Picture: Duska Sulicich

VAL McDermid strides across the hotel lobby, jeans and crisp, collared shirt framing the familiar silver boy-crop and mischievous blue eyes. ''I'm so sorry I'm late,'' she says in a deep Scottish burr. ''C'mon, let's find a quieter place.''

It's no more than five minutes after the appointed hour but her concern proves to be both portent and measure of a woman who has written two dozen books, sold 10 million copies worldwide and won just about every crime-writing prize around, but who still values old fashioned courtesy.

We are in Harrogate, Yorkshire, where she is both veteran and in-demand star of the Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. Her new book, Trick of the Dark, is just out and she is readying for a world tour, which will include the Melbourne Writers Festival. The handsome, old stone hotel is buzzing with lively, chatty bookish types, but as 5pm is fast approaching, many are looking hopefully towards the bar.

Away from the crowd at last, I'm anxious to warn McDermid that the manuscript of her book arrived too late for me to finish: I don't know the ending and I really, really don't want her to tell.

''Death is a hollow drum whose beat has measured out my adult life,'' writes Jay Macallan Stewart, the female protagonist of Trick of the Dark.

McDermid's new book is woven around her main character's journal. Working out if misfortune and accidental death have followed the millionaire businesswoman/author - or whether she has fresh blood on her hands - is the reader's conundrum.

The germ of the novel came to McDermid 11 or 12 years ago when she returned to her old college, St Hilda's at Oxford, to attend a crime and mystery festival.

''I was there just lounging on the lawn by the river when a wedding party turned up. I realised that I recognised the bride but only because she was the daughter of one of my tutors who I had babysat for,'' she said. ''That was the starting point for the 'what if, what ifs' …

''There would have been a marquee, perhaps two. Tables on the grass. A band, a dance floor, people everywhere, shifting patterns of conversation, dancing. Hard to keep track of anyone's movement, even the bride and groom,'' thinks another character, Dr Charlie Flint, the psychiatrist and Oxford alumna who will investigate the possibility of a crime.

McDermid's fictional wedding guests do indeed laugh, drink and celebrate the newly married couple. But as they do so, the bridegroom is battered to death and thrown silently into the water as the ruthless (or is it just unlucky?) Jay claps eyes on the clueless bride, Magda Newsome - daughter of one of her old tutors at Oxford. She decides then she must seduce her.

''It just seemed such a good idea to kill the bridegroom on the day of his wedding. Boom! Such drama!'' laughs the author.

McDermid is adamant that there is nothing biographical about the story: ''I didn't have a crush on my tutor and I didn't kill anyone, I promise,'' she says.

''But my experiences are there … Magda's mother was like many tutors I had too … they were very good to me, they took a kind of in loco parentis role. I was very young when I went to Oxford, I had just turned 17,'' she says. ''I know, I know. It was insane, but there you go, I just loved it. I thought they had the keys to the kingdom and I wasn't leaving till I had wrenched them from their dying haaaannds,'' she hisses like the baddie from a B-grade movie.

McDERMID grew up in Kirkcaldy on the east coast of Scotland, ''a small town famous for producing linoleum'', as well as being the birthplace of the economist Adam Smith. Nestled in the heart of the Fife coalfields, she spent a lot of her childhood with her grandparents in the mining village of East Wemyss.

At 17 (''to their amazement and mine'') she was accepted to read English at St Hilda's College, becoming one of the youngest undergraduates they had taken on as well as the first from a Scottish state school.

She has only good memories of university and says that of the many prizes and literary accolades she has won, her fellowship of St Hilda's means the most to her. "See, I grew up in a very working-class background but my father, who was an aficionado of Robert Burns, instilled in me in childhood that I was as good as anyone else,'' she said.

''I did not have a chip on my shoulder. I could be whoever I wanted to be if I would work hard enough, and I went to Oxford knowing I was as good as anybody.''

Married to publisher Kelly Smith, McDermid is also mother of a nine-year-old son and shares her time between a village in Northumberland and Manchester, where her boy is based with his other mother (and McDermid's former partner). She is buoyantly, unabashedly anti-Tory and recounts with pride her son's recent eschewing of the expensive, branded football boots his friends hanker after.

Instilling a sense of values and understanding about money - even when her wealth would allow her to grant his every wish and desire - is important to her, as is having a solid work ethic and the belief that all human beings are capable of redemption.

Most crimes, she says, are circumstantial and usually sparked by a set of events. McDermid rejects the notion that people are born evil and cannot abide those who talk or write about it as if it were innate.

''That kind of belief lets all the rest of us off the hook. 'Phew, we don't have to worry about that because he was just evil.' There is nothing we could have done that made things different … We have to take responsibility as individuals or as a society,'' she says with passion.

''Look at the lives of people who have done terrible things. You have to think 'I'm not surprised'. I have no idea what I would do if I were thrown into a situation of such terrible desperation - some people show remarkable bravery and honesty and some don't, but we should not be surprised. For many out there, life is hellish and what makes me most annoyed is injustice and the inevitability of the injustice as well … we get the crimes we deserve.''

When she graduated from Oxford, McDermid became a journalist, allowing her to glimpse the lives of those less fortunate. But all the while, she spent her spare time writing fiction in the hope of being published. Report for Murder, written for the Women's Press in 1987, was the first novel she saw in print and the rest, as they say, is publishing history.

Since then, she has written 27 books and another is due out next month. She has had dozens of bestsellers and many of her stories have been optioned or adapted into TV shows, including the acclaimed BBC series, Wire in the Blood. Tellingly, for British society, her first series of books, about a lesbian reporter, Lindsay Gordon, have not.

The new book is a romp, labyrinthine, and without doubt a page-turner. There is no shortage of complex female characters but Charlie Flint, the psychiatrist investigator left me frustrated: she seemed unbelievably gullible, allowing lust to cloud, if not blind, her investigative judgment. This response made me wonder, in retrospect, if I'd have had the same impatient reaction if Flint were a man. Somehow, we expect men to think with their nether-regions - and almost excuse their stupid mistakes. But women? And is such a distinction fair?

McDermid says she writes very differently from how she used to. Initially, she figured the whole story out beforehand, did a structured synopsis and worked on doing 1500 words a day. ''It worked for me when I started out; I felt my weakest area was plot, that that was where I really needed to concentrate my energies.''

Then, while writing The Torment of Others, a crisis: ''Suddenly it stopped. It was like wrestling cats, every time I tried to pin it down it slipped out of my grasp. I had the beginning and the end but couldn't get that big chunk in middle. I'd never been stuck before … it wasn't like writer's block, I was doing journalism, writing short stories.''

In the end, as deadline approached and fear of returning an advance seized her, she panicked, holed up in a small town in Italy, with no phone, no internet, nothing.

''I wrote solidly and in 10 days did 65,000 words. I could not speak at the end of it. When I sent it off to the editor, I had no notion if it was any good or just a pile of crap. I went home and a couple of weeks later, the editor said best first draft you have ever handed in. I don't know how.''

Since then, no synopses, no slow, ordered writing, just a feverish period in a big block. She says she has no idea why things changed, although her wife mused that it might be a sign of her finally trusting her own instinct and imagination. McDermid is clearly tough on herself, challenging her skills each time, and still doubts her talents.

While writing Trick of the Dark she struggled to work out a structure that would allow her to raise doubts about the narrator: ''It's difficult if you have a series of flashbacks and if you also want a question mark over the reliability of the narrator. If you do a straight flashback, then in a way you are lying to the reader. It took a long time to use the memoir, Jay's memoir, as the way to do it …"

Now though, it's time to sell the book, and Australia, ''one of my favourite places'', is something to look forward to: ''I always have some great nights there. Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, they are perfect for me at this time of year.''

She has a great relationship with Melbourne's Sisters in Crime and is presenting the 10th Davitt awards for the best crime writing by Australian women next weekend.

''I love Australians' energy and their appetite for things. Those that love books have a huge appetite for books - and the wine's nice too!''

And with that, she's off. For a drink and a chat no doubt.

Paola Totaro is Europe correspondent.

Val McDermid will be appearing at the Melbourne Writers Festival, starting next Friday. Visit mwf.com.au.

The Age is a festival sponsor.