Val McDermid

The City Reads - Deckchair Interview

Interrogation room
Turning its hand to the art of interrogation, City Reads (for The Deckchair) put Val McDermid under the spotlight. She said she wouldn't break, but with a little good cop, bad cop action, she soon spilled the beans...

On the spark of a new crime novel:
All my books have more or less the same sort of genesis. Something intrigues me - a detail in a news story, an item on the radio, a throwaway line in a conversation. I go away and put the writer's secret weapon into action. The secret weapon? The two magic words: "What if?".

On series versus stand-alone novels:
Obviously a series novel takes less time in the planning phase because I already have a nexus of off-the-shelf characters. With stand-alone novels like A Place of Execution, I have to start right from square one, getting to know everybody from scratch.

On structure, form and narrative shape:
The shape of the books and the way the story unfolds [is] largely dictated by the stories themselves. I do like to try different kinds of books, partly to keep myself interested and partly to push myself harder as a writer.

What makes a good read:
What I look for in a book is interesting character development, a well told story and an atmospheric setting. Like a three-legged stool, I think a great novel needs all of those to be properly balanced.

On letting a finished book out into the public domain:
What I mostly feel is a sense of failure - I haven't managed to write the perfect book I'd dreamed of at the outset!

On what keeps a crime writer awake at night:
When you're writing, you're concentrating on technical stuff - does this sentence work? Is that the right adjective? - that does put a certain distance between you and the effect. It's not my books that give me nightmares - it's other people's!

Some material from this Q&A was taken from an interview on the HarperCollins web site (www.HarperCollins.co.uk) and from The Good Fiction Guide, ed. Jane Rogers, OUP, 2005.