Denise Mina on seeing her thriller The Long Drop adapted for the stage: 'they've kept all the funny bits'
Based on the true story of Glasgow serial killer Peter Manuel, Denise Mina’s 2007 book The Long Drop has now been turned into a stage play. Mina and playwright Linda McLean, who wrote the adaptation, tell Mark Fisher what to expect
Denise Mina owes it all to the audience. In 2013, she wrote a lunchtime drama for Glasgow’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint. It was called Driving Manuel and starred the late Andy Gray as the real-life serial killer Peter Manuel.
This was a grim story. Responsible for at least seven murders, several of them in the victims’ bedrooms, the Lanarkshire housebreaker was eventually arrested. He was one of the first criminals to sack his lawyer and defend himself in court. Unsuccessful, he was hanged in Barlinnie in 1958.
There was a lot Mina knew about a man who had spread fear through Glasgow in the two years before his arrest. The former Strathclyde University lecturer in criminology and criminal law had researched the relationship between Manuel and William Watt, a businessman whose wife, sister-in-law and daughter had been shot dead in the middle of the night. Manuel was to blame, but before his conviction, Watt himself had been put under suspicion.
But the lunchtime audience at Oran Mor, many of whom remembered those terrible events, believed they knew more than Mina about what had really gone on. “They stopped me at the end and said there’s a much better story here,” says Mina today. “The story in the city was that William Watt had asked somebody to kill his wife and they had subcontracted it to Peter Manuel. When you read the court documents, they’re very obviously skirting around a whole lot of stuff.”
She adds: “There’s the story the city tells and the story the law tells. And the law often tells an unsatisfying story that tidies everybody away.”
The audience’s insights informed Mina’s book, The Long Drop, which told the grizzly tale of Manuel’s final triple murder through the lens of a boozy encounter between the two men. It is the story of how, desperate to clear his name, Watt let it be known he would pay for information. At great risk, he arranged to meet Manuel.
READ MORE: Book review: The Long Drop, by Denise Mina
Published in 2017, the book was rooted in fact – “All the dialogue is taken from the transcripts of the court,” says Mina – but was written as a novel. Using a tone that veers between the clownish and the gothic, Mina framed the story as a murder mystery, evoking a 1950s Glasgow of menacing pubs and underworld thugs where nobody’s testimony feels quite straight.
Writing it, she found the truth was stranger than fiction: “William Watt is not a believable character. He’s ludicrous, very tall and a bit of an Ealing Comedy character. You wouldn’t write him, he’s too broad strokes, He actually says the words, ‘I’ve never done a wrong thing in my life, never in my life have I ever done anything wrong.’ But he was real.”
Now, things are coming full circle and Glasgow audiences are to be repaid for the insight they gave the novelist all those years ago. Commissioned by artistic director Dominic Hill at the Citizens Theatre, playwright Linda McLean has adapted The Long Drop for a mainstage production. With Star Wars actor Brian Vernel playing the serial killer, it features an A-list of Scottish actors: Andy Clark, Martin Donaghy, George Drennan, Keith Fleming, Mary Gapinski and Robert Jack clocking up 27 characters between them.
The casting reminds you what a male-centred story this is. Mina wonders how a male writer would have coped in telling it. “It would be hard for a man to find that stuff funny,” she says. “A man would find William Watt a bit threatening or would find Peter Manuel enchanting in some way, whereas as a woman, you’re thinking, ‘They think they’re social pirates and they’re just very drunk men, staggering around.’ Linda has kept in all the funny bits and that outsider eye which only women of a certain age could bring.”
For her part, McLean was careful not to lose sight of the crimes. “There are deliberately humorous moments,” says the playwright. “But I’d be doing a disservice to everyone to not be aware of how awful the consequences were of that man’s actions – and, actually, of living at that time. It wasn’t easy. Glasgow was being run by gangs of men – in the council, the police, criminals, businessmen…”
McLean is sitting in the upstairs foyer of the refurbished Citz, looking out at the houses that have replaced the high-rises and, before them, the slums of the Gorbals. It was in pubs in this vicinity that much of the story played out. McLean’s maternal grandparents lived here and her mother was a teenager at the time. “My grandfather used to put my mother on the bus, because everybody was so afraid,” she says.
Mina gave her carte blanche to tell the story the way she saw fit, keeping her distance until an early rehearsal. McLean is one of Scotland’s most adventurous playwrights, frequently playing games with theatrical form, be it the overlapping monologues of Sex And God, or the sequence of seemingly unrelated scenes in Strangers, Babies. In the case of The Long Drop, she says that job was done for her: “The novel was already quite experimental. It swaps backwards and forwards in time, storylines interweave. That was a gift for me.”
What does Mina think about the prospect of seeing her book on stage? “I’m looking forward to it so much I’m taking my aunties. That’s how confident I am.”
The Long Drop is at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 5–20 June, see www.citz.co.uk This feature was produced in association with the Citizens’ Theatre
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