Interview – The Perception of Crime Fiction

The Perception Of Crime Fiction: Val McDermid Speaks

Julian Maynard-Smith

In Fever of the Bone, Val McDermid’s latest novel, Tony Hill and Carol Jordan track down a serial killer who is hunting apparently unconnected teenagers via a social networking website.

A child’s murder is every parent’s worst nightmare, and a subject that needs to be handled with the utmost sensitivity. Debates have raged about the level of violence in serial-killer novels (most recently when Jessica Mann declared that she would no longer review novels filled with ‘sadistic misogyny’) – but one of Val McDermid’s strengths is the way in which she humanises her victims, rather than simply setting them up as meat for killers.

‘I think in the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan stories that’s at the heart of what I’ve tried to do. It’s about the judgments we make about victims. Recently we’ve had the Kercher case, and one of the things I wanted to write about is what it means to be touched by that victimhood. As a journalist, I worked in Manchester for a long time and you couldn’t escape the long shadow of the Moors murders. I was often in the company of the families of Ian Brady’s and Myra Hindley’s victims. In a way I’ve always had that in the back of my mind. It made me aware of the way that violent death contaminates the lives of everyone it comes into contact with. It’s so easy to get caught up in the violence but you have to control it when you’re writing. You have to find the right balance. You’re writing fiction that touches on some of the darkest places of people’s lives. It’s only readers who can make the final judgment if I’ve got that right. I weigh things up as they seem to work for me. It’s a tough call.

Read the whole interview – http://www.crimetime.co.uk/mag/index.php/showarticle/1421