Val McDermid closes the Acknowledgements section of Out of Bounds—like fellow crime scribes Ann Cleeves and Ian Rankin, McDermid is publishing her 30th novel this year—by thanking friends and family “who treat my addiction to words with compassion, pity and humor.” That addiction, she explains when we chat via Skype, has been integral to her life, enabled by loving parents, a community-and-education-focused societal system and her own interest in an eclectic array of writers that includes Robert Browning, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Kate Millett, Agatha Christie, Sara Paretsky and children’s author Elinor M. Brent-Dyer.
“I come from a working-class family,” says the Kirkcaldy, Scotland-born McDermid. “There was no money for books, but my parents understood the value of education, the value of words. My dad was a great Robert Burns man, and when I was six we moved house to live opposite the central library. That changed my life: I had access to the entirety of the children’s library and I basically read my way round it.” Once she’d run out of books in that section, the progressively inquisitive McDermid absconded with her mum’s library card, procuring adult reading material under the aegis of running reading errands for her ‘sick mother.’ “I then read my way right round the crime section,” she recalls, “and became imprinted with the idea that an adult novel had to have a dead body in it.” Because it was Presbyterian Scotland in the 1960s, says McDermid, you could take out four books at a time, but two of them had to be nonfiction. “There was that sense that you had to improve yourself. So I read lots of things that might not otherwise have crossed my horizon: poetry and drama, for example, came under non-fiction. And I started to do what people do who become infected with words: I started making stuff up and writing things, writing stories. Most of my teens I spent writing song lyrics and bad poetry.” While songsters Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen were strong influences, so was poet Robert Browning. “I liked his dramatic monologues,” McDermid explains. “I always liked the Scottish ballad tradition, the idea of telling stories in songs, so what attracted me were Browning’s dramatic monologues that told stories in poems. I think I’m pretty well addicted to the narrative form: I like things that have a beginning, a middle and an end—though not necessarily in that order.”
That addiction serves her well: over the past three decades, she’s created the robust narratives of five main protagonists. Early on, it was journalist-investigator Lindsay Gordon and PI Kate Brannigan; more recently she’s focused on the symbiotic duo of profiler Tony Hill and detective Carol Jordan, and cold-case investigator Karen Pirie of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit. Out of Bounds, published in the US this month, marks Pirie’s fourth outing, and its carefully calibrated puzzlefest highlights issues around mutating perceptions of family; privacy and inheritance rights; the refugee crisis; and the revealing properties of DNA forensics.
Pirie pursues what should be a simple investigation that careens wildly in new directions, while attempting to soothe a major hole in her life with commiserative gin-tasting sessions with a colleague (“I’m getting a hint of coriander and cinnamon. Might be the perfect curry aperitif.”). She’s stubborn, loyal and smart, with a keen sense of justice that serves her well whether she is chasing baddies, shielding her partner from professional trouble or figuring out a substantive way to help immigrants. In her downtime, she reads Lee Child and keeps things in perspective by binge-watching Homicide: Life on the Street episodes.
As with all her novels, McDermid demonstrates an enormous amount of empathy with her characters, a quality that makes the novel-to-novel transitions within each series remarkably smooth, even though her protagonists may have gone through gut-wrenching changes in their personal and professional lives, and even though McDermid will have written at least one other book—a standalone or different series installment—in between. She also clearly relishes calling on recurring characters such as forensic anthropologist River Wilde and digital technician Tamsin Martineau, giving her fictional world a consistent familiarity while packing her narratives with keen—and often comedic—observations.
Capturing the heftiness of a character atop a barstool (“a turnip on a toothpick”); spotlighting the “rich seam of humanity huddled on [night] buses”; giving a character a simple statement—“work is dignity”—that speaks universal volumes; elucidating the attachment Pirie has to her trusty pen knife; or executing a jaw-droppingly spectacular car crash, McDermid demonstrates a deep delight with the written word that stems from avid and adventurous reading, a trail she tracks back to a dog-eared copy of Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage—“a master-class in putting a story together”—the only book at her grandparents’ house apart from The Bible.
“[Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s] Chalet School books also really shaped much of who I am today,” notes McDermid. “They’re a boarding school series where what happens in one book has an impact in the next. These are characters for whom there are consequences, unlike most children’s series—whatever happened to Nancy Drew, nothing fundamentally changes Nancy Drew. It was the first time I encountered someone who got paid for writing: one of the characters grows up and, in a way that we now see as very meta-fictional, becomes a writer of girls’ school stories. I remember her getting a check from her publisher and thinking to myself, ‘Oh my god, people get paid money for this!’ Also, the characters who went to university went to the Sorbonne—I knew my French wasn’t good enough for that—or to Oxford. So when I decided on university, I knew about Oxford.” At Oxford, says McDermid, “Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics completely transformed the way I thought for myself. It was the first time I had really encountered feminism in any kind of codified way; it opened a whole new window on the way I read, the way I interpreted the world, and it moved me into different circles—I spent time with other women who were feminists and, ultimately, other women who were lesbians.”
She tried her hand at a literary novel, was soundly and roundly rejected, but turned it into a play that was produced at the local theatre. “Entirely by accident, I was a professionally performed playwright by the age of 23!” she says. “But I didn’t understand what I’d done right. I kind of tried to repeat my success and failed. I thought I should try something that I knew something about, and while I was thinking about writing a crime novel—but thinking that I couldn’t write a village mystery—like a gift from the gods, Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only arrived in the post from a friend. It was extraordinary: it had an urban setting which was something I understood; it had an independent female lead with a sense of humor; and the crimes that occurred in the book were organic—they happened because the book was set in Chicago, because of the nature of that city and its politics. It wasn’t about taking a village and bolting on a murder—let’s see who we can kill in Cabot Cove this week—it was that sense of action that had its roots in the community that you’re writing about. At the time, I was a newspaper reporter; if you’re going to be a good reporter, you have to understand the community and the people that you’re writing about, so that was directly transferrable. I thought, ‘It’s actually possible to write about the things that are important to me and to use this genre to write about them.’ So off I went.”
It’s partly a sense of groundedness from her parents, McDermid acknowledges, that allows her to happily go off and plunder her imagination, mining a world rife with murder, mayhem and psychologically damaged characters. “Where I still feel most rooted is with my family, my close friends,” says McDermid, who celebrated her civil partnership with Professor of Geology Jo Sharp in October. “There’s a public life that I lead because that’s the nature of what I do for a living. But when I go home, I have a close community that is my private space, a structure that really supports me. In a paradoxical way, what I got from my parents’ closeness with each other was a kind of independence: they very much understood the importance of time for each other, so the concomitant of that was that I had to entertain myself some of the time. The reason I spent time with my grandparents was so that my parents would have time on their own, without me, and I think that’s really healthy for everybody—healthy for them, because they didn’t lose sight of the importance of their relationship, healthy for me because I developed other relationships. There is a thing I feel about them which can sound harsh, but isn’t: they would have had an equally happy marriage if I hadn’t come along. Which is not to say that they didn’t love me and that I wasn’t a key part of their lives, but they would have been happy no matter what. They didn’t even expect to have a child because they both had TB and that can have quite a severe impact on your fertility. They had, in fact, been married for eight years before I came along, so I was a surprise.” McDermid laughs. “I think I was often a baffling surprise.”
She’s already thinking about next year’s book, a return to Hill and Jordan. “I’m also very, very excited about the idea I’ve got for the book after that which is Karen Pirie. I do not have a plan beyond that because I don’t have overall story arcs—it’s always been book to book. Every time I’ve gotten toward the end of one book I start to think, ‘Oh, yeah, I can do this with them next.’ When I stop feeling like that I will stop writing those books.”
Series-writing aside, McDermid produces standalone thrillers such as 2012’s Vanishing Point that delineated with chilling precision the intricate intimacies between a ghostwriter and her client. Since April of 2014, as well as Hill/Jordan and Pirie novels, she’s published the terrific nonfiction Forensics—a conference she attended while researching that book was a spur for Out of Bounds—and an entertaining re-imagining of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. She’s a regular presence in the British media as a commentator, interviewer and entertainer—in May, alongside crime writers Doug Johnstone, Chris Brookmyre, Martyn Waites and Mark Billingham, she was on the winning Criminal Element team on BBC TV’s brainiac quiz show Eggheads—and is currently working on a radio drama around the theme of anti-microbial resistance (another follow-on from her Forensics research). A fixture at UK crime-writing festivals, she is also a vocal fan of Kirkcaldy’s Raith Rovers football team for whom her father was a scout.
Between it all, she is a generous advocate of other writers—check out her Twitter feed—and appreciates the support others have given her. “As many books as you might write, I learned from Ruth Rendell, it doesn’t get easier, it gets harder. It’s like any skill: when you first get behind the wheel of a car you think, ‘I’ll never get this, never get my feet to work at the same time as my hands while changing gears and looking in the mirrors!’ And then, quite quickly, you get the hang of being able to drive in a kind of fairly crappy way. Then you pass your driving test and, from that point on, as you’re becoming an advanced driver or a rally driver or a racing-car driver, those steps are actually incrementally much harder than getting those basic skills in the first place. It’s like that with writing: one sits down with ambition, knowing in this little part of your head that you will not realize all that you want to achieve with this book. Every book in that sense is a failure. So you adopt the Samuel Beckett thing: ‘Fail better.’”
So does she think she’s hit Formula 1-level by now? McDermid laughs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I sometimes think I’m still bumping into fire hydrants.”
