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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS Vol. 1, No. 11 |
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 Author of The Lindsay Gordon Series The Kate Brannigan Series The Tony Hill Series and the acclaimed thriller "A Place of Execution" |
Scotland's gift to mystery reaches a career pinnacle
of TheColumnists.com
Val McDermid had every reason to be dragging like a whipped steeplechase pony as she trudged into the hotel just off the runways at San Francisco International Airport. Nearing the end of a punishing eight-city book tour in the U.S., she had just come from the hectic Bouchercon mystery convention in Denver by way of a book signing in Seattle and she was pretty well worn down to her last frazzle.
Then the desk clerk broke the news that her room wouldn't be available for another couple of hours. To her eternal credit, McDermid did not pull a .44 magnum out of her jacket and blow off one of his kneecaps.
As
a matter of fact, she just grumbled a bit as she sank into a
sofa in the lobby and pitched into her next task before her evening
signing in San Mateo and her 6:30 a.m. flight to Houston: An
interview in the hotel lobby, not exactly the serene amd restful
setting she'd been hoping for earlier.
Though it probably didn't feel like it just then, this has to
be a great time in the life of Val McDermid, which may be why
she seemed to shrug off her fatigue and give the interview her
best shot. With one big success after another, she now seems
on the cusp of superstardom in the realm of the mystery.
The former tabloid journalist from Scotland has been a best-selling crime and mystery novelist in the United Kingdom for several years, but she had been pretty much unknown in America until all the buzz about her finally began to grow loud enough to hear in the States this year. Her latest novel, "A Place of Execution" (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), has been generating rave reviews everywhere. And for good reason. Just open it up and you feel like a steel hand has grabbed you by the throat and jerked you into the irresistible story she's telling. It's a riveting read. And the critics all keep saying it's a "turning point" novel that lifts McDermid up to the rarefied strata where those British masters of the mystery, Ruth Rendell and P.D. James, currently dwell.
Of course, McDermid takes such acclaim with the wariness of a seasoned reporter who spent "16 years before the mast" in the tabloids and knows today's hero may be the one picked for a flogging tomorrow.
"Whenver I finish a book, I'm always profoundly disappointed. I never feel like I've achieved what I wanted to achieve," she said. McDermid claims she didn't feel like she'd turned any major career corners while writing it, even though she knew, "It was different from anything I've ever done before."
In fact, McDermid modestly concedes, "I didn't know if I could do it."
By now, though, she ought to be over that hump of self-doubt. The book is being hailed as a bold venture into serious crime fiction. Going boldly is rapidly becoming one of her trademarks.
Like many of her more recent novels, "A Place of Execution" purposely took McDermid in a new direction. Though it's a novel, it's written as if it's a factual crime book. It has the feel of the very best non-fiction crime books, like Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" or Robert Lindsey's "The Falcon and the Snowman." What's more, one of its leading characters, journalist Catherine Heathcote, is actually trying to write a non-fiction book about a celebrated criminal case that seized the British public's attention nearly 40 years earlier: The disappearance of 13-year-old Alison Carter from the tiny village of Scardale just before Christmas in 1963.
In addition to the stylistic non-fiction feel she created, McDermid also set herself other difficult tasks. First, she had to create a vivid portrait of a village so small that most of the inhabitants are related to each other and even the friendliest stranger in town is treated like an invader from Mars. Then she had to meticulously recapture the way a provincial police force might have investigated the case of a teenage girl gone missing, circa 1963.
She does this so masterfully that you become totally unaware of style and technique as you get swept up in the story of young police detective George Bennett, whose determined search for the truth about what happened to Alison goes beyond his devotion to duty and finally lurches into the realm of obsession. The case truly haunts George, so much so that when the truth finally comes out nearly 40 years later, the shock of it nearly kills him.
Like all great novels, "A Place of Execution" has many layers of meaning and McDermid doesn't let them all come forth until the very last pages. At the heart of her story is a theme that McDermid admits has fascinated her for years and years, which she calls, "The gap between justice and the law." Indeed, you will find yourself wrestling with that very issue once you learn the truth along with George Bennett.
"I don't sit down with themes in mind when I write a book," she said. "Generally speaking, I don't even see the theme in the book until quite a long time afterward."
But McDermid will say one thing she had in the back of her mind while writing this one: That what happens in Scardale isn't so much a Shakespearean tragedy as it is a Greek tragedy.
"A lot of crime fiction hinges on the Shakespearean notion of tragedy -- that it somehow happens because of a character flaw," she explained. "In this book, I was going back further to Greek tragedy -- where these things come at you out of a blue sky. George Bennett is trying to do the best thing he can, but then it all unravels -- and it's not really his fault."
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McDermid's acclaimed new book, left, has created a demand for her earlier mysteries, like 'Clean Break,' her 1995 novel featuring Manchester private eye Kate Brannigan.
McDermid is an admirer of Ruth Rendell, who started out writing her fairly traditional Inspector Wexford mysteries, but for the past 20 years has been moving more and more into serious, often deeply psychological novels, often very experimental in nature. She believes British "literary fiction" has gone intolerably soft while trying to please critics and academics while "mystery" genre novelists like Rendell, James and Minette Walters have been writing the most ambitious fiction in the UK.
Not
about to annoint herself as a member of that pack, McDermid instead
argues that she comes from a different literary tradition --
the contemporary Scottish tradition, which James Ellroy has called
"tartan noir."
"I regard my literary ancestors as Robert Louis Stevenson
and Arthur Conan Doyle," she said, tossing in a few other
Scottish names for good measure. "I think Scottish crime
fiction is much different than English crime fiction because
it's rooted in the Scottish psyche -- dark and Calvinist. But
we have that black humor that sustains us."
McDermid certainly has a great sense of humor. You won't see
much of it in "A Place of Execution," where it wouldn't
fit too neatly, but it's all over her two popular detective series:
the Lindsay Gordon mysteries, about a lesbian sleuth, and the
Kate Brannigan mysteries, featuring a decidedly heterosexual
private eye. McDermid, who's openly gay, writes both series with
such finesse that you might have trouble figuring out her real
proclivities if you didn't know better.
"I'm a gemini," she chuckles. "Nobody's a one-trick pony. We all have different facets and we tend to be different people when we're with different people. I'm a different person when I'm home with my partner and we're having a quiet domestic evening. Each of my characters has some elements of me in them, but none of them is all me."
McDermid says she keeps the two radically different detective series going because she likes that sort of variety as a writer. Her more recent novels "The Mermaids Singing" and "The Wire in the Blood" feature forensic psychologist Tony Hill, a third series that has taken her in still more venturesome directions. She also decided long ago not to use her Lindsay Gordon character to put across any pro-lesbian messages.
"I didn't want to write books that would only be accessible and enjoyable to other lesbians," she said. "I wouldn't want to live in a ghetto, so why would I want to write for one? I've always written about the gay experience as part of the continuum of the world. Besides, if I wrote books with an agenda, they'd move my books from the mystery section to the gay and lesbian section. I don't want that."
Still, McDermid agrees that by creating a likeable lesbian character and putting her in stories that really move along as mysteries, she's probably doing her little bit to promote understanding in a world where anti-gay discrimination remains a serious problem.
"Once they know there's no rabid sex scene on page five and the story is just about real people getting on with their lives, straight readers can relax about it," she said. She says several male fans have told her they never thought they'd get into novels with a leading gay character, but now they're back-ordering the earlier Lindsay Gordon novels.
McDermid is doing her best to curb any excitement that might be building up over her growing popularity in America, but the truth is the huge American marketplace can make a writer very rich overnight and the breaks really are starting to come her way. She has received widespread acclaim for "A Place of Execution" and considerable publicity. She's already taped an interview that will appear in October on "CBS Sunday Morning" and most of her books now are available in the U.S., something that has come about only in the past year.
Though she has some negative things to say about the American publishing business, she's quite happy with her own American publishers -- St. Martin's Minotaur and Spinster's Ink. She's very hip to the American mystery scene and has made many friends here among this nation's best mystery writers. McDermid, in fact, dates her interest in writing mysteries back to what she considers a seminal event for the mystery in the UK: The first publication of American Sara Peretsky's hard-boiled V.I. Warshawsky private eye novels in England in the early 1980s.
When she read the first one, McDermid said to herself, "This is the kind of book I could aspire to write." She says Peretsky's influence was profound on the new generation of female mystery writers in the U.K. because "that kind of galvanized us and we started writing in that vein."
Now McDermid feels she's in the best possible position -- popular enough to write what she wants to write, even if it's something startlingly new like "A Place of Execution."
"I hope to be able to continue to write books that take me in different directions," she said.
Ask your favorite mystery bookstore for the following Val McDermid titles:
Lindsay Gordon series: "Report for Murder," "Common Murder," "Final Edition," "Union Jack," "Booked for Murder." Kate Brannigan series: "Dead Beat," "Kick Back," "Crack Down," "Clean Break," "Blue Genes." Tony Hill series: "The Mermaids Singing," "The Wire in the Blood." Non-Fiction: "A Suitable Job For A Woman" (with Nevada Barr)
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