Tony Hill and Carol Jordan are back, on the hunt for the ‘Wedding Killer’
Val McDermid has written close on 30 award-winning thrillers and suspense novels, in four series, since the late 1980s, all of them featuring a lead female protagonist. She herself worked as a journalist and a crime reporter, and the atmosphere is grittily realistic.
Insidious Intent is the tenth volume in the only McDermid series to feature a partnership – one both emotional, albeit reticent and repressed at times, and professional. Once again, as in all these novels, the title is a phrase from TS Eliot, here “The Love Song of J Albert Prufrock”:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
McDermid, once an English scholar, has a captivating rhythm to her writing – perhaps because of her underlying apprehension of poetry, and affinity with her chosen poet and his ability to plumb human nature. To set the scene, she quotes from De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. The interplay of understanding and collaboration between the high-ranking policewoman Carol Jordan, and the clinical psychologist, a profiler of criminals, Tony Hill, is crucial.
Both are middle-aged adults with complex characters and complex histories. They are people of integrity, but all too aware that things are never black and white. Both are heavily compromised by past actions, undertaken perhaps for the best of motives but marred by misjudgements, as well, of course, by the law of unintended consequences.
They are utterly human, weighed down with difficult pasts and unresolved grief and conflict. Tony is more or less living in Carol’s renovated barn, once home to her murdered brother and sister. Their relationship is platonic but stressed, as both may want more; she is also an alcoholic who has gone cold turkey and is desperate, as the story unfolds, for a drink. The reader can practically feel her physical and mental pain as she longs for her fix of choice. Carol is also being stalked by an investigative journalist who seems partly motivated by malice. Lurking behind the present sequence of events is a spectrum of past failures and successes in dealing with the most horrible violent crimes, some psychopathic in nature.
Crime story fans are being offered an evening with an award-winning North East novelist sas she shares her writing secrets.
Author Ann Cleeves, whose best-selling books – Shetland and Vera – have both been made into TV series’, will be at South Shields’ The Word: National Centre for the Written Word on September 8.
The event will see Ann interviewed, discuss her latest novel from the Vera series: The Seagull, and answering questions about her successful career as an author.
Since starting writing 30 years ago, Ann has gone on to publish more than 30 books, with some of her bestsellers being adapted for both radio and TV.
Seven series of Vera, the ITV adaptation starring Brenda Blethyn, have been broadcast in the UK, and sold worldwide. There have also been three series of Shetland, based on her Shetland novels – and a fourth is in preparation.
Tania Robinson, Head of Marketing and Culture for The Word: National Centre for the Written Word said: “September is a brilliant month for crime fiction fans at The Word.
I came of queer age on a steady diet of lesbian films, purchased covertly at university, and hidden under my bed when back home. Films with brilliant titles such as “The Itty Bitty Titty Committee”, “Watermelon”, “I Can’t Think Straight” and “Better Than Chocolate” (yes, it is what you think) taught me a huge amount about what it meant to be a queer woman.
These films weren’t always easy to come by – this was before Netflix, before Sandi Toksvig was on TV, before “Orange Is the New Black” and “Moonlight”. The lesbian and queer pickings were slim, and predominantly featured white characters. I watched everything I could get my hands on – films about each letter of the LGBTQ spectrum – wanting to understand the breadth and depth of the new community I’d joined. But eventually the internet’s well of queer films ran dry.
So I went looking for the books. I’d soon read James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Brett Easton Ellis and Thomas Mann. But I wanted something that looked like me, something beyond the white gay men or the lesbian film where everyone dies at the end. Starting with Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness nearly had me abandoning the whole thing together. (If you haven’t read it, be warned: it does what it says on the tin…) Praise the lord for Stella Duffy, Sarah Waters, Nella Larson, Carol Ann Duffy, and Jeanette Winterson. I discovered Val McDermid when she came to speak at university, and she fast became my favourite crime writer. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a gift that came just at the right time – perfect for a queer student simultaneously navigating an English degree and dating. I will keep the exquisite letters that Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West wrote to each other close to me for the rest of my life. Woolf’s Orlando was one of the first (and only) novels I’ve read that even nodded at gender identity, or being trans. So, there are great queer writers, but you’ve got to go looking.
