Val McDermid (ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards) Interview
Running up to the glittering ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards will be six weeks of the greatest of crime dramas. Each week will begin with a specially commissioned documentary profiling the six best crime writers working today. The six authors who have been chosen are Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, PD James, Lynda La Plante, Val McDermid and Ruth Rendell. Viewers of ITV3 will then be able to vote between these authors to select the author who will win the first ITV3 Award for Classic TV Crime Drama.
"I was absolutely delighted to be nominated for the Crime Thriller Awards, when you look at the quality of the shortlist I think anyone would be proud to be featured on it. Everybody on that list is someone whose work I have been familiar with and enjoyed for a very long time. Of all the writers, I would say the ones that have most had an influence or an impact on my own work would be… I would say Lynda La Plante’s Jane Tennison was a big influence on me in terms of the creation of a strong female lead character. I’d also say Ruth Rendell has been a huge influence on me as well, mostly for the Barbara Vine novels, but also because she writes many different styles of books. I think she has blazed a trail there that the rest of us have followed.
I suppose I feel that personally I write right across the genre; so I write dark psychological thrillers, novels about the impact that the past has on the present and the way that the past casts a long shadow, private eye novels. I also write what are essentially radical lesbian feminist cosies. So whatever your taste in crime fiction you can probably find something that you are going to enjoy in my work. My new book is a standalone novel, but is set in the present day, but it moves back in time to 1984 and ’85 during the miners’ strikes. It’s set in Fife where I grew up and it is about a couple of cold cases that intersect in an unexpected way.
I think crime thrillers are so popular because increasingly we live in a fragmented world in which we are much more geographically and economically mobile. We don’t necessarily live close to our families anymore so we don’t have that sense of belonging to a tight unit. So when we read stories in the press and see things on the TV about scary things happening out there we can often feel quite isolated and vulnerable. One of the most important things about a crime novel, amongst the many things it does accomplish, it that it gives you a sense of comfort. It’s a safe place to be scared if you like. It’s a place where we can put our fears and our worries and actually come out the end of it, although terrible things have happened, and know that there is a Tony Hill or an Inspector Wexford there to put it right. I think people also like the crime novel because it challenges them - it challenges them intellectually and they can try to get to the solution or try to figure out where a book is going to go ahead of the writer. That’s always a fun thing to do.
To be perfectly honest, whatever happens out there in the wild is far, far worse than anything that myself or my colleagues come up with. I think if it is out there we ought to be able to deal with it. We ought to be able to go there and look at it as a society and figure out what our reactions to this are. I’ve never seen any benefit in hiding your head in the sand from what happens in the real world. Drama is a very good way to explore these sorts of issues because in drama you can say the things you couldn’t otherwise say and think the unthinkable where you perhaps can’t where there are real life cases involved. The case in point was with the last series of Wire in the Blood, where we had a case involving a missing child and there was a lot of discussion as to whether we should be doing that in the wake of the Madeline McCann case. But I think having a drama about that allows you to explore the issues in a way which you can’t explore something that is happening as a live case at the time because of people’s sensibilities around that, and also because you might, unwittingly, be causing more grief and pain to the people involved."
