A Conversation with Val McDermid, Part 2 of 2

by Sandra Parshall

Val McDermid is the internationally-known author of the Tony Hill suspense novels and many others. She serves on the national board of Sisters in Crime as an at-large member. A native of Scotland, she now divides her time between Northumberland and South Manchester.

Visit her website at http://www.valmcdermid.com for more information -- and to see a 1974 photo of Val playing guitar on the lawn at Oxford and a 1977 picture of her with Prince Charles.

Recently, Val shared her thoughts about crime fiction and gave a glimpse into her own writing life.


SP: Your police detective, Carol Jordan, is refreshingly real and normal, unburdened by the quirks and disastrous personal problems that some fictional female cops have. She doesn’t drink on the job, she’s not snarky and defensive, she's a strong person but doesn’t act as if her main goal in life is proving she’s more of a man than the men around her. Where did Carol come from? Did you create her as a deliberate balance to Tony Hill’s tortured persona? Or did you base her on real women detectives you’ve known or observed?

VM: Thank you. When I first created Carol and Tony in The Mermaids Singing, I thought I was writing a standalone, not the start of a series, so I didn't do any long-term planning for either character, just gave them the personalities and histories that would work in terms of that novel. But, as soon as I'd finished, I realised how well they could carry other stories between them and so the series was born.

My first intention for Carol was that she should be a good cop, driven by a powerful sense of justice, but set apart from her colleagues because of her gender. She would be the bridge between Tony and the police. As the book progressed, she developed a more rounded personality.

She's not based on any one individual, but she's drawn on my observations of women operating in a predominantly male world, which in my case was the world of national newspapers in the 1980s. (I worked in the northern bureau of Mirror Group Newspapers. When I joined in 1979, there were three women journalists on a staff of 137. No, that's not a misprint. 3/137.) As the series has progressed, I've allowed her to assimilate the weight of what's happened to her and around her. She's probably my favourite of all my characters.


SP: You’re best known for your thrillers, but you’ve also written some lighter, traditional mysteries. Which is easier for you? Which comes most naturally to you?

VM: I've been lucky enough always to have written the stories I was passionate about. They often take a long time to travel from the initial seed of an idea to the finished book. 'A long time' can be as much as 20 years!

There's a different set of challenges between series and standalones. With a series, the central character nexus is always the starting point, with the abilities and the limitations of those characters steering how the story can develop. With a standalone, the plot is the primary driver, then I have to sit down and work out whose story it is and why these people would do the things I need them to do to make this damn book work.

But writing books with a different tone -- Fever of the Bone vs. A Darker Domain -- is as much a pleasure as it is a challenge. I can't write two similar books back to back -- I get too easily bored!


SP: How do you divide your time between travel/promotion and writing?

VM: Badly! I seem to spend the months between August and December traveling and promoting. I don't go anywhere the first three months of the year because I deliver at the end of March. I spend the rest of the time doing a bit of promotional stuff -- festivals and the like -- and thinking about the next book.


SP: Are you able to write while you’re traveling?

VM: I prefer not to work on novels while I'm traveling -- short stories and journalism work OK, though -- but I have learned the hard way that, when I have to, I can finish a novel on trains and planes and in hotel rooms. Yuck.


SP: I’ve heard that one of your favorite diversions is playing the guitar. What kind of guitar do you have? What kind of music do you play? Do you have one favorite piece you play over and over, perhaps when you’re trying to work out a plot problem in a book?

VM: I have two acoustic guitars because I divide my time between two houses. I have a Yamaha FG-160, which I've had for 37 years, and a Martin D-16-GT, which I've had for seven years. I play what I suppose one would call contemporary folk. I've not been playing enough lately. I need to get back into the habit of picking up the guitar daily. The last really challenging thing I taught myself was “Tonight” from West Side Story -- a bit off my usual beat but my son wanted to play it on violin and needed the accompaniment.


Sandra Parshall is the author of the Rachel Goddard mysteries. She serves on the national SinC board as Chapter Liaison.

A Conversation with Val McDermid, Part 1 of 2 Parts

by Sandra Parshall


Val McDermid is the internationally-known author of the Tony Hill suspense novels and many others. She serves on the national board of Sisters in Crime as an at-large member. A native of Scotland, she now divides her time between Northumberland and South Manchester.

Visit her website at http://www.valmcdermid.com for more information -- and to see a 1974 photo of Val playing guitar on the lawn at Oxford and a 1977 picture of her with Prince Charles.

Recently, Val shared her thoughts about crime fiction and gave a glimpse into her own writing life.


SP: Your books are popular in many countries. What makes some books click with readers in different cultures, while others appeal only to the home audience? What’s the universally appealing ingredient?

VM: I've often wondered myself what readers in Tokyo or Buenos Aires make of life on the mean streets of the North of England! The only answer I can come up with is based on what I enjoy in novels set in other cultures -- the characters chime with my experience of the world. I recognise their attitudes and reactions and that's what anchors me in a story whose environment is unfamiliar. So when I read Andrea Camilleri or Karin Fossum, I find myself in the familiar world of human behaviour that makes sense to me. I hope that when readers pick up my books, they have that experience too.


SP: Do you see differences between U.S. and British attitudes toward violence in crime fiction, and violence toward women in particular? Do you have any thoughts on why so many women enjoy serial killer novels in which female victims are mutilated, tortured and murdered?

VM: I don't see much difference between U.S. and British crime fiction in terms of the way we write about violence. There's been an ongoing debate in British mystery circles about the issue of how violence is portrayed, particularly about women both as creators and consumers of books that explicitly deal with violence against women. As far as reading it is concerned, I think there is a complex set of motivations in play. Women are brought up believing they are potential victims of violence -- 'don't walk down that alley, don't go out alone after dark, don't talk to strange men...' These are the voices we all have in our heads and one way to confront those fears is to read about what can happen, but in an environment where we know we're safe and where we know there will be a protagonist who will wreak some sort of vengeance on the perpetrators. I think of it as a way of cauterising fear. And of course, it's fun to be scared in a safe way -- think of fairground rides, where we scream and scream and scream, then get off and stand in line to do it all over again!

The big plus of having been conditioned to look at the world as a potentially threatening place is that women get to understand the fear of violence and powerlessness from the beginning. Generally speaking, when women write scenes of violent attack, it's written from the inside, from the perspective of the victim. That's what makes it all the more scary when women write violence -- the reader's experiencing being on the receiving end. With a few notable exceptions, when men write similar scenes, they write as spectators. And that's just not so scary. Maybe that's why women who directly confront what violence is and what it does get so much more stick than men doing the same thing.


SP: Do you think crime fiction on the whole, in all countries, has become more graphic in recent years? Does this mean we’ve all gone a little crazy and possibly dangerous, or is it simply an effort by writers to match the real violence we see on TV every day -- to present crime as it really is, instead of cleaning it up?

VM: The crime novel has moved on a long way from the cosy drawing room of Agatha Christie or the stylised knight errant of Raymond Chandler. One of the challenges contemporary writers have taken on is to write much more honestly about the society we live in. So when a writer is dealing with crime, it's necessary to be direct and authentic. There's still a place for the mystery novel as pure entertainment, but I think the really interesting writing comes when we try to auta realistic picture of the world we inhabit. But that doesn't mean writing tacky gorefests. I've no interest in the kind of novel whose prime directive seems to be to shock and disgust and there are authors whose books I will not pick up for that reason.


Sandra Parshall is the author of the Rachel Goddard mysteries. She serves on the national SinC board as Chapter Liaison.