As Val McDermid celebrates her 30th novel, Gayle Ritchie meets the titan of Scottish crime writing
Val McDermid is renowned for the stomach-churning nature of graphic violence in her novels – the blood, the guts, the gore.
So it comes as a surprise when the queen of crime writing reveals she’s phobic about needles and can’t stand the sight of blood.
“I took a chunk out of my finger with a knife yesterday and just about fainted,” she tells me, when we meet in a cafe off Edinburgh’s Princes Street.
“I don’t like blood at all. It’s another thing writing about it – it’s all made up; it’s not real blood.”
The multi award-winning crime author’s 30th novel – Out of Bounds – celebrates a career spanning more than 30 years, selling more than 11 million books, translated into 30 languages.
In her latest story, a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car in Dundee and ends up in a coma, while a routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from 22 years before.
Set largely in Val’s native Fife and featuring locations such as Loch Leven, Kinross and Scotlandwell, the novel also sees DCI Karen Pirie drawn to another mystery with roots in a historic terrorist bombing and, in Val’s words, “getting tangled up in things that are none of her business”.
So how much of Karen’s character is based on Val? “No more than in any of my other characters,” she says, patting down her voluminous lilac blouse.
“People go, ‘oh, she must be you because she comes from Kirkcaldy, she’s a wee bit overweight and she’s got bad hair’. Excuse me – I have really good hair!”
Killer
Brought up in Kirkcaldy, Val, 61, comes from a working class background – her dad was a shipyard worker, and she was the first person from a state school in Scotland to attend St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she studied English.
It was partly a mission to spread her wings because of her sexuality; as she jokes: “It seemed there were no lesbians in Fife in the 60s”.
Down south however, people struggled to understand her accent. “I had to learn to speak English, ken,” she says, slipping into a broad Fife dialect. “It comes back when I gang ti the fitbaw.”
Before becoming a full-time writer, Val worked as a journalist. This included a stint at the Daily Record in the late 70s where she earned the nickname “killer”.
But, she says, journalism was only ever what she did to tide her over until she could make a living writing fiction.
“What newspapers gave me was a fantastic data set of characters, places, people, behaviour and reactions to draw on and that’s still part of my toolkit for writing. You get amazing access to peoples’ lives. You get to see how they live, how they react in a crisis, how people cleave to each other, how people fracture.
“No characters are based on individuals but everything I write draws on people I’ve encountered. I’m a bit of a news junkie. I’m interested in the world round me. It informs what I think about; the things that suggest themselves to me as vehicles for stories.”
Val deems it her duty to write fiction that feels “authentic” and while not going overboard on minutiae, includes sufficient detail that readers feel they’re being led into someone else’s expert world.
In her mission for authenticity, Val, an honorary graduate of Dundee University, travels to Dundee on a regular basis to seek advice from Professor Sue Black and her colleagues at the university’s forensic science unit to ensure the anatomical details in her books are scientifically accurate.
“I usually say, ‘this is what I want to happen, will that work?’ and they say ‘no, here’s what you need to do.’ I find wee bits to humanise the information. But if I wrote accurately about a post mortem, police investigation or any forensic process, I’d put readers off, as it’s mostly dull and tedious. I don’t feel the need to explain what a mass spectrometer is.”
The big emotions
For Val, writing crime fiction is a cathartic experience, allowing her to process the “big emotions”.
“That’s why crime writers are so mentally healthy!” she beams, batting off a wasp buzzing round our table.
“We’re very convivial, very laid back, very good fun. It’s not as simple as getting our anger out on the page but because we’re dealing with characters who are experiencing these dark, powerful emotions – grief, loss, anger and pain – we constantly revisit our own experiences of those emotions to render them credible. We don’t have them festering away in a corner of our psyche that we never return to.”
While Val writes from January to April – “it’s a horrible time of year; you don’t want to be outside” – the rest of her time is consumed with prepping, promotional work and doing events.
Much of her writing takes place on trains and in hotel rooms, but she’s happiest in her Edinburgh office. She always has music on, usually something instrumental or with incomprehensible lyrics “like Sigur Ros”.
Growing up by the sea, Val finds water triggers creativity. “There’s something very freeing about being by water; walking by rivers, by the sea – it seems to loosen up any creative logjams and helps my brain to unravel itself.”
In July, the Fifer was honoured with an Outstanding Contribution Award at the Theakstons Harrogate Crime Writing Festival and last month, her novel Splinter the Silence was shortlisted for the McIlvaney Prize.
And yet Val can’t get her head around her career’s longevity.
“All I know is I’ve always written books I’ve cared about; I’ve never written a book because someone’s offered me a bag of money. If you write with passion, that communicates itself to readers. I want the books to resonate with them long after they’ve read them.”
A good story well told
It’s no surprise that Val herself is a voracious reader, admitting to taking nine books with her on a week’s holiday, plus her ebook reader. And she isn’t just hooked on crime.
“The differential for me is a good story well told. I want to be drawn into somebody else’s world. It doesn’t matter if a book’s got a murderer in it or an alien.
“But the great thing about the crime genre is it’s become so expansive that there’s nothing it can’t accommodate. You could write a historical novel, a romance, a sci-fi novel within the genre. The really good stuff breaks down boundaries.”
She gets “very angry” at the denial of opportunity and one issue which riles her is the closure of libraries, particularly in deprived areas like Fife.
“Libraries are about the heart of the community in many cases, especially in small towns and villages,” she says. “Take them away and you strip away opportunity from people who already don’t have very much opportunity in their lives – it’s atrocious.
“The people who close them have no idea what a library is these days. They think of them as the hushed places of their childhood where people went to borrow books. But many libraries I visit have groups for mothers and toddlers, groups for the elderly, reading groups…and they’re the only access to the internet for many people.
“I wouldn’t be a writer today if it wasn’t for the public library system. My family didn’t have money to spend on books so the library was my home from home.”
Val’s views on everything from independence to equal marriage can be found on Twitter, Question Time and Radio Scotland and she’s a star on the literary circuit.
Badass woman of the week
Recently, somebody tweeted that since discovering Val is a feminist, they won’t be reading her books. Her response, that he probably struggled with them anyway, went viral: it was retweeted more than 15,000 times, appeared in The New York Times, and Elle magazine Malaysia nominated her “badass woman of the week”.
Being thrust into the public spotlight may have its pros, but it also has its cons.
When I mention the “ink incident”, Val bristles. (In 2013, a woman threw ink over her at a book singing. She was later given a restraining order).
“That was a one off,” she says. “It was a very unpleasant experience. It was a long time before I felt entirely comfortable doing events.”
Thankfully, most of her readers only approach to give compliments, which, she says, keeps her going on “bad days”.
When she’s not writing or dreaming up new material, Val enjoys walking, knitting, gaming, cooking, playing guitar, singing and football.
She sponsors her beloved Raith Rovers and has a stand at the club’s ground named after her father who was a scout for the club.
“I love fitbaw. It’s tribal. It’s about community. And particularly in times of depressed economic situations, if your team’s doing well, it gives people something to be positive about.”
She’s also working on a radio drama series about anti-microbial resistance – “basically, the drugs don’t work and we’re all going to die” – in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust, which will be aired in Spring 2017.
Discovering Edinburgh
It’s three years since Val returned to Edinburgh and the move marked a new chapter in her life. Previously, she shared a home with civil partner, Kelly Smith, in Northumberland, but they split up. She’s now with Jo Sharp, a professor in geography at Glasgow University.
“I moved to Edinburgh because it was time. I’d never lived here before and I’m still learning bits of the city. Like DCI Karen Pirie, I walk around a lot.”
Val also has a home in Manchester, where she stays three days a week in order to be with her 15-year-old son, who goes to school in the city. She shares custody with a previous partner.
This weekend (September 9 to 11) she’s at Bloody Scotland, Scotland’s international crime writing festival in Stirling, and on September 15, she’ll talk about her new novel at Topping and Company Booksellers in St Andrews.
Any advice for aspiring writers? “Stop talking about it and just do it. Figure out what time of day you’re most creative and then carve out some time to write. Be brutal about it.”
Val’s life in six words? “They said I couldn’t do it.”
info
Out Of Bounds by Val McDermid is published by Little Brown, priced £18.99.
Val is at Bloody Scotland, Stirling, from September 9 to 11. www.bloodyscotland.com
She is at Topping and Company Booksellers, St Andrews, on September 15. www.toppingbooks.co.uk
