime Writers’ Association Hall of Fame. She is the award-winning author of three series and a standalone. Her most recent book, Blood Salt Water, is the fifth in her Alex Morrow series.

 

Denise Mina

Interview

Denise Mina: 'I couldn't read until I was about nine'

This article is more than 5 years old

The acclaimed crime author on being a late bloomer, how we decide which victims to care about, and her affinity with Glasgow

Anita Sethi

Saturday 29 August 2020

The Collected Poems of Li He

trans. J. D. Frodsham

(NYRB, March 2017)

POETS OF THE LATE TANG DYNASTY

January 15, 2019
by Matt Turner

Most American readers of Chinese poetry come to it through classic translations by Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, Burton Watson, and a few others. With some notable exceptions, those translations have tended to focus on the poetic triumvirate of the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE): Li Bai (Li Po), Du Fu (Tu Fu), and Wang Wei. The literary context in which those three Tang poets are placed—in China as well as the U.S.—is part of a long, ascendant tradition in Chinese letters, beginning to certain degree with the early anthology that Confucius assembled: the Shijing, better known in English as the Book of Odes or the Book of Songs (Pound translated it as Shih-Ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius). The poems of the Shijing, which often seem little more than folk ditties, span seven centuries during the fabled Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE)—the time, according to Confucius in his Analects, when politics and society were ordered as they should be. In China, the Zhou and Tang periods are acknowledged as two golden ages, exemplars of what is best in the Chinese tradition. A trajectory of one to the other is easily assumed.

BOOK OF THE DAY
REVIEW

The Poems of Seamus Heaney review – collected works reveal his colossal achievement

This article is more than 1 month old

The complete works, including previously unpublished poems and expert notes, are brought together in one volume for the first time

Philip Terry
Thu 9 Oct 2025

Baudelaire introduced ordinary objects into poetry – likening the sky to a pan lid – and by doing so revolutionised poetic language. Likewise, Seamus Heaneyintroduced Northern Irish vernacular into the English lyric, peppering his lines with words like glarry, the Ulster word for muddy; kesh, from Irish ceis, a wickerwork causeway; and dailigone, “daylight gone” or dusk, from Ulster-Scots. It is this that gives his writing a mulchy richness and cultural resonance that remain unique in contemporary poetry. One of the key poems in North (1975) is a version of Baudelaire’s The Digging Skeleton, to which Heaney brings an Irish flavour – the skeletons dig the earth “like navvies”. It’s especially rich as digging for Heaney is also a metaphor for writing, while the archaeological metaphor resonates with the darkly symbolic bog poems.

 

Mick Herron

Interview

Mick Herron: ‘I’m interested in incompetence, things going wrong’

This article is more than 3 years old

The Slow Horses author on the ‘virtue of limitations’ and drawing life lessons from The Wind in the Willows

Anthony Cummins

Saturday 9 July 2022

Mick Herron, 58, is the author of 19 books, most recently Bad Actors, the eighth novel in his Jackson Lamb series about a group of demoted MI5 agents. In 2013, he won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for the second instalment, Dead Lions, which Herron’s original publisher rejected on account of the poor sales of the first book, Slow Horses, now an Apple TV+ drama starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. He is on the shortlist (for a fifth time) of the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award (announced 23 July), for Slough House, the seventh in the series, out in paperback. Herron met me in Oxford, where he has lived ever since leaving Newcastle to study English in 1981.

Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?

 

In crafting his hero, Herron drew as much from Wodehouse as from le Carré.Illustration by Harol Bustos

Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?

In his “Slough House” thrillers, the screwups save the day—and there’s a very fine line between comedy and catastrophe.

By Jill Lepore

November 28, 2022

Mick Herron is a broad-shouldered Englishman with close-cropped black hair, lightly salted, and fine and long-fingered hands, like a pianist’s or a safecracker’s. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and he is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony. He does not drive a car and he does not own a smartphone, and, in the softly carpeted apartment in Oxford where, wearing woollen slippers, he writes spy novels—the best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the funniest—he does not have Wi-Fi. He used to be a copy editor. He has never been a secret agent, except insofar as all writers are spies and maybe, lately, so is everyone else.