When the restaurant in the lobby of Val McDermid's very ritzy
midtown hotel proved too noisy for taping our interview, she invited me up to
what has to be the whitest hotel room I've ever seen, a room that could make
even your better hospital clinics look dark and gloomy. A discarded paperback
mystery, by one of the genre's leading writers, lay on her bed; McDermid
explained that it was the only thing in the airport bookstore she could find
that she hadn't read already, and that it had been dreadful. "You'd think [so-
and-so] would know how to tell a story by now," she protested, pointing out
egregious flaws in the book's setting and plot. Those types of criticisms aren't
likely to be lodged against A Place of Execution, a grim tale of the investigation of a teenage girl's murder set
in a remote English village in the early 1960s. Her attention to detail, both in
police procedure and psychological characterizations, is stunning, and as
McDermid carefully pulls the rug out from under the reader's feet in the last
third, she firmly establishes her place in the top echelons of contemporary
crime fiction.
RH: You write three different mystery series, but A Place of
Execution is a stand alone. How did you end up writing outside
your series work?
VMcD: Different kinds of stories demand different turns,
different voices, different kinds of investigation. A book takes quite a
long time before I'm ready to write it. It can be two or three years
for me getting the first idea; I play around with it and get more
information about it, talk to people who know about the general
subject area I'm interested in. Gradually, a kind of story develops,
and I know pretty early on whether it's a story that will fit one of
the characters I already have, or whether I need to branch out in a
new direction. When I wrote The Mermaids Singing, for
example, I didn't intend that to be the start of another series. It was
planned initially as a stand alone, but when I got to the end, I was so
hooked up with Carol Jordan and Tony Hill that I wanted to see what
happened to them next. And I also came up with a story that was a
perfect Tony Hill story.
RH: How early on in the writing process do you know that the
solution to the crime is going to shift the story into the direction that
it ends up taking?
VMcD: By the time I start to write the book, I have a very
clear idea of where it's going. I write quite detailed synopses. I tend
to plot quite complexly, and I find that if I don' t map it out for
myself, I just get hopelessly lost and all the climaxes clump together
and all the sort of dry bits clump together. So when I start I know
pretty much every main plot point along the way.
Sometimes, I find that I've made a mistake and I get to the end of
the book and I think, "This is not right." With one book, I actually got
to the end and realized that the murderer was, in fact, not the
murderer. It was too obvious. It lacked subtlety. It wasn't
satisfying to me. There was another candidate who, I realized, would
do equally well, if I could show that character's motivation. And I
thought, "Oh, shit, I'm going to have to go back and change
everything." But when I went back and looked at it, my
subconscious had known what I was doing better than my conscious
mind, because I didn't have to change a thing. All I had to do was
put a scene into the book introducing this character earlier than I
had before.
RH: The novel is set in 1963, a period recent enough that plenty of
readers will know whether you got it right.
VMcD: Right. I was eight years old in 1963, so my memories
of 1963 are what sweets I was eating and what comics I was reading,
which is not desperately helpful when you're trying to create a social
picture. I was lucky because one of my former neighbors used to be
a police officer in the Lancashire police force in the 1960s. He was
able to talk to me about what life was like for the police then, both in
terms of the practical nuts and bolts of policing and the kinds of
relationships there were between ranks, the social expectations there
were of police officers, that sort of thing. We sat down one day with
a bottle of whiskey and worked our way down the bottle and as he
had more whiskey, he became more forthcoming. By the end of that,
I had a pretty good idea of what life was like policing then. He also
gave me a couple of his notebooks from that period, so I could
actually flip through and see day to day what kinds of things he was
doing.
The rest of it came from reading newspapers. I went back and
looked at all kinds of newspapers, national newspapers and local
newspapers, and just read what kinds of stories were in the news,
what was being reported, how it was reported, what movies were
coming out, what bands were on the charts, all that sort of stuff. Old
newspapers are a great source of social information--even the
adverts are telling you what kinds of washing machines people were
buying and how much you'd pay for a car and how much a house
was.
RH: The Moors Murders appear throughout the book as a subtext,
which may resonate more for your British audience. Some American
readers, especially perhaps younger readers, might not know about
that case.
VMcD: When I started planning out the book, the resonance
of the Moors Murders hadn't occurred to me at all. I was concerned
primarily with telling the story, especially with telling the first part
in the true crime narrative, and making it appear as if this entirely
fictitious case was real. But I found myself in the position of having
a book that was very specifically in time and place, so I couldn't
ignore the reality that was going on in the background.
I didn't want to make too big a thing of it for people who didn't
know, but I wanted the resonances to be there for the people who
did know. It was a case that changed the way we looked at
ourselves in Britain, an end of innocence, if you like.
RH: There are a couple of points in that first section where I had a
chuckle of recognition at some sentences that are very much in the
"true crime" style, particulary the foreboding at the end of some
chapters.
VMcD: It was quite a challenge to write the first section of the
book in a style that would be clearly, in some respects, a true crime
style but also allow me to write stylistically the way I wanted to.
Trying to marry those two things together was quite difficult, but I
drew upon my own experience as a journalist, writing that kind of
factual reporting.
For example, the way you bring in real events in a true crime book is
very different from how you do it in fiction. There's a chapter that
begins somewhere like, the Beatles were topping the charts, the
Russians were doing this, and such and such was happening
meanwhile in Scardale. If you were writing in what was meant to be
a fictional narrative, you'd find a different way of doing that.
RH: Have you been interested in doing a true crime book?
VMcD: Not really. I've written one nonfiction book, based on a
series of interviews with real women private eyes, called A
Suitable Job for a Woman. The trouble with the truth is it's not
neat. It's not organized in the way you would like it. Things don't
turn out the way you want them to and you get loose ends that are
awkward and uncomfortable and things that aren't resolved, and I
find that quite frustrating. And I have suspicions about a lot of true
crime in that an awful lot of it is speculative. You can't know what
was going on in people's heads. You can't know what was going on in
the victim's head because they're dead. They can't tell you. You
can't know really what was going on in the criminal's head because
you're either speculating or you're going by what they tell you,
which is usually self-serving.
RH: As a British mystery writer, what's it like to try to build an
American readership?
VMcD: I think it's harder for British authors to break out
here. There is a strong American mystery readership that likes the
notion of an England where there's honey sold for tea. They don't
really want to hear about urban realism in the UK because it
interferes with the fantasies. But there are a lot of other readers out
there who like a different kind of fiction, and the exciting thing about
crime fiction, certainly in the UK, is that it's attracting readers now
from a much wider pool. It used to be that only mystery readers
read mysteries. Now, there's much more crossover, and people who
read a lot of literary fiction often read what they regard as the
leading edge of crime fiction, authors with a strong sense of social
criticism and social realism like Joolz Denby, Nicholas Blincoe, and
Stephen Booth. [Because of writers like that,] we've busted the
boundaries in the UK, we're outside that narrow confine of being
genre writers that no one but genre readers will read.
RH: At the same time, many "literary" writers have been writing
books that could be marketed as mysteries.
VMcD: One of the terribly amusing things about literary
writers trying to steal our clothes like that is that some of them write
well, but they can't actually plot a mystery. It's not as easy as it
looks. They've never learned how you work within the constraints
and how you use the limitations to work for you to confound your
readers and to take them to places they don't expect to be taken.
What I find quite interesting with new British and even new Scottish
writers, is that they're writing work that has real literary merit, but
because they've started out in the mystery ghetto, if you like,
they've learned basic craft skills that some literary writers just don't
have because they've never had those constraints.
If your plot doesn't work, it doesn't matter, really, how powerful
your characterization, your sense of place, or the themes you're
writing about are. Mystery readers will complain if you lose them in
the middle or if your story goes off rambling. It's frustrating to read
a story that gets away from the author because it's very hard to hang
in there and find something to cling onto to get you through the
book. That's not to say that the crime novel at its best is not also a
novel of character, because it is, but you come to it with a different
set of expectations, and if the story doesn't hold together, then the
chances are it's not going to find a big readership.
RH: Have you thought about or wanted to do a story in the United
States?
VMcD: I think it's very difficult. For most Brits, when we
first come to America, because we've seen the movies and TV shows,
we step off the plane and we think we know where we are. We
think we know this place, that it's somewhat familiar, not strange
and not terribly foreign. But the more time you spend in America,
the more you realize how very, very different we are.
The only way I could write a book set in America would be if my protagonist
were British and coming into America, so I'd be writing from the point of view
of someone who's outside. But even so, it would be very difficult to set a book
in America that had an authentic feel. There's all sorts of things, just simple
things, like speech rhythms. And I know from experience... when American
writers set their books in Britain and get stuff wrong, it just drives me crazy.
There's certain American writers who have set their books in Britain, but I've
had to start reading them as if they were science fiction, as if they're set in a
parallel universe. I have a strong feeling that Brits who set their books in
America probably provoke the same response in Americans, where they
think, "Boy, they just don't get it."
