Book Review

By Derryll White

Mina, Denise (2009). Still Midnight.

Detective Sergeant Alex Morrow has a hard time on the Glasgow police force. She is sensitive to sexism and the workings of the old boy’s club. And she cannot keep her mouth shut. As she gets assigned more “women’s” roles she simmers. She hates being punished for speaking her mind, but she can’t lie to herself. The consequences keep trickling down from the ranks above.

Denise Mina is extremely good at creating images and feelings. The reader feels the dirt and decay of the Glasgow slums, the racial tension heightened by poverty and envy. She invites the reader to understand personal history, to identify with how DS Morrow uses her own past to eliminate the camouflage and subterfuge surrounding the kidnapping of Aamir Anwar. It is a delicate dance made more difficult by DS Morrow’s need to keep her own past hidden from the police authorities.

Mina uses the “c…” word with shocking frequency, which may alienate some female readers, but she does it to energize a sense of DS Morrow’s frustration. She is a woman in a man’s world and she has to be hard mentally, physically and linguistically. The fact that her child has died and she is still grieving makes her even angrier and harder. Her dark belligerence communicates the fact that she really doesn’t give a fuck about office politics.

Much of the grace of this novel is in the details. Mina is a master at building scenes and senses of Glasgow – a working class city pushing forward to a larger promise. The reader gets a sense thru DS Morrow of just how hard it is for Glaswegians to cross class and economic boundaries, to be accepted for who they are rather than where they come from.

Mina throws immigration and racism into the mix to give even a fuller picture. The outcome of this gives the novel a real vibrancy, a feel of the world today with both its warts and glories. I really enjoy Denise Mina’s novels.

****

Excerpts from the novel:

SCOTTISH RACISM – She nodded out to the hall. “They’re from Uganda and I’m from bloody Lancaster. You wouldn’t believe the shit we have to put up with now, ‘cause of all them fucking Arabs.”

“D’you think that’s what it was? Just a case of misplaced bigotry?”

MEMORY – Aamir felt the cold Scottish wind buffet him again and braced himself, cowering, his chin on his chest. Men like these men did not drive to the countryside for no reason. They were going to kill him. He shut his eyes to pray and, from a deep dark place, a small bubble of honest emotion rose to his chest, an old feeling, a puff of African dust and the smell of cigarillos. The feeling was urgent and fresh, unadulterated by memory. He had been running from this small bubble for thirty years, suppressing it with prayers and work and worry, with children and home improvements and food. A puff of dust from the November road to Entebbe airport. Under the pillowcase Aamir opened his eyes in shock. Facing death his last thought was honest and pure. It was relief.

GRIEF – Gerald had died. It was the first time she’d thought the words since they left the hospital. Gerald has died. She hadn’t said it to anyone because she couldn’t even think it. Gerald died, but this, the carnage afterwards, this was her creation.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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