VAL MCDERMID

Award-winning crime writer Val McDermid is the author of many novels, including The Mermaids Singing, The Wire in the Blood (now a popular UK television series), and, most recently, The Torment of Others. She responded to questions mailed in by EnCompass users during May 2006.

Susan Tranter, EnCompass Reader in Residence: Can I kick off by asking about what you enjoy reading? Do you read all the crime writing 'competition', and have you come across any great new writers you'd recommend?

VMcD: I'm principally a reader of fiction. I read mostly crime fiction and literary fiction. Two things always attract me - good writing and storytelling that sucks me in and takes me to another place. I don't really see my fellow crime writers as competition - if I recommend, say, Denise Mina, I don't expect the readers will suddenly abandon me for her! I've been reading quite a bit of crime fiction in translation recently; after many years of frustration at how little European, Cuban and South American writing was available to Anglophone readers, there has been a sea change and a slew of terrific writers are newly available. Among those I've really enjoyed - Arnaldur Indridason, Boris Akunin, Gianrico Carofiglio, Leonardo Padura, Kerstin Eckman, Karin Alvtegen and Fred Vargas.
 

Di: Hi Val. My 'Sisters in Crime' bookclub in Perth, Western Australia are all great fans of yours. This year, our book club is looking at how characters evolve over an author's series and this month we are looking at the Lindsay Gordon series of books. I am wondering whether you plan out a life for your series characters, or does the plot dictate the direction they take. My colleague would also like to know whether Tony Hill is based on real people. Does anybody in real life do what he does?

VMcD: First, let me say how flattered I am that you've chosen the Lindsay Gordon novels for such close scrutiny. I hope you all enjoy them.
I don't really plan much ahead for my series characters. A series novel is always triggered by an idea that excites me and which seems to be a natural fit for one of the series. Then as I start to think about how the story might evolve, I look back at what happened to my nexus of characters in the last novel and what impact that will have on how they behave in the immediate future. I explore the various possibilities for them alongside those for the story and try to get some kind of a fit that feels appropriate.
The first three Lindsay Gordons are a slight exception to this general habit because the book I really wanted to write was the third in the series, Final Edition. I wasn't a very sophisticated storyteller back then and the only way I could figure out how to get the back story in place for this story to work was to write the first two books in the series.
And yes, in the UK at least there really are people who do what Tony Hill does, in the sense that there are clinical psychologists who work with the police in offender profiling. The closeness of the relationship is much stronger in my books than in the real world, but one has to take that sort of liberty with the truth in order to make fiction work.

    
Cathy C: Hello Val, I'm a big fan of all your books - always something I look forward to. I heard PD James once say that when she was writing about Adam Dalgleish she had the actor Gregory Peck in her mind, although the actor Roy Marsden ended up playing him on TV. Did you have anyone in mind for Tony Hill and Carol Jordan when you were writing the books and do Robson Green and Hermione Norris fit the bill?

VMcD: When I was first writing the characters, I had nobody in particular in mind. But Robson Green is a pretty close approximation of the Tony Hill that was in my head before the TV series, so now when I write Tony, I see Robson in my mind's eye. Not so with Carol - good though Hermione's performances always were, she wasn't 'my' Carol Jordan. So I still see 'my' Carol when I write her, not Hermione.

            
Muneeb: Hi Val, I'm from Pakistan. My question is: do you always feel justified about what you write in your books? I mean have you ever regretted anything after your novels have been published?

VMcD: I don't have any regrets about what I have published. Mostly, I suspect, because I think I examine what I write pretty carefully before I send it off to my editor. I am particularly scrupulous about the way I write about violence. For me, it must be functional, not just there for a cheap thrill. It should also be unnerving for the reader because violence is unnerving and frightening and it changes lives. To pretend otherwise is to be dishonest in a way that makes me very uncomfortable. I explore the issues of the responsibility of the author in Killing The Shadows, my second standalone novel. I don't have all the answers, but at least I made an effort to ask the questions...

 
Mayega: Hi Val, I'm from Cameroon. Do you agree with Georges Bott when he says that every writer has his own style of writing?

VMcD: Well, the linguistic specialists who conduct computer analyses of our prose seem to suggest that! I think it's true that we all have highly individual voices inside our heads; how far we can translate that to the page is a measure of our skill and technique. When I'm working with beginning writers, helping them to find their own distinctive voice is one of the most difficult and rewarding parts of the process.

   
Markwek: When you write a crime novel, you in a sense control the loose ends. At the end you, the plot, and the clues decide who did it. But when you write about historical figures and unsolved mysteries, there are many elements that you don't control. Do these constraints make you more creative or do they limit you?

VMcD: I don't know whether those constraints have made me more creative. In The Grave Tattoo, they certainly cause me to approach the story in a different way.
When I'm working out how a story will develop, I always explore different possibilities. With series novels, there are similar constraints to those involving real historical figures, because the series characters themselves have a hinterland that dictates their narrative possibilities. We already know many of the things they can and cannot do.
With real people, what I suppose I'm doing is simply extending that existing hinterland. For The Grave Tattoo, I had to find out as much as I could about the facts of the lives of William Wordsworth and Fletcher Christian so that I could pinpoint the gaps in those facts that might be amenable to being filled with the events of my imagination. I didn't want to corrupt the historical record, and I managed to construct my own fantasy within the framework of the facts. I haven't altered anything that is an accepted part of the historical record, just inserted material where it seemed to me to fit best. So while one might argue that this was a constraint on the free flow of imagination, it felt more like a challenge to me. And challenge in writing is what I live for.

Linda: Hi Val, I've got all of your books now and am getting through them rightly (finished the Tony Hill and Kate Brannigan series, half way through the Lindsay Gordon...). They're so hard to put down! I was wondering if you are going to be adding to any of the series again, and where you have based your research on - from the real gory stuff to white collar crime? And would you ever consider doing a signing in Belfast?

VMcD: I'm currently working on the fifth Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novel, Beneath the Bleeding. I don't know when / if I'll return to the other series - I always have to wait for a story that fits the characters and excites me before I can write any book. I do have a strong story idea for Kate Brannigan and I'd like to revisit her but it won't be this year - I have a book to finish, a second major knee surgery to get through and quite heavy touring commitments in the autumn involving trips to the USA, Germany, Spain and Switzerland.
I'm not often inspired by real cases. What sets my imagination running are tangents - throwaway lines, casual anecdotes, odd facts and strange phenomena. For example, The Grave Tattoo has its roots in a lecture about crime in the Lake District in the 19th century. The speaker mentioned that Wordsworth and Fletcher Christian had been at school together, which struck me as being a pretty wild playground pairing. Then later, the speaker revealed that the Lake District had been a popular refuge from justice for criminals from the big northern industrial cities because there was a lot of space and not many people. And he added as a throwaway line that there had always been a strong and persistent rumour that Fletcher Christian had not in fact died on Pitcairn but had come home to be harboured by friends and families. And those two things - one fact, one rumour - were what set my pulse racing. What demonstrates the individual nature of inspiration and creativity is that there were at least 20 other writers in the room and none of them has gone one to write anything even vaguely connected to this one fact and one rumour.
I have done events in Belfast a couple of times in the past, both at the Belfast Festival and at the splendid No Alibi bookshop, whose owner David always makes me very welcome!
 
Eliot Honeywell: Dear Val, thank you for many hours of delicious bedtime reading. I'm wondering if Tony Hill's character name is a nod towards another favourite author I currently have piled up next to my bed - along with quiet a few of your books - Reginald Hill? Both very clever, both with interesting minds, both with a dark side, maybe R. Hill's a little more cheeky? But then T. Hill sometimes comes across with a quirky sort of cheek!

VMcD: To be honest, I never thought of this connection when I named Tony. Names are important, and I tried on several possibilties before I came up with the name that felt right to me. However, when Reg Hill read The Mermaids Singing, he enjoyed teasing me over the connection, threatening to have his lawyers make me sign a paper stating that Tony Hill's problems were in no way based on anyone named Hill known to me! He has also subsequently got his own back with several jokey remarks directed at my home town of Kirkcaldy and our football team, Raith Rovers.

Nellie: Are there any plans or offers (top secret or otherwise) to adapt the Kate Brannigan series into a film or TV drama? Please do it! (And if you do
please ensure they send it downunder to Australia). Kate would fit the brief for a sexy, smart, tough leading herione in a classy production. Do you agree or does the thought of Kate crossing from print to screen make you laugh, squirm or shudder?

VMcD:We've had Brannigan in development a couple of times, but it's never made it to a commission. TV companies are not keen on private eye series in general, and also I think stylistically it would need some work for contemporary TV. Having said all that, I'm always threatening to sit down and do my own treatment when I get the time (never get the time, never get any time...). I'm sure if it ever got made, you would get it in Australia, not least because you lovely people buy so many of my books. I'd only go along with a production where I had some say in the process, as I do with Wire in the Blood, so I guess I'd feel pretty confident that we'd make good TV out of it.

 
Laney: I would like to ask Val how many Wired in the Blood series have been completed. I recently saw a notice for Wire in the Blood 3 and don't remember if that is the latest and if not which is.

VMcD: Three series have been screened, a total of eleven episodes. The filming for WITB4 has just been completed and it will be screened in the UK in the autumn. I've read all the scripts and seen some of the finished product, and I think it's going to be even better than the previous series.

   
Susan Tranter: You've written recently about how you've totally changed the way you write novels. Could you tell us a little about that, and say whether you've settled into the new process?

VMcD: I can tell you a lot about it! I think most writers use their first two or three books to figure out what method of writing works best for them. I wrote Report for Murder more or less by the seat of my pants. I didn't know where it was heading, or how it was going to get there. I wasted a lot of time writing myself into blind alleys and trying to shoehorn characters into unlikely behaviour. With the second book, Common Murder, I thought it might help to have a better idea of where I was going. So I wrote a brief outline. Just a couple of scribbled pages. But it made life so much easier. By the third book, I was writing a ten-page chapter-by-chapter breakdown. It worked for me - it was like a roadmap. And that is pretty much how it stayed until The Torment of Others.

It felt like a serious problem. Everything up to the point where I was about to start writing had gone as usual. In my head, I'd taken the story from the starburst of the first idea to something that had a bit of shape. I knew whose story it was and how they got to where they were at the start of the book. I could hear their voices in my head and I thought I was ready to roll. I started working on the synopsis, and the beginning went as usual. I had the outline of the first eighty or so pages neatly in place. And that's when the trouble started. I couldn't articulate what happened next. There was a vague, amorphous shape in my head, but I couldn't grasp it. I wrestled with this for a while, then decided to leave it alone on the general principle that my subconscious would have it sorted when I went back to it. Wrong again. I did some work on the end of the book, trying to make clear where I was headed to see if that would help me figure out how I was going to get there. And the ending seemed to come together quite readily. At least now I knew what I was aiming for. I went back to the synopsis. And still it wouldn't come together. By now, my deadline was looming and I had no alternative but to buckle down and write the damn book. I just got my head down and wrote straight through, barely pausing to sleep and eat. It was physically draining and mentally exhausting. And ironically, my editor maintained this was the strongest first draft I'd ever handed in.

I thought it was just a glitch. A one-off. But with The Grave Tattoo it was worse. I couldn't even get the beginning or the end down. It was a nightmare. I really was beginning to wonder if I had lost it, if I had come to the end of the road as a writer. But again, the deadline was looming and so I tried to get the book down. It felt like walking out on a high wire without a safety net. And the first time, I fell off. Nothing worked. I crashed the first deadline with embarrassing aplomb. I was so embarrassed about the whole thing, I pretended it just wasn't happening. It was awful. I wasn't sleeping properly, I was avoiding other writers and I felt like a fraud.

It was desperation and shame in the end that got me moving. I couldn't go on pretending to write the damn thing forever. I forced myself to my desk and made myself do it. And as I did that, something shifted. I realised there was another way of doing this. It's what I later discovered the American writer EL Doctorow calls 'driving at night writing'. Imagine you're setting off at night to drive somewhere. You know where you are heading, you know the way there. But you can only see a small part of the road lit up ahead of you. And as you drive forward, the road reveals itself piece by piece until you finally reach your destination.

Since then, I have written the about-to-be-published novella Cleanskin by the same method and it seems to be working. Now I've done it more than once, I've stopped panicking and I'm trying to be sanguine about the whole thing. I'm writing the new novel by the new method and so far, I am sleeping at night. So I am now, it appears, a night driver.

Susan Tranter: Many thanks for taking part Val.

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