Publishing
Talk: Why weddings can be murder for Val McDermid
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Where does Wire in the Blood creator
Val McDermid get her ideas? Danuta Kean
investigates.
Val
McDermid, photographed by Charlie Hopkinson © 2009
This interview first appeared
in issue 1 of
Publishing Talk Magazine. An edited version first appeared on
this site on 20 July 2012.
8 minutes to read
Val
McDermid – © Alan Peebles
Weddings can be murder for Val
McDermid. As can radio shows, conversations, walks on beaches and even book
reviews. For these are among the unlikely inspirations for the crime writer’s
25 bestsellers, including recent UK number one The
Retribution (Sphere, 2012).
‘When I started off I thought I
had maybe three or four novels in me,’ she explains over a cup of tea on the
lawn of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, her old college and where she is hosting
a crime writing conference ‘The concept that I would still be full of ideas
after 25 books seems bizarre, but there has never been a point in the last 25
years when I have thought, “What am I going to write?”’
The concept that I would still be
full of ideas after 25 books seems bizarre, but there has never been a point
in the last 25 years when I have thought, “What am I going to write?”
For those of us who struggle to
realize one idea McDermid’s admission that she ‘always has at least three
ideas at an advanced stage’ in her imagination will be a source of wonder as
well as envy. ‘Things come from small beginnings,’ she explains. ‘It can be a
throwaway line on the radio or a little anecdote someone shares over dinner.’
If it’s not interesting enough to
remember, it’s not interesting enough for a reader to want to read about it.
 Unlike other writers the Queen of
British Noir does not scribble these crumbs of inspiration into a notebook.
‘I work on the principle that if it’s not interesting enough to remember,
it’s not interesting enough for a reader to want to read about it.’ Her voice
retains the tough, no nonsense tones of her working class roots in Fife,
Scotland. It is one of those accents that can make a whisper sound sinister
and clashes with our surroundings – a rose garden in an elite English
university.
It was from here that she spied
the inspiration for Trick of The
Dark (Sphere), her 2010 standalone thriller. ‘I
was sitting on the lawn just by the river, over there,’ she points towards
the banks of the Cherwell, where a girl in a punt trails her hand in the
water, while her male companion lazily pushes it along.
‘There was a wedding going on and
I saw the wedding party arrive and I recognized the mother of the bride,
which started a train of thought about what would be the ramifications of
that sort of unexpected encounter?’ Her gaze is fixed on the couple in the
punt and I wonder what train of thought they are releasing.
‘I started to think, where could
you go with that idea? And by the end of the day, what I thought was that the
most interesting thing that could happen would be that the bridegroom would
be dead by bedtime.’ She laughs at the admission, a deep, dirty laugh, as
guilty as a secret.
Once McDermid has an idea for a
book it can take years before it is committed to paper – the inspiration for Trick of the Dark took 12
years to bear fruit. In that time she teases out plot and character details.
Much of this incubation is done in her head, though it occasionally seeps out
– like her famous creation Dr Tony Hill, McDermid has an unconscious habit of
talking to herself.
She can often be spotted walking
her dog on the beach near her village home on the Northumberland coast. The
dog is a useful foil if anyone passes by worried that the short, middle-aged
woman ahead is nattering away to nobody.
Vocalizing her thoughts helps
overcome obstacles in stories. ‘I remember in The Last Temptation, one of the key things
that had to happen was for this Dutch cop and German cop to share details of
a couple of cases they were working on that, on the face of it, didn’t have
any connection. Why would they be sharing information?’ she recalls.
‘I was puzzling with it for a
while and then was in the shower one morning and shouted out: “Because they
are lesbians!”’ She bangs her hands on the bench, her shout cutting through
the sedate atmosphere of the garden. Across from us a couple of elderly women
look up and laugh.
McDermid’s partner, American
publisher Kelly Smith, is used to such outbursts. ‘There was a point
yesterday when I was driving down here with Kelly and she suddenly said,
“What are you doing? Who are you talking about? Is that the next book?”’
McDermid pulls a face of sweet innocence. ‘”No, I am just singing.”’ A great
laugh rips from her belly.
In a world in which authors are
pressured to be as presentable as D-list celebrities, McDermid is
refreshingly unselfconscious. Dressed in baggy t-shirt and dayglo shorts, her
image is at odds with the title most often used by profile writers: Queen of
Crime. When I wrote that she looked more like crime’s ‘gobby chief shop
steward’, she emailed to say she planned to get it printed as a slogan on a
t-shirt.
McDermid goes against type for
crime writers in other ways. In a genre where creative writing students are
told to plan every detail of their plot, it comes as a surprise to hear the
creator of Wire In The Blood
(Harper, 1997) starts each novel with nothing written down.
Not that she has always written
‘blind’. Until The Torment of
Others (HarperCollins, 2004), her fifteenth novel, she worked to
a detailed synopsis, but she hit a wall. ‘It was like wrestling with water,’
she recalls of the crisis. ‘Every time I tried to pin down the rest of the
plot it would slither away from me.’
With a deadline looming and in
fear that she had finally run out of ideas, she fled to an isolated holiday
home in Italy. ‘There is no phone or internet,’ she explains. Each day she
would rise early and write solidly until seven, when she would have dinner
and a bottle of wine. ‘Then I would go to bed and the next day do exactly the
same again.’ Within nine days she had completed 60,000 words. ‘By the end of
it I couldn’t speak in sentences.’
In trepidation she sent the book
off to her editor, who immediately got back to her extolling it as ‘the best
draft’ McDermid had ever produced. The novel went on to win the Theakston’s
Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year and to be shortlisted for the Crime
Writers Association Gold Dagger. ‘I have no fucking idea how that happened,’
she says. Clearly, 10 books on, the trauma of the experience still resonates
– as does the liberation of writing without a synopsis: she has not used one
since.
The years before writing a novel
are spent teasing out its broad structure. When McDermid sits down to write
the first 50 pages – usually in late summer – she has a rough idea of where
she is going and ‘feels’ her way into it. ‘I then put the manuscript aside
and start again in January. Because I have been thinking over it so much, it
is at the front of my mind when I start again and it all comes out onto the
page.’
The years of careful analysis do
not mean McDermid knows every detail when she sits down at her computer again
in January. ‘There are still chunks that won’t happen until I get to them,’
she admits. I wonder if the adrenaline rush that comes with such deadline
baiting is a throwback to her past as a crime reporter for The People? It does ensure
her work has an edge of urgency often lacking in prose dependent on
chapter-by-chapter synopsis.
Being able to work to rigid
deadlines in her previous career goes some way to explain McDermid’s
prodigious output. She kicked off her crime writing careers in the ‘80s with
a series featuring gay journalist Lindsay Gordon, which ran to six novels.
Since then she has written six featuring private eye Kate Brannigan and seven
featuring psychologist Tony Hill and detective Carol Jordan. In between
these, she has written a further seven standalone novels.
She says there is a strong
difference in writing series and standalone novels. ‘In a standalone book you
can allow in the earlier stages for the plot to be paramount.’ As McDermid
describes it, there is a Zen-like pleasure in developing character and plot
together for a one-off novel.
‘The earlier stages of planning
the characters are at the service of the story, and it is only in the process
of the writing that you come to an understanding of the characters, which in
turn feedbacks into what the possibilities are for the plot and that feeds
into the characters….’ She leans back into the wooden bench. Arms
out-stretched either side of her, she looks as satisfied as a cat after a saucer
of cream.
The great joy of series fiction is
you get to spend a long, long time with characters.
Serial novels, she says, offer
different pleasures. ‘The great joy of series fiction is you get to spend a
long, long time with characters and you can really develop the full richness
over a period of time. In a one off novel things can get rushed.’ It is not
unknown for her to finish a standalone novel with a strong desire to spend
more time with its characters. The first Hill and Jordan novel, The Mermaids Singing
(Harper, 1995), started off as a standalone. ‘I just wanted to return to
those characters.
The sun disappears behind a great
grey cloud and a church bell rings in the distance. I am aware our hour
together is closing. McDermid has a paper to present at the conference though
she seems in no rush to leave. Before we part I ask her about her support for
début crime writers – in recent years she has chaired the New Blood event at
the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate.
I am excited by what crime writing
has become in the past 10 years, the expansiveness of it. The quality is
quite astonishing.
She supports new writers because
the likes of Reginald Hill and Sue Grafton helped her when she started out.
‘I am also a genuine fan of this genre,’ she adds with a broad smile. ‘I am
excited by what crime writing has become in the past 10 years, the
expansiveness of it. The quality is quite astonishing.’
Would she like to be starting out
again now? ‘No.’ Her mood darkens. ‘I think one of the problems with
publishing now is that it has become a very short-term business. I would not
want my career to be judged on my first three books.’ Her voice is emphatic.
‘It takes a while to develop the skills that will help you along the way. The
way publishing is now, if you haven’t broken by your third book, it’s
goodnight Vienna.’
Val McDermid’s Top
Tips for Crime Writing
1. Inspiration: keep an open mind
and allow small details to start trains of thought. Then ask questions to see
where the idea takes you.
2. Ideas: if it stays in your
memory it is a good idea. If you can’t remember it, it was probably not good
enough to sustain a novel.
3. Synopsis: if you are finding
it hard to follow a synopsis, don’t be afraid to tear it up and write
‘blind’.
4. Character versus plot: serial characters
can develop; in one-off novels character needs to be subverted to driving
along the plot.
 UPDATE: Val McDermid’s latest book, Insidious Intent (Tony Hill and
Carol Jordan, Book 10), is published by Little, Brown on 24 August 2017 and
is available to pre-order now.
The post Why weddings
can be murder for Val McDermid appeared first on Publishing Talk.
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