Val McDermid

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Please welcome Val McDermid to Melbourne.

Val, and the audience here, I really enjoyed reading this book, and of course the way you set up the mystery of who is doing what with whom is part of that enjoyment. So were not going to spoil the experience of those who haven't read it yet but we can talk about many of the themes that come through. Is it the case, I think it is for you, that a crime novel isn't just a way of talking about particular deaths and a particular group of incidents, but it is a way of talking about how we live and what we make of life.

Val McDermid: Yes, I think the crime novel has transformed itself in the last 20 years. We've moved light years away from the old Agatha Christie style crossword puzzle. People still read the books because they want to see the mystery unravel as well, but the best of crime writing now is much more than that, it's a novel about place, it's a novel about society, but most of all I think it's a novel of character.

Ramona Koval: And how did it change, what made it change?

Val McDermid: I think in a funny kind of way what made it change was what happened to literary fiction. Certainly in the UK and in Europe and to a degree in America in the 1980s critical theory became very important in the world of literature, and it seems that literary novelists were more interested in the theory of writing rather than actually engaging with readers, and they lost the sense of telling stories that had a beginning and a middle and an end.

And I actually believe that human beings are hardwired for stories. I mean, when somebody says to you, 'What kind of day did you have?' You don't go, 'Well, the alarm clock went off at 7.15 and I leapt from bed and went straight to the bathroom,' you go, 'Well, it was okay until this really weird thing happened at the bus stop.' You know, we always pick on the anecdote, we tell it as a story, we form a narrative, and human beings made narratives before we had language. If you look at those ancient cave paintings in France, they are telling a story; look, there's your woolly mammoth and there's us chasing the woolly mammoth and there is us killing the woolly mammoth.

And so I think people crave that sense of narrative, and writers I think also want to engage with narrative. So when literary novels became the repository of something other than telling stories, the storytellers among us had to go someplace else, and genre fiction offered the perfect escape, if you like, for would-be writers who wanted to write proper stories. So I think a lot of us who maybe might have become literary novelists became crime writers because it gave us an opportunity to engage with telling stories that had a beginning, a middle and an end. And every great novel I think in history has had some mystery at the heart of it that is unravelled in the course of the telling.

Ramona Koval: So do you think you were born for telling these kinds of stories? Do you feel that there was a storyteller always there?

Val McDermid: I don't remember a time when I didn't want to tell stories and I didn't make stuff up in my head. I was an only child, so I spent a lot of time either on my own or with grown-ups doing completely incomprehensible things and having conversations that you couldn't understand. I grew very attached to storytelling very early on. My mother used to take me to the library before I could read. In fact I used to say that she was taking me to the labrador.

Ramona Koval: And there wasn't a dog there when you got there?

Val McDermid: No, but some would say I have been going to the dogs ever since. But I was very lucky because although I grew up in quite a poor working class background, when I was six years old we moved house to live opposite the central library and that to me was manna from heaven because that was where I went every day after school, I just read everything I could get my hands on. Of course being Scotland and being very Presbyterian and Protestant, you were allowed to take out four books at a time but two of them had to be non-fiction.

Ramona Koval: I think we had those rules here...

Val McDermid: Did you?

Ramona Koval: Yes, we did, people are nodding.

Val McDermid: Yes, heaven forfend you should have unmitigated pleasure, bury yourself in novels.

Ramona Koval: That's right. Do you remember what you were reading, what you liked to read?

Val McDermid: Like most people at that time, you read what was there on the shelves, so it was everything from the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, Enid Blyton, but one of my real early loves was the Chalet School books, and I learned a lot about life from the Chalet School books. In fact you could probably say the Chalet School books shaped my life it was indeed through a Chalet School book that I first discovered that writing was a job that you got paid money for, because one of the recurring characters, when she leaves school, goes on to write school stories and get paid for it. And I'm thinking, you get paid for telling lies, that's fantastic! And it also shaped my choice of where I went on to further education because the girls at the Chalet School went to one of three institutions; they went to the Sorbonne, which I knew I wasn't going to go to because my French just wasn't good enough, or they went to Oxford University or they went to the Kensington School of Needlework.

Ramona Koval: What a choice.

Val McDermid: You can see from the laughter in here that they knew as well as me that I wasn't going to the Kensington School of Needlework.

Ramona Koval: Well, the murder trail starts in and around Charlie's old Oxford college, and the thread here is the matter of class and the way it is delineated at that end of the scale, at the Oxford end, and one can't help but remember that I believe you were the first person from a Scottish state school ever admitted to Oxford University, is this true?

Val McDermid: Not to the university as a whole but to my college specifically.

Ramona Koval: And you actually dedicate the book to the memory of Mary Bennett who was principal of St Hilda's, the college you went to. So can we talk about those days...we talked about being a state school kid in Fife and suddenly you were at Oxford. How did you do that? Because even the language about Oxford is weird, it's about 'going up' to Oxford even though you're going down.

Val McDermid: 'Going up to read', yes.

Ramona Koval: What's that about?

Val McDermid: The heart of Scotland I grew up in, Fife, is very hermetic in some ways. You know we have the Firth of Tay in the north and the Firth of Forth in the south, Dundee to the north, Edinburgh to the south, but we are very much not of either of those cities. And for a long time it was quite difficult to get in and out of Fife until the road bridges were built in the '60s. So we became quite sort of inward looking and quite self-contained. Also there was a strong streak of political radicalism in Fife, and we kept to our own. And my school, if you are clever you went to Edinburgh or St Andrews, and if you weren't quite so clever you went to Dundee or Stirling, and then you came back to Fife and you spent the rest of your life living and working in Fife.

And all through my teens I felt like an outsider. I realise now that a large part of that was my sexuality but at the time that wasn't evident to me because there were no visible lesbians in my world, and I put it down to the fact that I wanted to be a writer, which was pretty weird in that environment because people like us don't be writers, people like us don't do a lot of things. And another one of them was go to Oxford. So I thought if I'm going to go to university outside Scotland, well, I might as well go to this one that is supposed to be the best because it is in the Chalet School books.

At that time there were only five women's colleges in Oxford and I chose St Hilda's because it had the prettiest brochure. I applied, I sat the entrance exam, I went for my interview, and they said they had never taken anyone from a Scottish state school before. And with the arrogance of 16 I just said, 'Well, it's about time you started, isn't it?' And so they accepted me and I was very, very young, I'd only just turned 17 when I went up to Oxford, partly because the Scottish system throws you out younger anyway but also because I'd skipped a year at high school because of a bizarre experiment by Fife County Council, which is another story...

Ramona Koval: What is that story?

Val McDermid: Well, they had this bizarre notion in the 1960s that if you are really bright you should have accelerated progress through the system, and so they went around all the feeder schools and took the top two or three kids from each class and sent them to high school a year early. But instead of interspersing us through the year they kept us in a separate group, they called us the E class, which was supposed to be E for 'early' but everybody said it's E for 'experiment'. So by the time we became dispersed through the school population, everybody knew who we were, we were the weirdos, we were the geeks.

And some of us did quite well. I think it instilled in some of us this kind of burning overachievement thing. I did okay out of it, so did Gordon Brown, but an awful lot of other people crashed and burned along the way and had their potential destroyed by this. So that was the real reason why I went to Oxford very young. Looking back at it now, I understand how much can they looked after me. They didn't just take me in from some strange background and extreme youth and then just let me get on with it, sink or swim, I actually can see now how much care was taken off me, that people were looking after me from a distance but not in a way that I felt patronised.

Ramona Koval: What did they do?

Val McDermid: They did things like I remember in my first year I never had any money, I was always skint, and I didn't want to go home for the holidays I wanted to stay in Oxford and read and just be absorbed by the place, and I really couldn't afford it. And so getting towards the end of term, Mary Bennett summoned me to her office one day and she said, 'I wonder Miss McDermid, if you might do me the most enormous favour? My husband and I, we like to go back to our house in Surrey during the vacation but the cats don't like to travel, so I wonder if you might be persuaded to stay in the principal's lodgings over the holidays and look after the cats?'

Ramona Koval: And you said?

Val McDermid: 'Yes, that would be fine. Okay, no problem, I can do favours like that anytime.' And so I think there was just generally a maternal eye kept on me that I wasn't always aware of at the time, as I said. It was a tremendous culture shock. The first problem that I had was the linguistic problem. [Speaks fast Scottish brogue].

Ramona Koval: So what did you have to do then?

Val McDermid: I had to learn to speak English, quite quickly.

Ramona Koval: And what kind of English? Did you have to pitch the accent that you were going for?

Val McDermid: I'm lucky, I've got a musical ear, so I'm quite good at picking up what I hear around me, so what I was hearing around me was Oxford, so I very quickly became adept at speaking Oxford English...

Ramona Koval: How does it sound?

Val McDermid: ...e-e-even to the point of having that slight Oxford stammer, and I very quickly learned to assimilate and in fact mostly you couldn't really tell.

Ramona Koval: And you passed.

Val McDermid: I passed, yes.

Ramona Koval: So does the old girl network apply these days, the old St Hilda's network?

Val McDermid: Yes, the Hilda-beasts still stay in touch, and when you find out that somebody has been at Hilda's then that immediately builds a bridge. People do each other favours. I have on occasion rung up people that I was not an undergraduate with but who were at St Hilda's and I needed some expertise that they had to offer and I have rung out of the blue and said, 'Hi, I was at St Hilda's in the '70s, I wonder if you could help me with this?' And people do, people are very generous and very helpful.

Ramona Koval: You were actually visiting St Hilda's when you saw a wedding party in the grounds of St Hilda's and recognised the bride as someone you used to babysit, and that was the germ for this book.

Val McDermid: It was, yes, every summer St Hilda's has a conference on crime and mystery fiction, nothing whatsoever to do with the college, it just happens to be the venue for this, but I always get pulled into this because I am the alumna. I was taking some time off in the afternoon, I was just lazing by the river, and this wedding party arrived. Someone had said there was a marquee in the grounds and there was going to be a wedding, and the bride and the bridegroom came by, the bride looking radiant and the bridegroom looking very pleased with himself.

And then the mother and the father of the bride came by and I recognised one of my old tutors and I thought if that's her than that must be her daughter who I used to babysit for, what a strange coincidence. And in the way of writers everywhere, those kind of events are the things that set your mind ticking over, and you take the 'what if' out of the toolbox and start playing with it; what if this, what if that, what if the circumstances had been different of these two people seeing each other and meeting each other again after 15 years or however long. And by the end of the weekend I had the bare bones of what has become Trick of the Dark. And I then spent the next 12 years trying to figure out how to tell the story.

Ramona Koval: Twelve years? Why so long do you think?

Val McDermid: Because I couldn't find the structure. All the time there's lots of half baked ideas floating around in the back of my head, and generally what takes them from being a half formed idea to being the next book is finding the way to tell that story, and that's at the heart of it, I always start with story because the story has to be there at the heart of the book because if you don't entertain your readers, anything else is a waste of time because they're not going to read the book if they're bored.

Ramona Koval: You mentioned that structure idea and I just wanted to talk a little bit about one aspect of the book. One of the characters in the book is writing a memoir and she has to explain things to the reader of her memoir, and I thought it was a very clever way of getting back-story going in the book because, it's strange, sometimes you see a character and the character is just remembering, you know, 'she remembered the time when this happened and that happened' and then she just tells this great big complicated story and you think why would she be telling herself this huge story when she was there? But this is a fantastic way you've got, I think...is that what was supposed to do, to solve that problem?

Val McDermid: That was what took so long, to figure out how we could get that back-story in without it being just great wodges...it was exactly that thing of why would Jay be telling this story? For a while I started playing with this idea and is alternating first person narrative with third person narrative, and a stumbling block I kept coming back to was why would Jay be telling this story, and how do we know it's true or how do we know it's unreliable? Because one of the things at the heart of this book is that basically everybody is telling you lies at one point or another. The question for the reader is which are the lies and which are the truths, and when is this character lying to me and when they telling me the truth?

So where's the memoir, the way that I've introduced the memoir into the book, you know that Jay is not telling you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because whenever we tell an anecdote we always polish it up, don't we, we make ourselves be a little bit more intelligent or a little more glamorous or a little more coherent than we in fact are. And so when people are writing biography they always skew things very slightly to make themselves look better. So we know that she is doing this but we don't know which of the things that she is talking to us about our lives and which are just little swivels on the truth and which are just straight down the middle truths.

Ramona Koval: So what was the eureka moment that you thought, ah, this is the way to solve it? Was it something you dreamt? How did it come across?

Val McDermid: No, the kind of eureka moment was reading Jackie Kay's book Trumpet, and Jackie uses several different narrative forms within that book to tell her story, and that was kind of the seed of thinking I could use something like this, not exactly like this but I could use something like this. And they went away and I started thinking about that. And then the next building blocks that went on top of that idea was the great success a couple of years ago of 'misery memoirs', they were everywhere, everyone had some bloody awful childhood to tell us about, and I thought this would be the perfect time for somebody who wanted to get on the bandwagon, as it were, and who had something to tell and who had a bit of a public profile to write a misery memoir. And so it all kind of came together over that.

Ramona Koval: Do you find that all the books you read, you're kind of looking at the skeleton behind the book as well because you are a writer and you want to know how they've achieved whatever this is?

Val McDermid: A lot of the time I think, yes. If you're serious about your craft as a writer, I think it takes a lot of your pleasure out of life as a reader because every book I'm reading, I'm either looking at the flaws in it and going 'I can't believe they did that' or 'I can't believe their editor didn't pick that up', or else I'm looking at something that's been very cleverly done and very beautifully done and thinking that's really good, I've got to remember how she did that, or I've got to remember how he put that together so that if I ever need to know that, there it is. I mean, that's how you become a better writer, is becoming a better reader. But sometimes I just long to be able to lie on the beach and just lose myself in a book and not be going 'oh that's really clever'.

Ramona Koval: Obviously reading is part of writing, research is a big part of writing too, and your character is this forensics profiler, a psychiatric forensics profiler. What do they do? How do they operate?

Val McDermid: In the UK we have gone down a slightly different route than the Americans in terms of profiling, they train up police officers and FBI agents in the art of behavioural science. But in the UK we tend to use practising psychiatrists and psychologists, so that's police work with people whose day job is working in secure mental hospitals with people who have personality disorders or some kind of mental dysfunction who need to be locked away from the rest of us. So most of the people who do profiling in the UK are also clinicians, so they sit down with the police and they apply their clinical experience to the facts of the cases that have been put before them and draw conclusions from what they're presented with.

Ramona Koval: So how do you go about...do you have a range of the psychiatrists that you can call on? Are they old St Hilda girls?

Val McDermid: I have a guy that I go to who was for many years a practising clinical psychologist in one of the UK's most serious secure hospitals. He now is an academic but he still does police profiling, and he is very helpful to me. I generally run things past him and ask if something is psychologically credible, and he will go, 'Yes, but you could tweak it a little bit like this.' Sometimes he says, 'Yes, they would do that, but then...' and then he goes into some completely extreme place, and I think I don't need to go there. People think some of my books are violent but believe me, what's out there in the wild is way, way worse.

The funny thing about him is that three or four Tony Hill books back he said to me, 'Could you stop mentioning me in the acknowledgments.' And I said, 'Why is that? Is this causing you a problem with your academic colleagues or your police colleagues?' He said, 'No, it's just that with Tony Hill being impotent I get fed up with people coming up to me and saying, so, you can't get it up then.'

Ramona Koval: Well, you mentioned just now that what's out there in the wild would make the hair on the back of our necks stand up, and of course in Agatha Christie's day a good murder usually involved a neat bullet hole to the centre of the forehead, but now, 50 years on, writers seem to be compelled to go to extremes to describe all of the different ways people are tortured and murdered. Jessica Mann, the crime writer and critic for the Literary Review magazine said she'd had enough of books in which women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up, tied down, raped, et cetera, et cetera, and she wasn't going to review them anymore. What do you think of that stance?

Val McDermid: I find, like all blanket generalisations, it begs an awful lot of questions and leaves an awful lot of things unanswered. I write some books that deal very directly with violence and the nature of violence and what it is and what it does, and that's because the nature of those books it seems to me demand that you confront the nature of violence and what it is and what it does and how it contaminates the lives it comes into contact with. And also with the Tony Hill books, which is where my most direct writing tends to come, I'm writing about a profiler who reads the scene of the crime and draws conclusions from it. To not tell the reader what he is looking at, what he's seeing, what he's comprehending, would seem to me to be, in the very least, perverse.

I also think that sometimes we treat to murder almost like a parlour game, and when I wrote the Tony Hill books I wanted them not to be a game, I wanted to disturb people. If you read those books and you're not disturbed, then you probably need professional help. But there is a line, and I'm very clear in my own mind where that line is, between conveying what needs to be conveyed and as economically as possible, and treating it as a kind of gore fest, almost a kind of pornography of violence. And there are writers who I think go way over the score and whose books I will not read, but that's my choice and I think that's a decision we all have to make.

As I say, some people I know what to read my Tony Hill books because they find them too disturbing, but I will defend really the importance of writing that kind of direct confrontational book. It is not by any means the sum total of what I do. I mean, all my standard ones are pretty bloodless really. The Kate Brannigans, Lindsay Gordons, my earlier work, again, pretty bloodless. And I find it fascinating that because one tranche of my work deals very directly with this, I have become the poster girl for violent women writers, and it strikes me as being completely bizarre, but there you go.

Ramona Koval: So you know where the line is and you don't cross it...do you sometimes cross it and then you uncross it when you're editing yourself? How do you think about that? What do you think is a no-go area, how do you know when to stop?

Val McDermid: It's hard to say what's a no-go area because it's always a bit context, and so when I'm writing I'm kind of examining every sentence, I'm saying have I gone far enough, does the reader now know what they need to know, is it necessary to tell them anymore than this? There's a passage, for example, in the book The Wire in the Blood and people often come up to me and say, 'That was one of the most awful things I've ever read,' and it's like one paragraph. It's what your mind has done with that one paragraph, it's what your brain has injected into the spaces between the sentences that his horrific. What is actually on the page is not very much, and so often I think that happens. If you do it well, people think that you have said a lot more than you have said. But for me it's all about trying to maintain that judgement as I'm writing, and obviously as you go back over things and you revise things you do ask yourself those questions. And the next phase of course is that my editor looks at it and if he thinks I've stepped over the line, which he doesn't generally, but if he does then he'll say, 'Do you really want to go this far?

Ramona Koval: So what do you do with all this other stuff in your head that you haven't written because you think it's too horrible to write or it's too pornographic or it is too much?

Val McDermid: I try not to think about it.

Ramona Koval: No, but it's in there, it's in your head, and you're going back again to the scenes of the crimes, I suppose...what do you do with that at night, how do you get it out of your head or how do you not feel disturbed.

Val McDermid: I think the essence of it is that when I'm writing I'm in control, I know what's happening, nothing happens without my permission, without my consent. So when I close the office door at night I know nobody is going to die before breakfast and nothing bad is going to happen to anybody without my say-so. It's an entirely different experience when I'm reading somebody else's work, that's when I have the nightmares, it's not my work that scares me it's other people because I don't know what's going to come next, I don't know if there's going to be the shadowy figure behind the door with a blunt instrument.

So when I'm reading other people's work I get much more unsettled than anything that I'm doing...and also the other thing is when I'm writing it, everything is mediated by technique. You're thinking, is that the right adjective, should I have a new paragraph now, should I end this section here, where do I leave it so that the audience is kept dangling, how do I stop this scene, how far do I have to go? So all those things are going on in my head which kind of come between me and the immediacy of what's on the page. But when I'm reading there's nothing between you and the page, it's right there in front of you, and if the writer has done their job you're caught up in it and you can't not turn the page, you can't turn the lights out until your eyes are closing and the book has smashed into your face at two o'clock in the morning, so I think there's a different relationship to the text.

Ramona Koval: So you know that's what the readers are going to do...

Val McDermid: Well, I hope that's what they're going to do.

Ramona Koval: Well, you hope that because you've actually designed your book to do that because that is part of the architecture of the book. Do you sometimes have to move things a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right...I mean, if you think about the story as a line...that should happen a bit earlier, or I could end off the chapter here, or...

Val McDermid: I don't know how much of that is conscious. This is my 24th novel, I think there is a base level of technique that is now just in place that covers a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff that I would spend a lot more time thinking about in the earlier stages before I had a more developed technique. So I think a lot of the underpinnings are almost instinctive now, so I can fiddle about with the stuff on the top, put the grace notes in.

Ramona Koval: It's good to be old enough to think that you know what you're doing, don't you think?

Val McDermid: I don't know that I entirely know what I'm doing, I know what I'm doing with some of it, but firmly the whole joy of writing and doing this kind of thing, particularly in this area of the genre, is the possibilities, of challenge, of trying to grow as a writer, trying with every book to do something better or to do something different to what I've done before. It's been very exciting to be a crime writer in the last 20 years for those reasons because the genre has become so much more expansive, so much more challenging. Every year I read new writers, it is one of the things I do as part of the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival every year in the UK, I generally chair the new writers' panel, which means I have to go off and read all the first novels. And that is fascinating, to see what people are doing and to feel the chill wind of these young talents at your shoulder, that keeps driving you forward as well. I think if you really care about writing and what you do then you have to be like a shark, don't you, you have to keep moving forward. I don't want to write the same book every time I'm on the starting blocks, I wanted to be different, I wanted to somehow reflect the excitement in my head.

Ramona Koval: Back to St Hilda's College and the setting of this book, and it is a coming of age story in one sense, it is also coming out story or several coming out stories. Charlie is a lesbian and Jay is too..

Val McDermid: The whole book is chock-full of lesbians, frankly.

Ramona Koval: There's a lot of lesbians in the book...

Val McDermid: There is basically a lesbian in every bite.

Ramona Koval: So tell me about the idea of identity politics, I suppose, and writing in this genre, how important is it to you? We said when we first had this conversation at the beginning about the function of the crime novel now is to tell a bigger story, the sociology of the time as well.

Val McDermid: Yes, I think I've got the advantage, in a sense, of being a lesbian, it gives me an extra string to my bow. This is probably the most lesbian novel I've ever written, more so even than the Lindsay Gordon books where the protagonist is gay. I didn't do it for any political reason. I mean, there is politics in the book obviously, there is politics in everything that I write, but the reason why there are so many lesbians in this book is a very simple one and it comes right back to that idea of story. This is a story that works because the relationships within it are triangular, there are lots of triangles that take different shapes and forms in the course of the book, and they just wouldn't work with heterosexual relationships. I was lucky that being a lesbian I could actually write about these relationships with a degree of confidence that I was getting it right.

Ramona Koval: Why do you think the triangle wouldn't work with a heterosexual relationship.

Val McDermid: Because there is always somebody left out.

Ramona Koval: Is that so?

Val McDermid: I think so...

Ramona Koval: So everybody's 'in' in a lesbian triangle?

Val McDermid: Well, theoretically yes.

Ramona Koval: How come?

Val McDermid: You have the chain that goes around the triangle: A loves B loves C loves A. It's slightly harder to do that in heterosexual triangles if you're trying to have them overlapping and different people...

Ramona Koval: So it's a mathematical problem.

Val McDermid: It is kind of, yes. And in order for the complicated relationship manoeuvrings at the heart of this novel to work, that was the only way I could think of to make them work. I think also the climate has changed to make it possible to write a book like this. If I'd written a book like this 20 years ago it wouldn't have been published by a mainstream publisher, it just wouldn't have, but the world has changed. I was talking about this with Sarah Waters last year and we were doing a program about Radclyffe Hall for the radio, and Sarah was saying she thinks it's because the whole of British society has kind of loosened up. We have writers coming through like Zadie Smith and Monica Ali and we have just a much more open attitude to the world and we're not scared any more, and that makes it possible to write a book like this.

Ramona Koval: But it's very interesting for someone who isn't a lesbian and isn't involved in the world of lesbianism that all the questions that one has in one's head about how do you know when you are a kid and what is it like to be in a place where everyone is going to disapprove of you but you have to find out who you are. This is very important to have in mainstream books.

Val McDermid: Yes, I think it is. Although this book is about lesbians, it's a book that's not about the angst of coming out, it's not about persecution, it's not about any of those things, it's about a group of women who happened to be lesbians who are caught up in this thing. Whenever I have written about lesbians and gay people I've always written about them as part of the landscape. I'm not interested in writing special [unclear], I'm not interested in living in a ghetto so why would I want to write in a ghetto, so I've always tried to reflect the way that people live within the rest of society. And that to me seems to be that 99% of what we do is exactly the same as everybody else. You know, I don't have a particularly lesbian way of going to the supermarket, I don't wash my clothes in a particularly dykey way...well, I don't think I do anyway. In fact most of our lives overlap far more than people imagine they do, and one of the things you hope when you write a book like this is that when people read this they will actually realise that what they perceive as otherness is actually mostly sameness.

Ramona Koval: Yes. The novel looks at one character and we don't know in the book whether this is a person who is a psychotic serial killer or someone who is just a bit unlucky.

Val McDermid: Or lucky.

Ramona Koval: Or lucky even. Or someone around whom unfortunate things happen. I just wonder, is there such a thing as bad luck when it comes to death?

Val McDermid: I think there probably is. I think we all know people that just seem to like to stagger from one really bad piece of luck to another, and there is no real reason for it, you can't pinpoint...

Ramona Koval: It's not their personality or..?

Val McDermid: No, you can't pinpoint any causality...

Ramona Koval: But they invite destruction or...

Val McDermid: There does seem to be...I'm sure you know people like that, they come in and something else has happened to them and you just go 'I can't believe that', you know, the kind of people to whom seriously awful things happen. In the space of the same year they lose their partner and their kids and their parent, you know, things like that. And you just go, my God, how can you take this?

Ramona Koval: And then is there a part of your brain that goes click, click, click?

Val McDermid: Of course, and that is the somewhat despicable aspect of the writer of fiction. You cannibalise your own life but you cannibalise every life around you, and when these things happen, the human being in you is sitting there genuinely sympathising, genuinely being supportive and saying 'I feel your pain', but the writer in you is going 'That's fantastic, I can use this'. And then six years later when you're writing a character or writing a particular scene, you flick back through the databank in your brain and you remember that afternoon and you remember what your friend or your cousin or your partner said, and you think yes, that's what I need to draw on for this scene.

Ramona Koval: So this idea that there is justice in the world and the philosophy of justice, this is important in this book too because, as I said at the beginning, Charlie has basically made a report that she thought was fair and it was the case that a particular person did not commit a murder but went on to commit some murders, and then there's the whole question there about what is the right thing to do in that situation.

Val McDermid: I think that if there is a theme that runs through my standalone novels it is this notion of the gap between justice and the law, that so often when the law runs its course we are left as spectators thinking that doesn't feel right, that doesn't feel fair, somehow we haven't captured the essence of what needed to be done here. And so a lot of those books I suppose deal with how we negotiate that gap, how we mitigate it, how we cross it and how we sometimes have to take the law into our own hands, as people see it, to achieve a sense of justice.

Ramona Koval: So do you ever get readers coming up saying that they are unhappy with the way you'd set that out, that they wanted this person to get the [unclear] rewards?

Val McDermid: Sometimes people do get a little unhappy about the way the books end, that's true, and I think sometimes people don't always read enough into the way that a book ends, they sometimes don't always think through where we've got to at the end of the book.

Ramona Koval: But you do, and that's the thing.

Val McDermid: Well, it's my job.

Ramona Koval: It is your job, and you do it so well.

Val McDermid: Thank you

Ramona Koval: Well, that's The Book Show for today and this week. My thanks to Val McDermid, her latest book is Trick of the Dark, it is published by Little Brown. It's been a great pleasure to speak with you again Val, and to have you here at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Publications

Title: Trick of the Dark

Author: Val McDermid

Publisher: Little Brown