On Saturday, at Linlithgow’s bijou book festival, Val McDermid could not tell her audience very much about her new novel, Splinter the Silence, for fear of giving away the plot.
What she did reveal, however, is that its subject is the rise of internet trolls, those offensive patrollers of the online world who make twitterers of thin skin and anxious disposition nervous to broadcast even the blandest remarks. If J K Rowling can be savaged for expressing delight at the Scottish rugby squad’s performance in the world cup quarter final, what is safe for someone to say without fear of cyber assault?
McDermid believes that women are far more often the butt of trolls than men, despite the fact she has rarely been targeted. Even when she appeared on Question Time, a programme where, with the exception of politicians, most women’s performance is routinely met by twitter abuse, she emerged unscathed. Perhaps, as her teenage son has helpfully suggested, this is because she looks “so scary”. Or because, as her fiction attests, she knows countless undetectable ways to kill people.
Val will be on a reading tour in Germany from Wednesday 4th November to Thursday 12th November 2015.
Itinerary:
COLOGNE:
Wednesday, 4. November 2015
20:15hr
Mayersche bookstore , Neumarkt 2 , Cologne
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: David Nathan
HANNOVER:
Thursday, 5. November 2015
20:00hr
Decius bookstore Marktstr.52 , Hannover
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: David Nathan
HAMBURG:
Friday, 6. November 2015
Kampnagel p1
19:00hr
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: David Nathan
MÜNCHEN:
Saturday, 7. November 2015
Institute of Forensic Medicine / Section Auditorium
19:00hr
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: Gregor Weber
GROSS-UMSTADT:
Sunday, 8. November 2015
Gasthaus zur Goldenen Krone, market 7.64823 Gross-Umstadt
19:00hr
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: Gregor Weber
STUTTGART:
Monday, 9. November 2015
Wittwer Book House , King Street 30
20:00hr
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: Jasmin Tabatabai
SALZBURG:
Tuesday, 10. November 2015
City Library Salzburg
20:00hr
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: Peter Faerber
Vienna:
Wednesday, 11. November 2015
17:00hr
Signing at bookstore Frick , Kärtnerstr.30
21:00hr
Buch Wien
Moderation: Florian Scheuba
German voice: Peter Faerber
Novelist Val McDermid and Baroness Valerie Amos, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, will be among the speakers at the memorial service for crime writer Ruth Rendell next week.
They will be joined by Penguin Random House UK chair Gail Rebuck and actor Christopher Ravenscroft, who played DI Burden in ITV series “The Ruth Rendell Mysteries”…
