It’s no exaggeration to say Scottish crime writer Val McDermid is in a class all her own. Since the release of her debut crime novel Report for Murder in 1987, McDermid, a former award-winning journalist, has penned no less than 49 books and garnered a swag of prestigious awards, along with a devoted international readership. She has also clocked up sales of 20-million copies. And while she’s often labelled the “Scottish Queen of Crime”, McDermid is also renowned for her extraordinary versatility as a writer. She is as comfortable writing for stage and screen, radio or children as she is in the crime genre — and she pens non-fiction and historical fiction too. McDermid says, “I like the fact that I’m not shackled to one thing”. She also keeps five separate crime series on the go but alternates between each of them. “I can’t write two books back to back with the same character because I get bored,” she says.
Her latest novel, Silent Bones, is the eighth in her Karen Pirie series. Intricately plotted and loaded with Scottish wit and irony, it reminds you of just why McDermid is so revered. In essence, Silent Bones is a tangle of seemingly disconnected mysteries that begins to unfurl soon after a landslide on a motorway reveals human remains. “We’ve had some torrential downpours in the last year or two in the UK,” recounts McDermid, “and I had this idea that the side of a motorway might collapse and that human remains dated quite specifically to when the motorway was built would be found. I knew it was going to be a cold case, because that body didn’t get there yesterday. So it was obvious it was going to be a story for Karen, who is the head of the historic cases unit.”
But for McDermid the landslide idea was just part of the long genesis of Silent Bones and its rich, complex narrative weave. McDermid credits a fellow member of a BBC Radio 4 Round Britain Quiz team for in part seeding the novel by telling her about the existence of an exclusive book dating back to the 18th century. She’s given this notion a more sinister edge in Silent Bones where, no sooner has the landslide revealed human remains than someone brings new evidence to Pirie’s team, causing her to reopen a cold case into the accidental death of a hotel manager who had gained admission to a secretive men’s book club shortly before his death. “Bits and pieces kick around in my head for a long time,” explains McDermid, “and the book-club thing was doing that for quite a while before I came around to using it.”
I first started to talk about these kinds of issues back with The Wire in the Blood, where it seemed to me that celebrity was the new shield against being held to account.
In the novel, another mystery with links to the rich and powerful dates back to a crime committed in the run-up to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Indeed, one of the book’s underlying themes is the difficulty of investigating the rich, famous and powerful, and how they rarely pay for their crimes. And, given the recent revelations of the Epstein files, it’s a theme — together with McDermid’s clever, subversive ending — that lends the novel a heightened sense of relevance. For McDermid, the release of the Epstein files “is something that has for me been fortuitous, in that it’s a very timely point in history to talk about this particular issue”. She adds, “I first started to talk about these kinds of issues back with The Wire in the Blood, where it seemed to me that celebrity was the new shield against being held to account. It used to be you were protected because you were the lord of the manor or a politician or a police officer.”
She adds, “Now it seems to be that if you’re rich enough and have sufficient rich friends, you can do anything you like. What’s happening now, in reality, is that some people are facing a reckoning, but a lot of other people are not. And what is most depressing about the whole underworld that’s been exposed by the Epstein files is the victims, who are disregarded and cast aside. You don’t see people talking about what’s happened to their lives because of what’s been done to them. That’s a real tragedy. As a writer, one of the things that’s been in the front of my practice is not to ignore the victims. In my books, they’re not just cardboard cut-outs there to be raped, mutilated, murdered, or whatever —they’re characters I hope we feel some real connection with, some pity for, some sympathy for.”
These sentiments are embodied in her fictional creation, Karen Pirie. “She is concerned about those left behind when people disappear from their lives as a result of a sudden violent death or by other means, and that’s what drives her. She wants to bring the dead home, if you like,” says McDermid, who laughs at the suggestion she shares the same characteristics of being “thrawn” and “gallous” (Scottish words meaning “stubborn” and “bold”) she attributes to Pirie. “I think Karen is a bit more thrawn than I am. She’s certainly persistent. I’m much lazier than Karen, I have to say.”
Nothing is off limits when conversing with McDermid, who is deeply engaging and refreshingly honest. While she reveals some novels have had years of gestation, she usually spends months thinking about her books, taking long walks by the sea or the river, before writing them. “I find running water helps form ideas and give them clarity. I get to understand the characters by having them have conversations with each other. That’s what I think is most important when you’re developing a character — hearing the way they speak. And that, in turn, gives you insights into the kind of person they are.”
The only novel she didn’t spend months thinking about was The Mermaids Singing, which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award. It was the first in her wildly popular Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series, and was adapted into the enduringly popular British TV series Wire in the Blood. McDermid has credited winning that award with giving her the opportunity to write for TV, which changed her professional life. But, as she recalls, “The Mermaids Singing was a strange thing that’s never happened to me before or since. I was making my way home from an event in the north of England, driving down the motorway listening to the radio, and this idea for a plot just popped into my head fully formed. I stopped on the hard shoulder of the motorway to write it out because I was terrified I would forget it by the time I got home.”
McDermid’s dynamism is not limited to the page. She is, of course, renowned for her generous support of her fellow crime writers, and for promoting newcomers to the genre at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which she co-founded and which is held annually at Harrogate. She is also a prominent supporter of literacy initiatives in Scotland’s prisons and, since having had major heart surgery last summer, is now raising funds for the British Heart Foundation. “They are an excellent charity, and that’s my way of giving something back in return for the excellent care I had in hospital,” she says.
She also acknowledges her debt to public libraries by strongly advocating for them, and she is a devoted patron of the Scottish Book Trust, a charity that aims, she explains, “to deliver books widely to children who don’t have a book in the house”. She points out, “Often this is the first and only book they’ll ever own. It is heartbreaking.” But this charity, McDermid adds, “is something that, thankfully, is very dear to the people of Scotland’s hearts”. For, as she points out in an article on the Trust’s website which she wrote in her capacity as patron, “it doesn’t sound like much, but a book can unlock possibilities in a way nothing else can”.
VAL MCDERMID ON BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HER
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
I was an avid reader in my teens, and Catch-22 was a book I ended up reading three times in a year because I’d chosen it as the subject of my final-year dissertation. From its startling opening — “It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him” — to the puzzling ending, it’s a dark, grim, funny and ironic novel set against the backdrop of World War 2. It was unlike anything else I’d read then, or have since. If a book stands up to three readings, you know it’s special.
To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey
I believe the Scottish writer was the fifth “Queen of Crime”. She published only six novels, but each has its own charms. My favourite is To Love and Be Wise and, like all her novels, it deals with questions of identity and gender. The characters are delicious!
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
There are strong links between Scottish fiction and the gothic, and there’s no book more guaranteed to give a reader gosebumps than Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by the tirelessly inventive Stevenson. There is no need to describe it, as the plot is so well known, but if you’ve never read it, it’s not just creepy but also thought-provoking about what we keep hidden inside ourselves.
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
This is another classic of hardboiled noir. It’s a book that has spawned hundreds of imitators. Coming to it now, it can feel clichéd — but those clichés exist only because Hammett gave us the femme fatale, the hard-drinking PI, and the twist in the tale. It’s a novel that still packs a punch.
Helm by Sarah Hall
Love at first sight sometimes happens with books too. I’ve read Hall’s latest novel Helm three times in the past year because it was an entry in a prestigious award competition I’m judging. And I don’t begrudge a moment of it. It’s hard to describe — it’s the story of a named wind in the north of England, seen at various points in its history through the prism of four narrative voices. Don’t be put off by my summary — Hall is a wonderful writer, a conjurer of great stories and irresistible prose.
