The story of Mary, Queen of Scots, so often characterised as a romance, was notably violent and grim. Visitors to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh who would like to sense the brutal reality should pay attention to a very small room off the royal bedchamber – it was here, on 9 March 1566, that David Rizzio, Mary’s private secretary and favourite, was murdered. He was stabbed 56 times. The queen, pregnant with a future king, is said to have had a pistol aimed at her belly. This, then, is a crime scene, and so it is appropriate that a crime writer should take up the tale.
Denise Mina’s Rizzio dramatises the murder and its aftermath: the queen a prisoner, her life threatened. Mina makes no attempt at recreating the language of the Scottish court, opting instead for hard-boiled sentences, stabby and pithy. One assassin is “a killing spree looking for an excuse”, another’s “breath smells of turned milk and cat piss”. The narrative voice is indistinguishable from The Long Drop, her previous work in true crime, and that was set in 1950s Glasgow. Most of the dialogue, though, is taken from the historical record.
Mina is good on the institutionalised and individual misogyny of the period, subtly connecting it to those issues in our own time. Mary will not be believed when she later describes the personal outrages she suffered on the night of Rizzio’s death: “They will say she’s making them up to gain sympathy, a charge levelled at victims by powerful men since time immemorial.” The Earl of Bothwell, her future husband, is introduced as “an adulterer, an adventurer and a rapist”. Mina seems to hold most of her male characters in contempt, stepping outside the story to point out the distance between how they see themselves – as “the Great Men of History” – and what they really are: ridiculous killers and drunks.
Mary was a powerful woman whose gender made her vulnerable both physically and in terms of her hold on that power. Although Mina touches on this idea throughout, it feels at times as though this short novel is a step towards a longer work, one in which the predicament and point of view of the queen are explored in much greater depth. Perhaps she will write that book one day. Rizzio, meanwhile, is an intriguing sketch in blood.