Crime fiction — more than sensationalism?

Val McDermid’s perspective as a woman is key to her ability to write crime fiction, but the genre is more than it seems, she tells Declan Burke.

The Retribution. Val McDermid. Little, Brown, €25.10/€14.99, Kindle £8.99

VAL McDERMID writes crime novels about serial killers. She’s also a lesbian. You conflate those facts to call her a “blood-thirsty lesbian” at your peril, however, as her fellow writer Ian Rankin discovered when a throwaway remark led to one of crime fiction’s most notorious literary spats.

“Well, the ‘blood-thirsty lesbian’ bit, that was the headline in The Times,” says McDermid, who gets a steely gleam in her eye when the topic is raised.

“But what Ian actually said was that the most graphic and violent of novels were being written by women, and of those the most violent were written by lesbians. I mean,” she shrugs, “it was a row that was entirely confected by the media. There was no falling-out between Ian and I. Ian was at my wedding, and we’ve been friends for long enough to know we’re capable of having differing opinions from our pals.

“I do think his statement was wrong,” she says, warming to the theme. “But what it led onto was a wider discussion that seemed to indicate that there was something inappropriate about women writing violent crime fiction, which is something I take extreme exception to.”

We meet at lunchtime in the Westbury Hotel off Dublin’s Grafton Street, where McDermid sips on a glass of Guinness as we speak. A soft Scottish burr belies her reputation for not suffering fools gladly, and she radiates the quiet confidence of the perennial best-seller who has just published her 25th novel, The Retribution.

Married to her wife Kelly, with whom she shares her home with her son Cameron, the 56-year-old might be mistaken for any other of the Westbury’s lunchtime guests. But despite the tinkling cutlery and the sun streaming through the windows, the conversation quickly takes on some very dark tones.

“There’s a very good reason why, when women write about violence, it is so much more powerful than when it’s written by men,” she says. “That’s because, when we’re growing up, we’re socially conditioned to have a strong sense of potential victimhood. Growing up as a young woman, you’re always told, ‘Don’t go down the dark street by yourself. The bad men will get you.’ I don’t think there’s a woman alive who hasn’t walked down a street in the small hours of the morning and heard footsteps behind her and immediately thought, ‘I’m going to be thrown to the ground and raped.’ Men write about violence from the point of view of looking at it, as a spectator. Women write it from the internal position of extreme fear..”

The Retribution is the latest in the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novels, the pairing who featured in the Wire in the Blood TV series, an oddball team who combine Carol’s dogged police work with Tony’s forensic psychology as they track down the serial killers who plague McDermid’s fictional city of Bradfield, which the author self-mockingly refers to as “the serial-killer capital of the UK”.

The Retribution reprises the charismatic killer Jacko Vance, whom Carol and Tony sent to prison in the novel Wire in the Blood (1997). As the story begins, Jacko escapes from prison with a brutal kind of vengeance in mind.

Despite her reputation for gory violence, McDermid’s latest novel is carried by a story that trades on psychological insights into the relationship between Tony and Carol, characterised by both appearing to resent their perverse mutual dependence. In The Retribution, however, it appears as if Tony and Carol will finally make a tangible commitment to one another.

“It’s been an almost kind of formal dance,” says McDermid of the pair’s emotional history. “When they take a step towards each other, something happens that drives them apart, and then something happens that pulls them together. So their relationship has been, to a large degree, at the mercy of their professional lives. And that’s what I think saves it from being just a will-they, won’t-they relationship. It’s not just me playing with the readers’ expectations.”

The novel also contains scathing socio-economic asides about modern Britain.

“I think one of the purposes of fiction is to tell the truth about the society we live in,” says McDermid. “About the world we live in, and the choices we’ve made to bring us to this point. It used to be that that was one of the things that literary fiction did very well, but literary fiction abdicated that position when it became much more concerned with literary theory. I think crime writers, especially in the 1990s, stepped into the breach, and crime fiction has increasingly become the social novel.”

Despite her forays into social criticism, however, the former journalist stops short of employing real-life murders as plot material.

“I don’t base my books on real crimes, precisely because I saw as a journalist the impact on real lives of sudden, violent death. And that’s horrible. But I think writing about it in the form of a fiction allows you to be much more honest about it, if you like. Because we get the kind of crimes we deserve. The crimes we get, as a society, are provoked directly by the kind of society we have. So you have a bunch of people running wild in London nicking plasma screen TVs, because we live in an entirely materialistic society.”

The media, both right-wing and left-wing, take something of a tongue-lashing in The Retribution. “Oh aye, I take no prisoners,” laughs McDermid. But aren’t crime novelists as guilty of sensationalising violence and murder for the sake of sales?

“Well,” she says, “with the media, there are certain kinds of murder that undoubtedly get sensationalised. Abducted children who end up murdered, anything that looks like a serial killer, all of that stuff gets blown up out of all proportion. But if you want to know what Italy, say, is really like behind the tourist brochures and the headlines about Berlusconi, you go and read crime fiction. It’s the stuff that takes the lid off and lets us see what it’s really like, and give us that authentic flavour. And that’s not always comfortable, but that’s a good thing.

“There is a strand of crime fiction that is voyeuristic,” she concedes, “that is exploitative, but I don’t read that, and I work very hard not to write it.” A flash of that formidably steely glare. “And I would recommend that other people avoid it too.”

Last February Declan Burke made a radio documentary for BBC 4 on Irish crime writing, titled Emerald Noir: The Rise of Irish Crime Fiction.