Val McDermid (Image: Getty)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n The Scottish crime writer Val McDermid should be over the moon. As we meet in a London caf\u00e9, Time magazine in the US has just unveiled its prestigious list of \u201cThe 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time\u201d \u2013 and McDermid\u2019s 1999 novel A Place Of Execution is on it. But for McDermid, fresh off the train from Edinburgh, something has soured her celebratory mood.<\/p>\n Her friend Nicola Sturgeon, the former Scottish First Minister, congratulated her on X (previously known as Twitter).<\/p>\n \u201cAnd so my timeline today has been full of vileness. People respond to Nicola\u2019s most innocuous tweets with horrible abuse,\u201d she reveals. It\u2019s a reminder how much \u201cvitriol and misogyny\u201d women in the public eye have to put up with, she tells me. \u201cI tend not to get much trolling on my own account, though. My son says it\u2019s because people are scared of me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n McDermid, 68, certainly gives the impression of someone it would be unwise to get on the wrong side of.<\/p>\n Her nickname, in the days when she was a tabloid journalist, was \u201cKiller\u201d \u2013 \u201cbecause if I went out to get the story, if it was possible to get, it would be got.\u201d<\/p>\n As an interviewee, though, she\u2019s warm, funny and forthcoming \u2013 and even a little apprehensive about how her new crime thriller, Past Lying, will be received.<\/p>\n \u201cSome people in the crime fiction world will not like it,\u201d she tells me.<\/p>\n Past Lying centres on the friendship between two crime novelists \u2013 one successful and one not \u2013 and how circumstances change so that they end up switching places at the opposite ends of the bestseller lists. Their rivalry results in murder.<\/p>\n \u201cAlready people are trying to map these characters on to real writers,\u201d McDermid says with a groan. \u201cBut honest to God, they are not meant to be real people. I\u2019m not taking a pop at anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It seems unlikely, though, that she will be besieged by crime novelists complaining about being caricatured when she next attends the AGM of the Crime Writers\u2019 Association.<\/p>\n As established, she can be scary. But besides that, every crime novelist I\u2019ve ever spoken to adores her.<\/p>\n She uses her formidable fighting spirit to champion the crime genre in the face of snooty critics, and to support other writers. Within the crime community, she\u2019s regarded as the head of profession: the Queen of Crime.<\/p>\n Her novel does seem to imply that most writers are a bit nuts, I tell her.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, let\u2019s face it, we spend a lot of our time in our heads with people who don\u2019t exist, in a universe where we are God and nothing happens unless we let it. In different circumstances we\u2019d be treated for mental health problems.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n READ MORE: <\/strong> Amazon offers one million books for FREE and ultimate Kindle to read them <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Val with her friend Nicola Sturgeon (Image: Getty)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n Past Lying is a cracking read, due not least to the return of the wonderful cold case investigator DCI Karen Pirie, whom McDermid has been writing about for 20 years.<\/p>\n The ITV drama Karen Pirie, adapted from her books, was a big success last year and is returning for a second series.<\/p>\n \u201cI think Lauren Lyle absolutely captures the spirit of Karen Pirie. She\u2019s got that Scottish word \u2018gallus\u2019, which means brass neck with a bit of swagger and not letting anybody tell her what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Karen\u2019s relentlessness in pursuit of injustice is explained by her upbringing in a working-class family in Fife \u2013 something she shares with McDermid herself.<\/p>\n \u201cThat area was industrialised and unionised and it was a very strong community and people did genuinely pull together. It\u2019s not like that any more, but it\u2019s the world that I grew up in and Karen grew up in, and I guess that gave her her values of sympathy and empathy for victims, people who are done down by the system.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n McDermid studied English at St Hilda\u2019s College, Oxford \u2013 the college\u2019s first ever student from a Scottish state school. With her pugnacious personality, she laughs as she recalls her tutor encouraging her to apply to the Foreign Office after graduation: \u201cCan you imagine the state this country would be in? We\u2019d be fighting with everybody!\u201d<\/p>\n Instead she became a journalist with the Daily Record in Glasgow and later the Sunday People in Manchester.<\/p>\n Her recent series of crime novels about journalist Allie Burns draw heavily on her experiences in the Seventies and Eighties. The books bring alive a smoky milieu of misogynistic journalists bullying the tiny number of women in the profession. Was it really that bad?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Val with her wife Joanne (Image: Getty)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n \u201cYes, but I didn\u2019t let them get away with it. My Dad brought me up with the view that I was as good as anybody else and I should let no man be my master and that I should stand up for myself.<\/p>\n \u201cI made sure these guys knew they didn\u2019t have any right to push me around. I think I was good at journalism, and by the time Robert Maxwell closed down his newspaper interests in Manchester I was the last one standing, which really upset the guys.\u201d<\/p>\n Bizarrely, she was once beaten up by the celebrity wrestler Big Daddy after doorstepping him.<\/p>\n \u201cAfterwards I had a phone call from a contact of mine, a retired armed robber, and he said: \u2018I\u2019m gonna get the boys to go round with the baseball bats and sort him out.\u2019 I said, please, no violence. He thought for a minute, then he said: \u2018He loves going to the casinos in Manchester, I\u2019ve got contacts, I\u2019m going to get him barred from all of them.\u2019 And he did. Much more effective.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n All the time she was working as a journalist, McDermid was writing fiction. Her first crime novel, Report For Murder, was published in 1987.<\/p>\n Her career built slowly. One of her earliest reviews came from one of her aunts: \u201cAye, I read one of your books, didnae think much to it.\u201d Today she has sold 19 million copies and is translated into 40 languages, but such a future was unimaginable for a long time.<\/p>\n She had her breakthrough in the Nineties as part of the wave of interest in the \u201cTartan Noir\u201d school of Scottish crime writers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were doing something different to English crime fiction at the time \u2013 we had a sense of darkness, a Presbyterian concern with the balance of good and evil. One of the things that linked us as writers \u2013 myself, Ian Rankin, Chris Brookmyre, Denise Mina \u2013 was the black humour, which is a very Scottish thing. It\u2019s not been a good funeral unless you\u2019ve had a good laugh.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The more sensitive critics have blanched at the graphic descriptions of violence towards women in her novels. \u201cYes, but that\u2019s really only in one strand of my writing, the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series.\u201d<\/p>\n Those novels, featuring a clinical psychologist who studies serial killers, were the basis of the popular ITV drama Wire In The Blood, starring Robson Green as Dr Tony Hill.<\/p>\n \u201cThose books are violent because I\u2019m dealing directly with the nature of violence, how contaminating it is, how it destroys lives. When men stop being violent to us women, I\u2019ll stop writing about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Another Scottish crime writer, MC Beaton \u2013 creator of Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin \u2013 also started out as a tabloid journalist, among other roles as Women\u2019s Editor of the Daily Express; she once told me she wrote light, cosy crime fiction because she\u2019d seen enough darkness in her day job.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Val played the public eye Glastonbury with fellow authors in band The Fun Lovin\u2019 Crime Writers (Image: Getty)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n But the dark things McDermid saw pushed her writing in the opposite direction, it seems. \u201cYes. I can\u2019t stop the darkness but I can maybe make people aware of it.\u201d She is speaking more softly now, looking troubled by memories.<\/p>\n McDermid \u2013 who lives in Edinburgh with her wife Jo Sharp (and has a 22-year-old son, Cameron, from a previous relationship) \u2013 seems highly driven to me. This is her 38th novel, in addition to several non-fiction books. She is also a busy broadcaster: she never seems to be off Radio 4.\u201cI don\u2019t think I am driven. I just love what I do,\u201d she insists.<\/p>\n Ian Rankin often takes a year off between books these days: might she? \u201cWhat would I do? I can\u2019t play Assassin\u2019s Creed for a whole year. And I\u2019ve got a band to think about.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ah yes, the band: The Fun Lovin\u2019 Crime Writers, in which McDermid is a vocalist, alongside other musically minded authors such as Mark Billingham. Formed in 2016, it\u2019s been so successful that they\u2019ve even played Glastonbury. \u201cIt\u2019s been an absolute joy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI hadn\u2019t imagined this was how I\u2019d be spending my 60s, but I used to sing in folk clubs when I was younger and I hadn\u2019t really admitted to myself how much I\u2019d missed it.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a real bond between us now which you don\u2019t get when you just know each other as writers. I\u2019m the den mother McDermid is also a key player at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, which she co-founded in 2003. At this year\u2019s festival in July, Nicola Sturgeon was seen alongside McDermid in what these days has become a rare public appearance.<\/p>\n \u201cShe came because she loves crime fiction, and she wanted to start coming out and re-entering the world, which has been difficult for her. She\u2019s no longer got consistent police protection, and there are a lot of bams out there.\u201d<\/p>\n Allegations of Sturgeon\u2019s financial misconduct \u201care just a way of neutralising the SNP\u2019s strongest weapon. She\u2019s absolutely adamant she\u2019s done nothing wrong\u201d.<\/p>\n I wonder if McDermid, who is strongly pro Scottish independence, would ever accept an honour from the British government; after all, Ian Rankin is Sir Ian these days.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019ve said no to offers that have been made,\u201d she replies.<\/p>\n Why? \u201cFirst of all, my partner is a postcolonial geographer: I can\u2019t possibly accept something that says \u2018British Empire\u2019.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd it annoys me that although Ian is \u201cAnd then at my back I can hear my father: he might be proud that I\u2019d been asked but he\u2019d be furious with me if I said yes.\u201d<\/p>\n And she might feel compromised when speaking her mind about \u201cthat shower in Downing Street\u201d, she adds. \u201cIf you take their baubles you might start feeling it\u2019s not polite to kick them in the balls.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u25cf Past Lying by Val McDermid (Little, Brown, \u00a322) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop <\/strong><\/em> [ad_1] Val McDermid (Image: Getty) The Scottish crime writer Val McDermid should be over the moon. As we meet in a London caf\u00e9, Time magazine in the US has just unveiled its prestigious list of \u201cThe 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time\u201d \u2013 and McDermid\u2019s 1999 novel A Place Of Execution is …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1023],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8662"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.images.express.co.uk\/img\/dynamic\/39\/590x\/secondary\/5011576.jpg?r=1697233745736\" "\\"")
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of course.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Sir and so Miranda [his wife] becomes Lady, if I become a Dame, Jo will become nothing.<\/p>\n
on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over \u00a325<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"