The man at the post office knows Val. The waiter knew her the
moment we walked into the café. She's hard to miss. Short
and broad with a pink complexion and a thick shock of dazzling
white hair, Val looks like no one else and behaves like no one
else either. She's the hardest working person I've ever but she's
also famously sociable. A year ago I had cause to write to The
Crime Writers Association magazine and ask if she was missing
because they had published a photograph of a party and Val wasn't
in it, grinning out and holding a bottle of beer. And they published
the letter because it was remarkable.
She lives just around the corner from the café in this
grand but bohemian suburb and comes in here often. We order bangers
and mash times two. For reasons which escape me I ordered the
veggie sausages which are tasteless, uni-textured and are served
with pale, cloudy gravy. Val's looks much nicer.
She has a new book out, "The
Last Temptation," a tense and disgusting thriller about
a serial killer who targets psychologists. The book touches on
the heroin trade, the Abanian Mafia, people trafficking and the
future of pan-European policing. I had a nightmare the night I
finished it and tell Val about it. She nods somberly, "Yes,"
she says, "It would be hard to tail someone on a skateboard."
I tell her she can use that in a book in the future if she likes
and she smiles and says aye, maybe she will. If anyone can do
it she can. She auctioned a name-check in "The Last Temptation" to raise money for a charity promoting literacy. The guy who won
it was called 'Larry Gandle'. She fits it in well but it's not
a name you'd chose yourself. Val says Rankin once auctioned a
name check and it was won by a name so odd that he had to make
the woman a prostitute offering specialist services.
I tell Val it's a bit of a swizz, me getting paid to drive down
to Manchester and have lunch with her and she nods and laughs,
a big throaty, rich laugh, "Aye, getting paid to have lunch
with your pals. What a scam."
It's interesting though, because although we've been friends for
a while I've never had the chance to ask her what makes her so
driven. How does a working class girl from Kirkcaldy to get into
Oxford at 16, achieve her lifetime's ambition by 22 and end up
as one of Britain's best selling writers? The answer, as it turns
out, was a bizarre experiment carried out by Fife County Council
in the 1960s which produced not only Val McDermid, but also the
chancellor, Gordon Brown, a number of other, less famous, successes
and quite a lot of burn-outs.
The first time I ever met Val McDermid, she was standing in the
lobby of a very posh hotel, shouting at another writer. The writer
had slept in for the panel he was supposed to be chairing at a
crime writing convention. The paying audience had turned up, the
other writers had arrived but he had an attack of the Dylan Thomases
and forgot to get up. McDermid was one of the organisers and went
through him like a dose of salts. She's formidable,
"That is so unprofessional. I don't care how pissed you were
the night before, you turn up for your work."
McDermid is famously hard working. By the time she was twenty
four she had written her second literary novel which she now calls
both unpublishable and 'bowf'. She has published twenty two books
and a dozen short stories in the past twenty four years. She reviews
crime fiction for The Express and does radio and television appearances
as well. She caused a record number of complaints to 'The Message'
on Radio Four last year when, at four thirty on a Friday afternoon,
she broadcast her surprise at stumbling across a photograph on
a web site of a man having a sexual encounter with an oven-ready
duck.
The breadth of her knowledge is astonishing. I've never mentioned
a book to her that she hasn't read. As a fellow judge on the Gold
Dagger for the best first novel she consistently, year on year,
called in books which the rest of us hadn't heard of. The books
hadn't been submitted but she'd read them anyway and felt they
should be considered. She has cut down on her reading recently,
"I'm down to two a week now," she says, letting me dab
at her far superior meat gravy with a chunk of bread.
Perceptions of crime fiction have fundamentally changed in the
past twenty years, largely because of the work of writers like
McDermid and Rankin. The new wave of British writing came as a
result of the influence of American urban noir. From the cosy,
Christie-esque puzzle thrillers set in country houses British,
and particularly Scottish, crime fiction has moved the genre into
new disturbing areas. The early lesbian and feminist works of
writers like Wilson, Paretsky and Mary Wings have made the form
uniquely attractive to writers who feel themselves alienated from
mainstream writing. McDermid says that straight literature,
"Became so self-reverential in the eighties and nineties
that it all but disappeared up its own arse. The success of crime
fiction shows that there is a place for narrative. Readers want
to read it and writers want to write it."
Crime fiction has become incredibly lucrative. Patricia Cornwall
has done million dollar deals for single books. Ian Rankin was
reportedly very annoyed when the details of his £1.3 million
publishing deal was leaked last year. Asked how she's doing, Val
grins,
"Fine. Quite happy." She grins and looks away. She takes
a swig of Hoegarten, "And I'm not going to say anymore about
that." She and her partner have matching BMWs.
But the financial benefits come at a price. Michael Ondaatje once
took seven years to write a book: four years to write it and three
for the edit. It is among crime writers' constant gripes, of which
there are many, that contracts pressure them into annual production.
Publishers like yearly launches. It means that momentum can be
built up by the marketing department, and promotion for a new
paperback can be piggy-backed onto a new, attention grabbing hardback
out at the same time. McDermid never complains about the pressure.
She always has the plots of the next three or four books in her
head.
Prolific she may be but she's certainly not rehashing books with
the same plots or characters. Her three major series, the Kate
Brannigans, the Hill / Jordan books and the Lindsay Gordons are
each very different and the quality of the work shows in the host
of awards she has won. 'Killing the
Shadows' was in the top thirty sellers for 2001. 'Place
of Execution' won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anthony
Award, the Barry, the Dilys and the Macavity. More significantly,
'The Mermaids Singing' won the
Gold Dagger for the best crime novel of the year. McDermid didn't
expect to win the gold. She'd researched past winners and found
that new wave books only ever got the silver. That she won is
a reflection of the breakthrough of new wave fiction in Britain.
More recently, McDermid was awarded the highest merit possible:
she was the answer to a question on University challenge.
McDermid is very successful but once the television series of
her Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novels is screened later this year
she'll go stratospheric. By all accounts the series is superb,
so good in fact that the transmission has been moved from the
spring to the coveted Sunday night autumn schedule. Filming of
'The Wire in the Blood' began last October. 'The Mermaids Singing'
and an original script called 'Justice Painted Blind' are also
being made. Hermoine Norris from Cold Feet is Carol Jordan and
Robson Green plays the psychologist and profiler, Tony Hill.
"I'm amazed at how good he is in the part," says McDermid.
It's not just a matinee idol vehicle either because the Tony Hill
character is impotent. No damp-shirted, Mr Darcy moments for the
laydeez, then.
It's now traditional to have a cameo from the writer at some point
in these things. Witness Colin Dexter's wooden amble through a
cloister in the first ever Morse and Irvine Welsh's shiny-faced
suppository salesman in Trainspotting. Val plays a journalist
in episode two. She has a line- "where was he arrested" and she says her performance is profound, intense and 'far more
mature and sophisticated' than Irvine's.
We try to share a lemon pudding and ice cream, each politely leaving
a tiny last mouthful for the other. Then I lash out swallow mine
and she eats hers. I'd like another one but resist. I'm full of
strong coffee and she's on her second Belgian lager.
It's hard to begrudge McDermid her success; it wasn't just a stroke
of luck or good timing that made her work so widely read. She
failed at being a writer once. She was unceremoniously dropped
by her agent after becoming an unsuccessful 'accidental playwright'.
She was rationalised by her American publisher after 'Mermaids'
didn't sell. She went out to the States and did promotion, working
the Bouchercon convention and paying for it from her own pocket.
She's driven to work all the time. She sends work-related emails
from holiday. This manic over-achievement can be squarely laid
at the door of the evil monster whose name, whisper it in dark
corners, is Fife County Council.
In the mid-sixties Fife conducted a small educational experiment.
Val McDermid and Gordon Brown were both subjects of the 1E process.
Each year one or two children who had shown particular promise
were moved up a year and kept in a special class of their own
in Kirkcaldy High School. The children knew they were different
and that the expectations of them were very high. McDermid says
the 1E'ers were famous for their participation in extracurricular
activities. They were desperately scrabbling around, trying to
fit into some social group and it left her with an abiding sense
of being an outsider. The hot housing gave her a life long habit
of hard work and an expectation of success - not something the
state system is universally famous for.
She was accepted into Oxford at the age of sixteen. Her interview
was the third time she had been to England. No one understood
why she'd want to leave Fife. Her school were so disappointed
that she'd turn up the chance to go to Edinburgh or even the hallowed
St Andrews that they refused to invigilate her Oxbridge exam. "I knew there had to be more to life than Fife." She
says, still somehow slightly defensive at the idea. "But
eighty percent of the teachers at the school were from Fife and
didn't understand why anyone'd want to leave."
Having decided she wanted to go to university in England she applied
to Oxford because she'd heard it was a good one. She was, she
says, far too naive to know that she had no right to go there.
The interview was an eye opener. "They were awfie posh,"
she says reverentially. "They said they'd never taken anyone
from a State school before and I told them that it was about time
they did, then." They offered her a deferred place but she
turned them down, "I told the woman that I didn't want to
waste a whole year." They let her in and she went up at seventeen.
After university she did her journalism trainee-ship on the Plymouth
and South Devon Times. Continuing the legacy of Fife C.C., she
won the National Trainee Journalist of the year. The prize was
the chance to interview Prince Charles. She wore a kilt, God bless
her. She was only twenty two,
"I thought he was an upper class wanker, but an intelligent
one." One year later he remembered her at a line up in Dumbarton
station when she was hanging over the barrier with the other hacks,
shouting questions at him. He came over and asked her how she
was getting on in her career. Did it make her like him? She swithers,
"No," She says finally, "But I thought it was a
good trick." At twenty two she got a job on the Record and
came home. It was her lifetime's ambition to work on the Record.
It was the working class campaigning paper at the time, everyone
she knew from home read it. A few years later she went to work
on the Sunday People in Manchester, attracted by its reputation
for investigative journalism and wrote her first book on her Monday
afternoons off. 'Report for Murder'
was the first of the series featuring lesbian detective Lindsay
Gordon and continues to be the least financially successful of
her series. Inspired by Sarah Paretsky's first V.I. Warshawski
novel, it was published, she says "to a resounding silence."
Lesbian and well-settled in a long-term relationship, McDermid
dislikes labels. It's not that she's ashamed of being female or
lesbian or Scottish but says she's more than just those things,
and people are always looking for excuses to pigeon hole and limit
her. Still, it's hard to imagine her being as confident and unashamedly
confrontational if she were heterosexual. Or, indeed, liking Blondie
quite as much.
The legacy of 1E has meant that she always felt like an outsider.
She has a theory about being a goalie. We were both goalies in
our school hockey teams and both had try-outs for the Scotland-under-sixteens.
McDermid points out that Camus was a goalie for the Algerian National
football team. It's a good metaphor for writers, she says, it's
the habit of watching other people from the edge, feeling outside
of the action. We wrestle with it, trying to extrapolate the connection
but it doesn't work so we give it up and look around for something
else to eat or drink. I order a tea to wash the caffeine away.
The political content is implicit in her books. It's telling that
the corpses in her books are not the easily cast aside prostitutes
or sexually duplicitous wives of other, more thoughtless, crime
writers. As often as not they are professionals. Accused by Joan
Smith of killing a disproportionate number of women in her books
she did a body count and found she was an equal opportunities
killer: twelve men, twelve women and a transsexual.
Her success has given her, she says, 'tremendous artistic freedom'.
Much to her publisher's dismay, her next book is another Lindsay
Gordon and isn't expected to make the bestseller list. In a neat
tie in a Hollywood hack would be proud of, it's also V.I.Warshawski's
twentieth birthday this year. Paretsky is organising a birthday
party for her. Val has been invited to it and she's absolutely
thrilled. Go'an yursel', hen.
This interview first appeared in the Sunday Herald |
