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Val McDermid has described the current "golden age" of crime fiction with many debut writers pushing the form, as well as discussing how gender can inform writing around violence.
In the session, "Val McDermid: A Life in Writing" at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday evening (22nd August), the novelist told interviewer Peggy Hughes how the perspective on crime writing has changed in the past 40 years and how she was inspired to give victims a voice in fiction.
McDermid told the audience at the Baillie Gifford Sculpture Court in Edinburgh: "We’re lucky to be in the period of writing we are in terms of crime fiction generally, not just in Scottish crime fiction, but I think we’re in a real golden age —there’s so much good stuff out there, it’s astonishing. I’ve been doing the New Blood at the Harrogate Crime Festival so every year for the past 20 years I choose a new writer to give them a platform so I can talk to them, and honestly apart from it being a great opportunity to push them under a bus, it’s been eye-opening for me to see new crime writers doing different things with the form, pushing the envelope and making different approaches."
The author added: "When I started out, all crime fiction in the UK pretty much was set in the Home Counties."
Remembering her first time at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 1993, she believes crime writing is viewed with more respect. "For many years the idea persisted that crime fiction was just holiday reading," she told attendees. "That it was inferior or throwaway. That’s something that has definitely changed in my life as a writer — increasingly the form is taken seriously and people realise it’s not throwaway fiction but the place you have to go to see how we live now."
McDermid also discussed the complexity of writing about violence in a realistic and sensitive way. "When I’m writing the directly violent things it’s treading the line between directly what people need to know to get a sense of this and what’s too much," she said. "I think it’s important to write honestly about what violence is and what it does and how it contaminates the lives of everyone who comes into contact with it. it’s uncomfortable at times and it’s walking the line between the context of the book and how it ripples out in all directions without being gratuitous about it, it’s a difficult thing to do and I do spend a lot of time trying to get that right. it’s important to contextualise violence, to give victims proper characters, they’re not just cardboard cut-outs."
The author described how she found some previous crime novels reductive in regards to victims. She said: "What sent me down this road I think was in the 1990s there was a whole slew of books coming out of America where the victims were just cardboard cut-outs, they were blondes who were there to be raped repeatedly and strewn around the highways of America. And I found that really uncomfortable and distasteful and unpleasant and I determined I was not going to write that sort of nonsense.
"So for me it was important that the victims were going to have a hinterland, get a sense of who they were and the lives they were going to get torn out of."
McDermid also believes that the female experience of violence informs the writing of it. "I think we [women] do write about violence in a different way to men and the reason for that is relatively straightforward, we’re all brought up as wee lasses told of the risks life has for us... it’s a big dangerous world out there and you’re vulnerable.
"I don’t think there’s a woman who hasn’t walked down a dark street at night and heard a noise behind them and flashed forward to all the terrible things that could happen to them in the next 10 minutes. It’s the way we live in the world — so when we write about violence we write about it from the inside as something happening to us whereas men write about it as something observed, that’s a gross generalisation, but that’s broadly speaking the difference."