'I seem to have an instinct for dangerous living,' said Val
McDermid. It didn't feel that way. We were comfortably ensconced
in the luxurious armchairs of a discreet hotel lounge, well insulated
from the bustle of nearby Covent Garden. The warmth and hilarity
of McDermid's company came across vividly when I replayed the
interview tape which was punctuated with bursts of laughter and
the tinkling of ice-cubes.
So whence the dangerous living? Perhaps it's because McDermid
has never baulked at anything life has thrown at her. Born into
a Scottish mining family, she got to St. Hilda's College, Oxford,
one of the youngest students they had ever taken, and the first
from a Scottish state school. 'I've come a very long way from
St. Hilda's College. I've come even further from being a wee lassie
from a mining community in Fife. I've been very fortunate - my
life has provided me with a series of opportunities to grow and
develop and change and I think because of my background I've regarded
the opportunities as precisely that - something to grip by the
throat and suck every possible piece of information from. I think
I have an appetite for life and an appetite for experience.'
That included stints as a journalist in Glasgow and Manchester,
when very few women worked in newsrooms. There was no gentle initiation.
'I was sent out on the very first day I arrived at the 'Glasgow
Record' to pick up photographs of four teenagers who had died
in a car-crash.' But she stuck it out and became Mother of the
Chapel. 'I was called "Killer" - I had a run-in with
the deputy news editor and gave as good as I got. I was a good
tabloid hack but had to join the domino school. Fortunately I
had a tremendous talent at dominoes - I was the Dominoes Queen,
and when you can actually drink the guys under the table they
develop a certain respect for you.' McDermid attributes her conviality
to her father, (the life and soul of the party') but has an acute
perception of divisions in the Scottish national character with
regard to sociability and enjoyment. On 'tartan noir,' the recent
Scottish school of crime-writing represented by such writers as
Ian Rankin, Denise Mina and McDermid herself, she thinks it has
its roots in Scotland's movement towards self-determination. We
didn't find ourselves in the tradition of Agatha Christie and
Dorothy Sayers, nor in the American one of Chandler and Hammett.
Our tradition is much darker, with psychological mainsprings and
black humour - it comes from writers like James Hogg and R.L.
Stevenson, and what Hugh MacDiarmid called the Caledonian antisyzgy.'
Beg pardon? Great word for scrabble. 'It means two badly-yoked
forces pulling against each other - the Puritan Calvinism and
the wild Gaelic urge to party, the sense we're enjoying ourselves
now but we'll pay for it later.'
McDermid sees the dynamics of her own work with extraordinary
clarity. 'When I was a reporter I worked on some big cases, the
Ripper murders, the Moors murders, but I was intrigued by the
effects of crimes on the lives around them, rather than the criminals
themselves. I've never found true crime particularly inspirational
or interesting - it's generally pretty banal. The perpetrator
is caught not because of brilliant detectional or psychological
insight but because somebody stumbled across something. It seldom
has the satisfaction of a constructed shape. I have a slightly
queasy feeling about using real cases because they affect real
lives. It's treading on the borderlines of exploitation of people's
pain. As a journalist there are often times when you are driven
by the story but as a human being you wonder what you are doing.'
I asked her about her latest book, The
Distant Echo (HarperCollins, 17.99), which begins with a murdered
woman found dying by a group of students. Is this based on a real
event?
'Only very loosely. I heard a story about the son of some friends
who was with a group of friends who came across a youth who was
being beaten up. They chased off the attackers and went back to
help the guy who was lying on the ground. When the police turned
up they made the initial assumption that the students were the
perpetrators of the attack. Luckily the guy who was on the ground
was conscious and able to tell the police these were the good
guys. It came into my mind: what would have happened if he'd been
lying dead on the ground?'
The originality of the book lies not only in this concept, but
in its study of the reverberations of that crime over the next
twenty-five years, the effects on the lives of the students themselves
as they become adults, on the victim's own family and on the police
involved in the original investigation. It's a departure from
many of McDermid's previous works, and not following any of the
crime series she has created, such as those featuring the policewoman
Kate Brannigan or the psychological profiler, Dr. Tony Hill, played
in the recent television adaptation of McDermid's Wire
in the Blood by Robson Green. The protagonists in this story
are just ordinary guys - they're caught up in something beyond
their control. The elucidation, the unravelling, had to come from
their characters, from who they were, what they were capable of.
In order to find that out, it has to be much more a novel of character
than a novel of process. 'For me it was a matter of developing
those characters and bringing them to the reader as fully formed
as I could make them so that they would understand why these things
happened in the way that they do.'
She doesn't directly use her own life in books, though she has
never made any secret of the fact that she is gay and does explore
the lesbian scene in her Lindsay Gordon books. She is more reticent
about her two-year old son. 'I feel he's entitled to his privacy.'
But since she's become a mother there has been an undoubted change
in her books, a deepening of moral awareness, an understanding
of the consequences of events on the next generation, which is
a major theme in The Distant Echo. 'I think you do change when
you have a child, you look at the world in a different way. You
have a sense not only of their vulnerablity but of your own: it
changes the way you see the world. Someone puts a new-born baby
into your arms and you would have to have a heart of stone not
to respond. - it's inbuilt. And as a writer, everything that changes
you, everything that happens of significance in your life, matters
to you. Writers cannibalise everything. We eat everyone else's
lives and when we've finished we eat our own. Your friends tell
you about some terrible thing that's happened to them, the human
being in you is genuinely sympathetic and the writer in you is
going, "That is absolutely fantastic - I'm going to have
that!" There's the life lived, and then there's the life
examined.'
Some of her books have been criticised for featuring undue amounts
of torture and violence. 'I feel there was a slew of books in
the nineties, serial-killer novels, where the victims were there
purely to be abused or dismembered. They were just ciphers, and
the violence was written about in a way that made people flinch.
There's nothing sexy about it, it's degrading, it's horrible,
it defiles everyone it touches, everyone who comes into contact
with it. I know there's a very narrow line between writing about
it directly and being gratuitous about it, but I think the violence
in my books is functional - it has a purpose within it. It tell
us about the mind of the killer.'
But why, given MacDermid's huge natural cheeriness, does she write
crime fiction at all? 'I don't feel any need to go beyond the
genre - it's so full of possibilities. I was planning a book last
year, I'd got all the way through, and no-one was DEAD! I thought,
well, they've just go to die, that's the only satisfactory conclusion.
With death, the stakes are higher, the ante has been upped - I'm
not sure I can get away from that kind of adrenalin rush. Death
means people really have something to care about, something to
fight for.'
This interview first appeared in the Independent
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