Words by LORAINE PATRICK
Photograph by FRAZER RICE
Earlier this year Val McDermid was honoured with an outstanding contribution to Crime Fiction award.
Previous winners of the prestigious title, given at the Theakstons Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, include Ruth Rendell, P.D. James and Reginald Hill. The Scots writer is up there with the best but a more down to earth woman you couldn’t wish to meet.
Like so many crime writers, PD James was drawn to her vocation out of love. Before she took up her pen, she was a keen reader of detective novels, and over her long career she remained fascinated by the so-called golden age that followed the end of the first world war.
But she was more than a fan. She applied her keen intelligence to what she read, and developed a genuine expertise on the subject. I once heard her lecture on the four “queens of crime” – Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L Sayers – and she wrote a fascinating monograph on the subject, Talking About Detective Fiction. This love for the work of her predecessors is evident in a new collection of her short stories: she picks the pockets of the mechanics of golden age plotting; Agatha Christie is referenced several times; and there are knowing nods to the conventions of traditional, “cosy” mystery stories.
This appropriation of the conventions of the past sometimes misleads people into thinking of James as a cosy writer. The reality is that she is anything but, and she took on those conventions only to subvert them in an often witty way. One thing in particular sets her apart from the mainstream tradition of interwar English crime fiction, with its stately homes and bourgeois villages where reality never rears its ill-mannered head. She understands that murder is nasty and brutal, that it is fuelled by the most malevolent of motives, and she’s not afraid to face that darkness head on. Her understanding of what she often called “wickedness” is creepily accurate. There’s nothing cosy about the murders in her stories, however much their settings mimic those of their forerunners.
Photograph: PD James in 2003 Photograph: David Sandison/Rex
Read the full article on The Guardian website…
Val McDermid has been thrilling readers with complex, fast-paced detective stories for nearly 30 years. She tells Chris Moss about her latest release, her 30th novel.
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” Joseph Heller’s famous line from Catch-22 could have been the epigraph for Val McDermid’s latest novel – her 30th, and her fourth to feature hyper-curious cold case rummager DCI Karen Pirie.
Already acclaimed by critics as well as fans, it’s a dark, knotty story that channels some of Scotland and the UK’s biggest social and political issues – including privacy, LGBT rights, immigration and mental health – and weaves them into a many-pronged investigation into a horrific traffic accident, an apparent suicide, a supposed air disaster, and a complex case of adoption and inheritance.
The author’s craft is there at every tricksy turn of the plot, but so is an impressively broad general knowledge and a clear passion for current affairs.
I’m in the business of writing about characters and am always driven by the story
“I never think about themes when I’m working on a novel,” insists McDermid. “I’m in the business of writing about characters and am always driven by the story. I’m a bit of a news junky and so it might be a news item or some fact I’ve picked up that finds itself in a novel. Often it can be quite tangential.”
The ideas for Out of Bounds, she says, occurred to her while she was researching her 2015 non-fiction book Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime.
“I was at a conference and two guys from Greater Manchester were discussing the ways to use familial DNA to uncover cold cases. That intrigued me. Families are seldom as simple as the image we have of them, and that got me.”
The novel is an exploration of the implications – for the victims of past crimes and for justice in general – that new kinds of forensic evidence can have when it comes to unearthing new facts. As ever with McDermid’s stories, the moment the reader is prepared to judge a character, the author turns the screw and forces us to reassess our prejudices.
Read the full article on The Big Issue North website
