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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Scottish mystery author Val McDermid talks about the tough reality of life in today's Britain and why crime writers, not literary novelists, are the ones facing up to it.
Nov 26, 2002 | In the past decade or so British crime fiction has been fiercely determined to throw off its pervasive image (in this country at least) as the genre that specializes in tales of cozy little villages hiding dark secrets. The sleuths of yore, kindly old ladies or Scotland Yard inspectors whose crime-solving technique amounts to ruminative pipe smoking, have been replaced by harried cops and psychological profilers who are both more plausible and more rumpled (mentally as well as physically) than their fictional predecessors. The members of this new generation of British mystery authors (which includes a large Scottish contingent) function as reporters as much as novelists, mapping the structures and failures of Britain's social institutions and the people who try to keep them working. The best writer, the most exciting and compassionate, to emerge from this school of British writing is the Scottish novelist Val McDermid.
Before writing mysteries McDermid spent 16 years as a reporter in the northern bureau of a national British newspaper. Her first mysteries were installments in two separate series featuring the detective Kate Brannigan and the journalist Lindsay Gordon. Then McDermid took a turn toward the darker side of crime fiction in 1995, when she published "The Mermaids Singing." The first in her trilogy of books featuring Tony Hill, a psychological profiler (who may also be the first impotent detective hero in fiction), "Mermaids" capitalized on the new prominence of the serial killer in crime fiction, but it was a definite move away from the genre's increasing fannish adulation of evil-genius killers.
The sequel, "The Wire in the Blood," prompted the British crime fiction doyenne Ruth Rendell, herself no stranger to disturbing tales, to write, "It is so convincing that one fears reality may be like this and these events the awful truth." Two stand-alones followed, "A Place of Execution," a brilliant reversal of the village-with-a-secret English mystery and simply one of the greatest mystery novels ever written, and "Killing the Shadows," in which thriller authors are murdered in ways copied from their books. McDermid's latest book, "The Last Temptation," the conclusion to the Tony Hill trilogy, features another serial killer, though that is only part of the story. Ranging across Europe, the book takes in the gunrunners and drug smugglers who have emerged from the collapse of the Cold War and touches on the abuses of the Stasi, the East German secret police. Salon spoke to McDermid during her stop in New York on her tour to promote "The Last Temptation."
Were you always a crime-fiction reader?
Yeah, I'd always read a lot of crime fiction, and I always wanted to write. I always wanted to tell stories. The mystery seemed appealing because I knew the rules. You have to have a body, you have to have a detective, all that kind of stuff.
In what was being written in Britain at that time -- I'm talking about the '80s -- you had two options: the police procedural and the village mystery. I did not know enough about the police to contemplate writing a police procedural. And, frankly, the cops I had met as a journalist had not filled me with a burning desire to spend more time in their company. So I felt that avenue was closed. The village mystery was really difficult for me to get my head around because I didn't grow up in England. I grew up in a Scottish mining community. We did not have retired colonels of the Indian army. We didn't even have vicars; we had ministers. So this world was completely alien to me. I felt that to write these kinda of books you had to have some kind of insider knowledge almost.
So I was playing with the idea, not really knowing what to do. And the catalyst for me was Sara Paretsky's first novel, "Indemnity Only." A friend who was living in the U.S. sent me a copy of it, and it was just a revelation. Here was someone writing about contemporary women's lives that seemed to have a connection to the kind of lives that I saw around me. It had an urban setting and it had politics -- politics in a personal sense and in a wider social sense. It was almost like reading Paretsky gave me permission to try to write the same style of book. I could write contemporary urban novels that had a sociopolitical dimension, which is what I'd always wanted to do. That was really what pushed me into actually starting it.
I don't know if it still exists in the U.K., but in the U.S. there's an idea that the English mystery is polite. It's about the restoration of order, where the American mystery is hard-boiled and tough. Is that a perception that still dogs British mystery writers?
It's a perception that is as false as the perception that American crime fiction is hard-boiled. You only have to go into any mystery bookstore to see the vast mountain of cozies that are produced by American writers. Whereas the best of British contemporary crime fiction is not like that at all, and I would include Ruth Rendell in that. She doesn't write cozies. She writes hard-edged novels that are about British society.
It's something that's made it very difficult for my generation of British crime writers to break out in America, because we are fighting this expectation of what British crime fiction should be. The American market expects it to be cozy, expects it to be, as you say, about the restoration of order. And it's been a little difficult for people to alter their understanding, to accept that British society isn't like that anymore and that if they want to read books that reflect reality then they need to be reading people like Ian Rankin, Frances Fyfield, Denise Mina, Louise Welsh, because these are writers who are engaging with the contemporary world. Slowly but surely we are getting across that, yeah, we can write hard-edged noir novels that work in the context of our society, and the message is getting across to the discerning readers. It's actually becoming a lot easier to convince people that, yes, we can write about the dark side of things, too.
