Garnethill (Denise Mina) Chapters 9-20

It has been pointed out to me that crime novels seem to always go on and on about smoking and drinking, the characters incessantly smoking and drinking.  Well, this story is certainly no exception.  Our protagonist comes from a family of alcoholism and is herself arguably a certifiable alcoholic.  ‘Maureen had never been happier to see a bottle of whisky.  She ordered a large Glenfiddich with ice and lime cordial . . . The barman looked at the drink as he put it on the bar.  “If the bar manager came in and saw me serving a malt whisky with lime juice, I just – I don’t know what he’d say.” ‘She downs it and asks for another.  ‘He put it down and asked what the drink was called.  “Whisky with lime in it,” said Maureen and moved to a table.’  A couple of pages later, ‘. . . her mind kept wandering back to the bottle of Glenfiddich at the far end of the gantry.  She could see it in her mind’s eye, lit up from behind like a holy vision.’  Well this is Scotland; and it is a fine single malt whisky!

Other great passages are placed here and there like rose bushes around the next corner:  ‘The clinic operated out of a converted creamery, built as part of the Levanglen Lunatic Asylum estate . . . The walls were painted yellow and covered in posters of puppies and kittens and monkeys.  When it was full of patients the maniacally cheerful room looked like a sarcastic joke.’   It is at another mental institution – Maureen is familiar with them all at this point in her life – that we finally get a major clue, just a few pages before the halfway point in the book, as to why the murder was committed.

Her friend Martin, who works at the Northern Psychiatric Hospital as a “porter” – apparently quite low on the food chain – says, ‘ “There’s something very bad happening and I don’t want to be involved in it, right?” . . . He said that several years ago there had been some sort of problem in George 1 [a psychiatric ward].  The women in the ward were all getting much worse.  It turned out that someone was interfering with them sexually . . . “Did they prosecute someone?”  “Have you been to George 1?”  “No.”  “Oh, God, the poor souls can hardly talk.  They couldn’t go to court – half of them don’t know their own names.” ’ (Did I mention this novel was “dark”?)  The implication is that the murder of Maureen’s boyfriend, of which she was set up to look like the murderer, was committed to keep him from revealing some dirty deeds indeed that had gone on at this Mental Hospital.

The setting continues to be important to the mood of the story.  ‘The light in Scotland is low in the autumn, gracing even the most mundane objects with dramatic chiaroscuro.’  And walking down Maryhill Road ‘the area had suddenly become desolate.  Subsiding buildings had been bolstered up or else abandoned, their windows and doors boarded up with fibreglass.   The city surveyors had always known there was an ancient mine there; they thought it was safe but the medieval miners had left weaker struts in it than they had supposed.  Maryhill was falling into a five-hundred-year-old hole.’  Cool!  Who wants to go with me to visit Glasgow!

‘Maureen lay down among the dog ends and looked up at the tree tops, empty tears running into her hair . . .’  “Dog ends”?  The last time I remember hearing that term was back in the early 70s:  ‘Neck hurting bad, as he bends to pick a dog end.  He goes down to the bog and warms his feet.’  from the song Aqualung by Jethro Tull, 1971.  ‘The unsmoked end of a cigarette or cigar.’  Now I know!

Next Week:  Chapters 21-27

Week 4:  Chapters 28-38