Val McDermid

You’d think after selling some ten million books, you’d kick back, head to a beach and bathe in success and glory. But Val McDermid isn’t wired that way. The ‘wee lassie from a mining community in Fife’ read English at St Hilda’s, Oxford, at just 16. She went on to work as a journalist for 14 years in Glasgow and Manchester before becoming an international bestseller whose name is rarely off the top ten bestseller lists. What is it that drives her so hard?

“If I knew the answer to that I’d probably sleep better at night,” she laughed. “I don’t know, all sorts of things: my Scottish background, a very strong work ethic – that’s part of it. And I ended up undergoing a strange experiment that Fife education did in the 1960s where a bunch of us were taken from primary school a year early and pushed through high school at an accelerated rate. And that certainly had something to do with it. It produced either dramatically over achieving children or people who crashed and burned and never realised their full potential. Neither of which is a particularly good thing. For all these complicated reasons, I’m driven to succeed and that’s not always a very comfortable thing…”

Why?

“You never actually take time to enjoy your achievements because you’re looking for the next mountain to climb, you’re looking for the next goal, you know, and sometimes you should just sit back and smell the flowers…it’s not always that easy.”

Val McDermid is a force in the crime genre like no other; it shouldn’t be surprising that she has whipped up the tornado winds of the Theakstons Old Peculier Harrogate Crime Writing Festival since its launch in 2003, helping it become the biggest crime writing festival in Europe.

“My agent was one of the first people approached when the idea was raised and she collared me to join the committee to put together the first programme,” Val explained. “Originally it was supposed to be for a year but it became three years in the end.” She programmed the Festival until 2005 when Mark Billingham took over the reigns for 2006, followed by Natasha Cooper, Simon Kernick, and this year Laura Wilson.

“I’ve always been involved in promoting the genre,” she explained, “and it seemed important to take this chance to tie into an existing, successful Festival which had the administrative back up to make it possible to put together a really good programme.”

The Harrogate International Festival has been bringing music and the arts to north Yorkshire for over 40 years. The crime festival is now the biggest in Europe.

“We’ve had professional back up from the team at the Festival, which means we can get on with the programming. We’re not responsible for dealing with the nuts and bolts. Writers are not really good at that sort of thing, that sort of organisation – making sure people have the right hotel room or have their tickets booked – it’s not the sort of thing that frankly writers should be left in charge of. So right from the start we were able to focus on putting together a really strong programme that represents the best of crime writing, not just in the UK but internationally as well. There’s always been a real sense of wanting the programme to be very high quality, and we worked very hard to make it so. That’s one of the reasons why we have a rotating chair, so it doesn’t become stale, so that different people’s tastes and experiences are reflected.”

An ex-tabloid journalist, Val hit the headlines a few years ago when Ian Rankin said: “The people writing the most graphic novels today are women. They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.” McDermid dismissed the remark as “arrant rubbish”. But controversy sells. The reality is far more grown-up and civil. Rankin attended Val’s wedding and is a good friend: “I did actually spend yesterday afternoon at the football sitting next to Ian Rankin and having very cheerful conversations about all sorts of things,” Val said. “The whole thing set up a false opposition. We’ve been friends for long enough to be able to express different views about things without it coming between us.”

Perhaps this tendency for the press to grab onto sensationalism explains in some part Val’s wariness at tapping into the rich pickings of the real life crime she experienced as a journalist. Val has always said she felt uncomfortable at the idea of using real life crime: “As a journalist I’ve encountered a lot of the aftermath of violent death and seen its effect on the lives of individuals. I feel quite wary about drawing on real cases, because I’ve seen at first hand the emotional problems and the personal issues that are raised. For me, working in the north west of England for years, the Moors Murders in the sixties was a story that resurfaced probably every six months. Some story would come up that touched on it in some way or another. And over the years I met a lot of the players in that story – the families involved, the peoples whose lives were touched directly by that – and I was very, very aware of the sensibilities that you get around a case like that. And I was also very aware that a lot of what we think we know isn’t true or accurate. It seems to me that there’s a danger on drawing on real cases – that you will inadvertently write things that might cause a lot more pain and grief than you intended because you don’t know the reality of what happened, you don’t know the full story, and you could end up saying something that was very hurtful. And I didn’t want to do that, it just felt exploitative. Having said that I don’t make the rules for other people; every writer has to make their own decisions about these things.”

Critics first hailed McDermid for leading the pack of crime authors away from the cosy crime dramas. The realities of her social settings and characters were praised for their compassion. But it hasn’t stopped her being critiqued for using extreme violence. Feminist writer Joan Smith claimed her novels were full of gratuitous violence towards women. In response, Val went through her backlog and counted the deaths: 12 men, 12 women and one transsexual. She quipped to a journalist at the time: ‘How’s that for equal opportunities?’ Does she feel this reputation of extreme violence is an unfair or exaggerated one? “I think it’s a label that is applied by people who aren’t familiar with the range of my work. Yes some of my books deal very directly with the nature of violence – what it is and what it does. But equally there are a lot of books that don’t. And if you did it by the numbers, probably about a third or a quarter of my books deal very directly with violence and the rest don’t. The stand-alones are pretty bloodless!”

So does this label frustrate her?

“To be perfectly honest I think if you start obsessing about that kind of thing it just gets in the way of your work and life: I do the things that I do. The labels that other people choose to put on my work don’t particularly bother me, I know the nature of what I do, I know the value of what I do, and what other people choose to overlay on that is more their issue then mine.” The Observer described her as a cross between Thomas Harris and Agatha Christie; a description that makes sense when you consider the old fashioned detective quests in some of her work and the psychological horror in other novels. She laughs at the description: “It’s a weird concept really isn’t it? I don’t know what it means. If it means I tell gripping stories that are well plotted and make sense at the end I’m perfectly happy to have that said. But like so many of these things what does that really mean?”

I guess it’s all about the tag line, selling novels, grabbing audiences. But for Val, the tabloid press lost its appeal a long time ago. Writing novels was always her ambition. David Simon is quite open about how he’d probably still be a hack bumming cigarettes off junior reporters if he hadn’t been made redundant. “For me it was the other way round; journalism was always something I did until I could make a living writing fiction. The one thing I wanted to be from being a kid was to be a writer. But the one thing I knew was you didn’t just get to be a writer -you had to really work at it – and to finance yourself till you could be a writer you had to have a proper job. Journalism seemed to me the only possible job I could do because everything else I thought of was just not going to work. What I loved about journalism was the lack of hierarchy and not doing the same thing two days running; it was always challenging, and there wasn’t a strict chain of command. I’ve never been very good with authority,” Val laughed. “So journalism was the only option. I enjoyed it for a long time but latterly that changed. I went into tabloid journalism because I believed working class people deserved newspapers that were informative and intelligent as well as entertaining, but that prevailing view was clearly not one that was going to hold sway by the mid 80s, which is when I decided to dig the escape tunnel.”

Journalists seem to take to the crime genre like ducks to water: Duncan Campbell, John Connolly and of course, David Simon. The Wire has been acclaimed as groundbreaking and epic: “The most critically acclaimed television show in the history of the medium.” “If Dickens were alive today, he’d be writing for it.” “The best TV show of the last 20 years.”

There aren’t many dissenting voices that cast shadows on its brilliance. But in a Guardian blog, Urmee Khan spoke out: “I’m not surprised that the programme got rave reviews by middle-aged blokes. Because to appreciate The Wire, it really helps to be cerebral, probably middle-aged, and above all male…I don’t actually like it and here are the reasons why: It is misogynistic. All the main characters are men, apart from one woman. It is a world of men, in which many of the women are portrayed as subservient, lap-dancing gangsters’ molls…Unless you’re a middle-aged, middle-class white bloke you might not even like it!”

So, as one of the most acclaimed female writer in crime fiction, does Val think The Wire is misogynist?

“I must be a middle aged man,” Val deadpans. “I loved The Wire from the beginning. Laura Lippman is an old friend of mine (Laura is David Simon’s wife and an acclaimed crime writer) and Laura sent me the series when it first aired in the US on DVD and I was hooked right from the beginning. I’ve been a huge admirer of David’s work right back to Homicide: Life on the Streets – he’s superb, with a fantastic imagination, and The Wire is extraordinary television. I can’t think of anyone less misogynistic.”

Val may not use real cases for her novels, but she has said she is vampire-like about using life’s experiences. She grew up in a mining community, and the 1984 miners’ strike provided a powerful backdrop of her stand-alone novel, A Darker Domain. Was it easier or harder to draw on her family history?

“Easier in the sense that I didn’t have to do much research because I knew the world I was writing about. What was difficult was trying to maintain the writerly distance so that I had some kind of objectivity. I didn’t want to write something sentimental about my childhood. I wanted to write something that was honest and direct about what it was like living in the UK at a time of so much upheaval as the miner’s strike turned out to be. And to use that for a backdrop for a good story, because at the end of the day if a story doesn’t work, nothing else has any point. So yes, I suppose the hardest part was maintaining that objectivity, but I had all the pictures in my head already, I know that area like the back of my hand.”

Using her personal experiences begs the question: is writing crime fiction an act of catharsis?

“I think it’s complicated. I think writing is a process for the writer to work through their own issues, not necessarily that sort of obvious ‘writing as therapy’ – but if you are writing with any degree of seriousness about big things like life and death, and murder and jealousy, and rage and betrayal – all of these things – you actually do have to dig into your own experience of these emotions and these circumstances in order to give your characters a credible set of responses and reactions. So yeah, in the process of that you examine your own past; you have to live the life examined.  And I think in that process you exorcise a lot of your own devils, but it’s not quite as simple and straightforward as direct catharsis.”

Ruth Wade, an author and regular attendee at the Festival’s Creative Thursday session insisted I asked Val where she gets her ideas from:

“I think she was at the wind-up… I think having you ask that question was definitely a wind up. That is the question that makes all writers grit their teeth a bit. I know Ruth very well and I think she was being a bit naughty there! If you force me to answer, I’d say that ideas are everywhere and what pushes a writer’s hot button is entirely individual. For me, what sets me going is little things; it’s tangents, something that makes me go, ‘That’s interesting. Oh, I didn’t know that’. Small ideas that take a long, long time to turn into a book, but generally they start off as something small, something tangential: a line on a radio programme, a paragraph in a magazine, or some anecdote over dinner.”

For someone who has been involved with the Festival since it began, for a writer who is an international bestseller, does she ever get star struck?

“I’ve always felt start struck in the company of other authors over the years…always. I’ve been lost for words in the company of Ruth Rendell and PD James. All my adult life I’ve been reading their work and learning from it. So whatever your own status, whatever your own experience, there are always people that you’re going to find yourself face to face with at Harrogate who are your heroes. One of the reasons the atmosphere at Harrogate is the way that it is, is because the writers too are hanging out with people they admire and people they respect.”

If you want to see Val McDermid, she’ll be appearing on the ‘Dangerous Dykes’ panel at 2pm on Saturday 25 July. You can also catch her at the Late Night Caberet: Secrets and Lies on Friday 24 July at 10pm and the Late Night Quiz Show on Saturday 25 July at 10pm.

Val McDermid was interviewed by Ann Chadwick.
© Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Harrogate.