Val McDermid with Murder on her Mind
Val McDermid has been writing books for a good long time – and for no apparent reason I had not read any of them until very recently. I picked up The Distant Echo, the first in her Karen Pirie series, simply because I was looking for an excuse to go to Scotland, even in my imagination with a book. And there I was, in Fife, where 25 years ago a young girl was murdered, the body discovered by four young men who were never proved either guilty or innocent – until Karen Pirie investigates the cold case and discovers the truth.
In a recent interview Val McDermid suggested that, “The consolation of crime fiction for the reader is that “although terrible things happen, at the end there is some sort of resolution”. The value of crime fiction for the writer is slightly different, “People can read these books and be afraid but in a safe way … and that I suppose gives you the freedom to explore other things in the book … You can write about politics, you can write about relationships, you can write about landscape, you can write about whatever you want to write about and frame it in this shape.”
In the same Guardian interview Val McDermid says she almost always “has murder on her mind”. She says, quite frequently a pleasant weekend away will turn her thoughts to homicide. There was the time when she spotted a wedding party … and, “by the end of the afternoon it seemed to me that the logical thing that was going to have to happen was that the bridegroom would be dead by bedtime. And by the end of the weekend I had the basic shape of the story in my head.”
The second book in the Karen Pirie series is A Darker Domain, and begins in 1984 during the national miner’s strike, a tough time for all involved. Twenty-five years later a discovery is made that may help solve the mystery of a kidnapping, and the fate of a man who disappeared during the strike. Again, it is DI Karen Pirie who is in charge, and again a cold case is closed after a long and difficult investigation.
On a recent holiday with her partner, Val McDermid reveals, “In France you can moor up anywhere, and in order to facilitate this they give you five sharpened steel stakes, about two foot long, and a big hammer. And I’m looking at this and thinking, isn’t that a great murder weapon? And we’re cruising through wooded banks with no access from the road. And I’m saying to my partner, ‘This is a perfect murder here …’ by this time my partner is inching away from me. So, we were on this lovely romantic holiday, and my thoughts turned to murrrder.”
Val McDermid has written dozens of books over the past three decades, and created a cast of characters who people four mystery series and several other novels. I am more than delighted that I liked the first two books in the Karen Pirie series and have a winter’s reading ahead, with all of the Val McDermid books I somehow missed!