Val McDermid, interviewed by Ian Rankin

Over the years, the NorCal East Bay chapter of Mystery Readers International has had many "At Homes" -- intimate evenings with favorite mystery writers. We've hosted Anne Perry, Lawrence Block, Sue Grafton, Elizabeth George, Janet LaPierre, Sharan Newman, Laurie King, Rochelle Krich, Carolyn Hart, James Elroy, Steven Saylor, Janet Evanovich and many others. Recently we were entertained by Eddie Muller, author of The Distance, a great noir mystery set in the world of 1940s boxing in San Francisco. These events are held in private homes, and they're similar to Literary Salons. Since so many of our cyber members and friends aren't able to attend these intimate evenings, I thought it would be fun to have a "visiting" author each month interviewed by another "visiting" author. This month we kick off with Val McDermid interviewed by Ian Rankin. I think you'll find the questions thought-provoking, and the candid answers from Val fun and informative. Wish they were here in real time. Val won the Macavity for Best Novel in 2001. I met Val at Semana Negra in Spain, which was sponsored by the International Association of Crime Writers. I told her if she ever found herself in the San Francisco Bay Area, she should stop by, and she did. The McDermid At Home was the beginning of a beautiful Mystery Readers International relationship. It's not surprising that we chose Val to be the first author on our At Home Online page. Pour yourself a Scotch and read on. Next month, Ian Rankin will be interviewed by Peter Robinson. —Janet Rudolph

Ian Rankin: Scotland has no real history of crime fiction. What do you think has changed in the past fifteen years or so?

Val McDermid: I think it's a combination of factors. Scots have been thinking about who we are in the world since the devolution debates really built up steam in the 1970s. We'd lived in the shadow of the English for so long, our culture sidelined and our identity blurred, that we tended to define ourselves in terms of what we were not -- "We're not English." But faced with the possibility of political self-determination, I think we began to look at ourselves with a more critical eye. Who are we? What kind of country do we want to be? What kind of society do we want to be part of? One of the ways this questioning manifested itself was in a literary renaissance. At the same time that this was happening, crime fiction in the UK had taken on a far greater role as the literature of social criticism. As literary fiction became more hermetic, more concerned with literary theory and less! concerned with narrative, crime writers assumed the mantle of turning the spotlight on the world we live in and doing it in a form where narrative was still of paramount importance. So the two elements came together and a significant number of Scottish writers chose this genre as their natural home. I think there are distinct differences in tone and style between English and Scottish crime fiction -- we tend to be quite dark, we tend towards psychological exploration, we tend to reveal the chip on our shoulder and we have a wicked sense of humour...

IR: In what ways do you think your upbringing has influenced the kind of writer you've become? When did you first realise you wanted to be a writer, and how did you break this distressing news to your family?

VM: I was an only child from a working class background where education was seen as the route to a better life. I was always encouraged to read, everything from comics to library books, and because I spent a lot of time either alone or with adults, I developed a secret life of the imagination. I'd simply take hold of whatever I was reading and inject myself into the stories, taking them in different directions, moulding them to fit the limitations of the world I knew, but also indulging in ridiculous flights of fancy. One of the other aspects of life I was aware of from an early age was politics. My grandfather was a trade union organiser with the mineworkers union, my father's friends included many local politicians, and I don't remember a time when I wasn't aware that the world needed to be changed! I suppose because books changed me, I thought writing was one of the ways this could be achieved. I wanted to be a writer as soon as I realised that people actually wrote all those books in the library and they got paid for doing it!

I don't remember the first time I announced I was going to be a writer, but I do remember that whenever I voiced this ambition, my friends and family always responded with bemusement. People like us didn't do things like that... I am the only member of my family to have shown any signs of artistic ability. All the rest of them are either scientists or very practical people. And they still think I'm weird.

IR: Which do you prefer to write: stand-alones or series books? Can you say something about the strengths and weaknesses of both, from the writer's perspective? Maybe you can give me some tips, so I can convince myself to take a break from Rebus.

VM: I don't have a preference. Mostly, I don't feel I have a choice... The story is always what comes first with me, and it's usually pretty clear early on whether it's one for my series characters or a standalone.

The advantage of writing within a series is that you start with a nexus of known characters. You know what they're capable of, how they respond in any given situation and you experience the pleasure of picking up old friends again. The disadvantage is that you have to find a way to move your protagonist forward in the course of the book, otherwise you run the risk of stagnation, boring yourself and your readers. And there's only so far you can take a set of characters before you reach their limits.

The advantage of writing a standalone is that you start with a blank canvas. You get to shape new characters and to explore situations in a way your series characters can't. You can go places, both literally and metaphorically, that you can't when you know you're going to have to bring your protagonist out of the situation sufficiently whole to play the game again. It's exhilarating and scary because you don't have any safety net to fall into when you're struggling to keep your balance, but it does bring with it a tremendous sense of freedom.

Also, I find writing different series and standalones gives me a break from characters that allows me a certain detachment in their development. For example, I've got a sixth Lindsay Gordon novel, Hostage to Murder, coming out next year. It's been a long time since I wrote a Lindsay novel, and that was mostly because I really couldn't see where to take her next. But eventually, a story came knocking at my mind that allowed real possibilities for doing something different with the character, and it was genuinely fun to go back to her again.

IR: What's your working day like? How do you manage to juggle family life with the pressures imposed on the bestselling author? (Speaking as one parent to another!)

VM: I have an office outside the home now -- that's the only way I can get any work done! I do a basic ten till four-thirty, Monday to Friday when I'm writing. It's a struggle to get the books written in so tight a time-frame, and towards the end of the book, I do work much harder, often sneaking away in the evenings and at weekends. But it's the family life that provides the sanity and the security that makes the rest of it possible. Parenthood does impose tremendous demands, but the rewards far outweigh the inconveniences.

It's harder to balance writing time with the demands of travel and personal appearances, because I enjoy both. As Yeats pointed out, "All things can tempt me from this craft..." When you reach a certain level of success, it's very easy to slide into "being a writer" rather than writing, but I still find the actual process very seductive, so I do my best to set aside times of the year when I don't travel and don't do events that take me away from home.

IR: Who do you write for? Do you have any notion of an audience "out there" while you are constructing a book?

VM: I don't want to seem rude, but I never think about readers when I'm writing. It's hard enough trying to satisfy myself without imagining what anyone else is going to make of this mountain of words. I never think of "the market" either. I've always written the books that are in my heart and in my head, and that's the only kind of book I want to write.

IR: I'm fascinated by the way real life can impinge on a fictional universe, and as you know, I've been the brunt of a number of coincidences regarding the Rebus books (cases turning out to be true; people who saw themselves in the books). Have you experienced anything similar? Maybe you could give us some examples.

VM: It's happened to me several times, some more spooky than others. Oddly enough, it's happened more with the Kate Brannigans than anything else. For example, Clean Break deals with a gang of art thieves whose modus operandi is to steal one piece to order from museums or stately homes. They break in through the nearest door or window, go straight to the piece in question, and straight out. It all takes a matter of minutes. I was in the middle of writing the book when I came downstairs one night and turned on the evening news to see a report of the theft of Edvard Munch's The Scream -- a theft whose MO was identical to what I'd just been writing...

In Crack Down, the book opens with Kate and her boyfriend Richard posing as car buyers to expose a fraud. The car they have "bought" is stolen, and a couple of nights later, Richard sees the car parked in the city centre. He still has the keys, so he reclaims the car but forgets to tell the police. Who of course stop him on the way home and refuse to believe his story, especially when they find a package of cocaine in the car. So they charge him with intent to supply drugs... I was just at this point in the book when some friends came round for dinner. One of them was a criminal defence solicitor, and she wanted to tell me what had happened to one of her clients. He was a car thief, and he'd stolen a car from the city centre. As he made his escape, he was stopped by the police who searched the car and found a package of drugs under the passenger seat. So they charged him with intent to supply drugs...

On a less light-hearted note, when I was writing The Wire in the Blood, I had a very uncomfortable experience. One of the characters in the book was called Kayleigh, a teenage girl who had gone missing. The police weren't taking her disappearance very seriously, believing her to be a runaway. Then I heard a story on the news about a young girl, called Kayleigh, who had gone missing, and her mother was complaining that the police weren't taking her disappearance seriously because they thought she was a runaway. Strange coincidence, I thought, and changed the character's name to Donna. I delivered the first draft to my editor, and one of the points she made for rewrite was that she didn't like the fact that Donna was found "offstage." She wanted me to write a scene where the reader was present at the discovery. I sat down one morning and wrote the scene, making it as immediate and powerful as I could. And when I came down for lunch, I heard on the radio news that Kayleigh had been found murdered that very morning. That really freaked me out.

IR: I've often been surprised by the number of crime writers who fly by the seat of their pants. In other words, when they start a book, they don't know how it will turn out. (This is perhaps one of the few times when I can be said to share something with P.D. James.) How much do you know before you start writing, and does the book always turn out as intended?

VM: I'm a ferocious outliner. I can't begin a book unless I know where it's going and how it gets there. I refine the story in my head over and over again before I'm ready to start, trying out all the possibilities I can imagine and discarding the ones that don't work for me. Before I start, I write quite a detailed synopsis and more or less stick to it. Along the way, I often come up with alternative methods of achieving something, but they don't take me far off course. I did once get to the end of a first draft and decided I had the wrong murderer and that another character made much more sense in that role. I was brassed off, because I thought I was going to have to go back and rewrite whole chunks of the book. But the only change I had to make was to write one extra scene which introduced the murderer fifty pages earlier. So my subconscious clearly knew better than I! where the book ought to be heading... But mostly, I end up where I expected to. That way, I can concentrate on getting the writing done before I get bored with the whole thing.

IR: How healthy is the crime novel right now, and can you offer a prognosis for its future?

VM: I don't think the crime novel has ever been healthier. The range of style and tone and subject matter seems to encompass almost everything imaginable, and it's hard not to feel optimistic about the genre. What's particularly exciting is the number of young writers choosing crime fiction; that virtually guarantees freshness and experimentation. I love reading first novels -- it keeps me on my toes to realise how much talent there is snapping at my heels.

IR: If you were to appear on "Oprah," what would you want the caption to say after your name: mystery writer? Scottish author? novelist? bon viveur...?

VM: International cultural icon, of course! Listen, if they put me on "Oprah," they can call me what the hell they like.

IR: Your house is on fire, and you can save only two books: one by yourself, one by another author. Which do you choose?

VM: The Distant Echo, which is the one I'm writing now. How depressing it would be to lose all I've written so far...

And The Chalet School in Exile, by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. It's my comfort blanket book and the original is out of print, whereas anything else I want to read I could replace relatively easily...

IR: What does the word "evil" mean to you?

VM: Teething nappies...

To be serious, though, I don't believe in the existence of some abstract force called evil. Some authors write about it as if it's a virus you can catch, or something you're born with, and that seems to me to let us all off the hook. Some individuals do terrible things to others, there's no denying that. But I believe such behaviour is a product of individual experience and social conditions. People who have damage done to them tend to pass that damage on, often intensifying it in the process. But that same person exposed to a different set of circumstances would act in very different ways. I believe in the possibility of personal redemption. But it's very hard to achieve, given the personal and societal barriers placed in its way. It remains, however, one of the reasons I am profoundly opposed to the death penalty.

IR: You wash up on a desert island. Which three items would you wish to find awaiting you? (No boats and outboard motors allowed.)

VM: A solar-powered computer preloaded with all my favourite games and word-processing software and a webcam feed from my kitchen so I could see my son growing up; a bottomless cask of 18-year-old Macallan; a guide to the flora and fauna of the region so I would know what I could safely eat.

Archived At Home Online Interviews:
Track 1:
Val McDermid, interviewed by Ian Rankin
Ian Rankin, interviewed by Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson, interviewed by Michael Connelly
Michael Connelly, interviewed by Laurie R. King
Laurie R. King, interviewed by Dana Stabenow
Dana Stabenow, interviewed by Jan Burke
Jan Burke, interviewed by T. Jefferson Parker
T. Jefferson Parker, interviewed by Harlan Coben
Harlan Coben, interviewed by Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman, interviewed by S.J. Rozan
S.J. Rozan, interviewed by Qiu Xiaolong
Qiu Xiaolong, interviewed by Cara Black
Cara Black, interviewed by Peter Lovesey
Peter Lovesey, interviewed by Anne Perry
Anne Perry, interviewed by Carole Nelson Douglas
Carole Nelson Douglas, interviewed by Nancy Pickard
Nancy Pickard, interviewed by Carolyn Hart
Carolyn Hart, interviewed by JoAnna Carl

Track 2:
Ken Bruen, interviewed by Reed Farrel Coleman
Reed Farrel Coleman, interviewed by Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott, interviewed by Theresa Schwegel
Theresa Schwegel, interviewed by Michael Koryta
Michael Koryta, interviewed by Steve Hamilton
Steve Hamilton, interviewed by William Kent Krueger

Track 3: At Home with Janet Rudolph
Reginald Hill

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