Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Alexander McCall Smith | Denise Mina | Samantha Harvey

There must surely be occasions when Alexander McCall Smith is a bit down in the dumps and doesn’t particularly feel like going on a book festival stage and being charming and sparkling and witty for an hour. It never seems to happen and yesterday afternoon was no exception.

Alexander 'Sandy' McCall Smith | Andrew O'Brien

Show me a writer who gets through more subjects. Yesterday we had the miners’ strike (background to his next, Edinburgh-set novel), the expressiveness of Colin Firth’s eyes, the importance of children’s books and university friendships, the civic destructiveness of AirBnBs, the dangers of boasting in dating apps, the privileged status of the German professoriat, the over-preponderance of clarinettists in the Really Terrible Orchestra, research into the extent of animal language (elephants apparently have a large vocabulary) and the moral instructiveness of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus.

All this and a poem written specially about Edinburgh for the Cockburn Association.

Chair Georgina Godwin did an excellent job in wrangling all of this into a coherent, enjoyable whole. She did, however, elicit one admission of weakness. “I’m not,” McCall Smith admitted, “good at writing about villains. I did write about a Glasgow gangster funeral. I’ve never been invited to one but would have liked to have seen it.”

Before her publishers said no, Denise Mina wanted to call her novel The F***-It Button. Except without asterisks. This, she explained, for the benefit of any McCall Smith readers in the audience – who would never have heard of such a thing – is what you press when you want to blow up your life: for example, when you tell your boss what you really think of him and storm out of your job.

Cosy crime fans should also be aware that one key element in the novel (now safely called The Good Liar) is the Blood Splatter Probability Index devised by her forensics expert protagonist. (“Just think of it as tomato ketchup” Mina counselled the squeamish.) Yet the moral dilemma at the novel’s heart is profound: should her protagonist admit her evidence led to a miscarriage of justice even if doing so would ruin the lives of everyone they loved?

As ever with Mina, the conversation flowed widely, from why she hates the idealisation of serial killers, to Scots reinventing themselves in London to why the police procedural is on the way out.

“There are so many types of crime stories we just don’t hear about,” she says, adding that her next book will be about “buff, waxed criminals in Dubai”.

By way of contrast, Samantha Harvey talked almost exclusively about her novel Orbital - but since it won the Booker and since we’ll probably never ever read anything as lyrical about a day in the life of the International Space Station, perhaps that was fair enough.

A friend once told her that she’d seen Orbital on a shelf labelled “Plotless Novels” in a Canadian bookshop, which is cruel if fair. Instead of a plot, she hoped to engage the reader’s attention by showing the sheer wonder of looking down at the blue planet, as all of its seasons spun by 250 miles beneath, spring and autumn just half an hour apart.

Researching the space station was the easiest thing, she said. What was harder was getting into the state of mind she wanted to write from: attentive to beauty and joy, and wanting to celebrate the internationalism of a space mission which is now sadly being superseded by more exploitative, capitalist projects.

Her publishers didn’t foresee Orbital’s success, but as it has now been translated into 45 languages, the planet’s readers are proving them wrong.

David Robinson

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