Val McDermid's Blog, page 7
August 29, 2017
Val McDermid: Insidious Intent review – dark and expert crime writing…
Tony Hill and Carol Jordan are back, on the hunt for the ‘Wedding Killer’
Val McDermid has written close on 30 award-winning thrillers and suspense novels, in four series, since the late 1980s, all of them featuring a lead female protagonist. She herself worked as a journalist and a crime reporter, and the atmosphere is grittily realistic.
Insidious Intent is the tenth volume in the only McDermid series to feature a partnership – one both emotional, albeit reticent and repressed at times, and professional. Once again, as in all these novels, the title is a phrase from TS Eliot, here “The Love Song of J Albert Prufrock”:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
McDermid, once an English scholar, has a captivating rhythm to her writing – perhaps because of her underlying apprehension of poetry, and affinity with her chosen poet and his ability to plumb human nature. To set the scene, she quotes from De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. The interplay of understanding and collaboration between the high-ranking policewoman Carol Jordan, and the clinical psychologist, a profiler of criminals, Tony Hill, is crucial.
Both are middle-aged adults with complex characters and complex histories. They are people of integrity, but all too aware that things are never black and white. Both are heavily compromised by past actions, undertaken perhaps for the best of motives but marred by misjudgements, as well, of course, by the law of unintended consequences.
They are utterly human, weighed down with difficult pasts and unresolved grief and conflict. Tony is more or less living in Carol’s renovated barn, once home to her murdered brother and sister. Their relationship is platonic but stressed, as both may want more; she is also an alcoholic who has gone cold turkey and is desperate, as the story unfolds, for a drink. The reader can practically feel her physical and mental pain as she longs for her fix of choice. Carol is also being stalked by an investigative journalist who seems partly motivated by malice. Lurking behind the present sequence of events is a spectrum of past failures and successes in dealing with the most horrible violent crimes, some psychopathic in nature.
August 26, 2017
Vera creator Ann Cleeves in South Shields…
BY TOM PATTERSON
Crime story fans are being offered an evening with an award-winning North East novelist sas she shares her writing secrets.
Author Ann Cleeves, whose best-selling books – Shetland and Vera – have both been made into TV series’, will be at South Shields’ The Word: National Centre for the Written Word on September 8.
The event will see Ann interviewed, discuss her latest novel from the Vera series: The Seagull, and answering questions about her successful career as an author.
Since starting writing 30 years ago, Ann has gone on to publish more than 30 books, with some of her bestsellers being adapted for both radio and TV.
Seven series of Vera, the ITV adaptation starring Brenda Blethyn, have been broadcast in the UK, and sold worldwide. There have also been three series of Shetland, based on her Shetland novels – and a fourth is in preparation.
Tania Robinson, Head of Marketing and Culture for The Word: National Centre for the Written Word said: “September is a brilliant month for crime fiction fans at The Word.
August 25, 2017
Out of the closet and into bookshops: where are all the queer books?
by Maisie Lawrence
I came of queer age on a steady diet of lesbian films, purchased covertly at university, and hidden under my bed when back home. Films with brilliant titles such as “The Itty Bitty Titty Committee”, “Watermelon”, “I Can’t Think Straight” and “Better Than Chocolate” (yes, it is what you think) taught me a huge amount about what it meant to be a queer woman.
These films weren’t always easy to come by – this was before Netflix, before Sandi Toksvig was on TV, before “Orange Is the New Black” and “Moonlight”. The lesbian and queer pickings were slim, and predominantly featured white characters. I watched everything I could get my hands on – films about each letter of the LGBTQ spectrum – wanting to understand the breadth and depth of the new community I’d joined. But eventually the internet’s well of queer films ran dry.
So I went looking for the books. I’d soon read James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Brett Easton Ellis and Thomas Mann. But I wanted something that looked like me, something beyond the white gay men or the lesbian film where everyone dies at the end. Starting with Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness nearly had me abandoning the whole thing together. (If you haven’t read it, be warned: it does what it says on the tin…) Praise the lord for Stella Duffy, Sarah Waters, Nella Larson, Carol Ann Duffy, and Jeanette Winterson. I discovered Val McDermid when she came to speak at university, and she fast became my favourite crime writer. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a gift that came just at the right time – perfect for a queer student simultaneously navigating an English degree and dating. I will keep the exquisite letters that Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West wrote to each other close to me for the rest of my life. Woolf’s Orlando was one of the first (and only) novels I’ve read that even nodded at gender identity, or being trans. So, there are great queer writers, but you’ve got to go looking.
August 22, 2017
Book review: Val McDermid shows no sign of a lost touch in Insidious Intent…
In the 30 years since her first novel was published, Val McDermid has written 30 books, both fiction and non-fiction. She shows no sign of slowing down, with her 10th novel featuring Dr Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan hitting the shelves this week with their most bewildering case yet.
A car is on fire on a remote road. Inside is the body of a woman. The Regional Murder Investigation Team, a newly created unit headed by Jordan, is called in to solve the mystery. Unfortunately, the fire brigade reached the car first and washed away potential evidence while putting the blaze out.
Then another woman is found in similar circumstances. Forensically aware, the killer leaves no clues to his identity or his reasons for killing two very different women. With the press on their heels, and a disgruntled senior police officer willing her to fail, Jordan and her team are under pressure to solve the case.
August 19, 2017
Val McDermid: ‘Even on a romantic holiday my thoughts turn to murrrder’
The queen of crime on the new generation of writers, how the genre has changed in 30 years – and how she’s promised not to kill off Tony Hill and Carol Jordan.
My readers are probably going to kill me,” Val McDermid announces cheerfully when we discuss the ending of her latest novel. Her new Tony Hill and Carol Jordan book, Insidious Intent, is published on Thursday, and the reaction of fans to how she has chosen to end it will be interesting. “There’s a certain fear of being stoned in the street,” she chuckles.
We meet at the Theakston Old Peculier crime writing festival in Harrogate, where McDermid is practically royalty, and she has murder on her mind. This is not unusual, she says; quite frequently a pleasant weekend away will turn her thoughts to homicide. There was the time when she spotted a wedding party during a crime and mystery conference at her old college, St Hilda’s, Oxford, “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.” That flight of fancy turned into the 2010 novel, Trick of the Dark. And then, more recently, she and her partner went on a boating holiday. “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.” She pronounces the word with obvious relish.
August 12, 2017
Crime writer Val McDermid on her latest book Insidious Intent and the secrets to getting away with murder…
OUTSIDE the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, crowds are gathering in anticipation of catching sight – or rather whiff – of the rotten, flesh-like smell of the famed corpse flower that is fleetingly in bloom beyond the gates.
As Val McDermid and I join the throng, it is corpses of a different kind that spring to mind. This month the Fife-born writer will publish her latest novel, Insidious Intent, which centres on a serial killer who stalks his victims at wedding receptions.
McDermid, 62, is often asked whether advances in forensic science have undone the job of the crime writer. The thriller, which sees DCI Carol Jordan and psychological profiler Tony Hill return for their 10th outing, cleverly turns that notion on its head.
Read the full article on the Herald Scotland website.
August 10, 2017
Val at the Edinburgh Festival…
Val is out and about this month…
Catch up with Val at the Edinburgh Festival! She is doing lots of events this summer so head over to our Events page to find out where she is going to be.
You can even see her strutting her stuff on stage (23rd August –details) with the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers…
Val Says: Here’s a glimpse into the secret world of Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers in rehearsal. Getting ready for our gigs at the Edinburgh Book Festival and Bloody Scotland. It’s been a while since I strutted my stuff on stage but finally I get to live the dream of the rock star life.
Not.
August 6, 2017
Irvine Welsh’s ‘brilliant rendition’ of Bye Bye Baby live on Bulgarian TV…
TACITURN Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh has revealed he belted out a rendition of the Bay City Rollers’ classic Bye Bye Baby live on Bulgarian television.
The deadpan writer famed for his hard-hitting social sagas was called out by fellow Scots author Val McDermid during a live BBC interview to mark the start of the Edinburgh festivals.
TACITURN Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh has revealed he belted out a rendition of the Bay City Rollers’ classic Bye Bye Baby live on Bulgarian television.
The deadpan writer famed for his hard-hitting social sagas was called out by fellow Scots author Val McDermid during a live BBC interview to mark the start of the Edinburgh festivals.
August 3, 2017
McDermid and Horowitz join Noirwich Crime Fest’s ‘killer’ line-up
Val McDermid, Anthony Horowitz and Martina Cole have been confirmed on the killer line-up for the fourth Noirwich Crime Writing Festival.
Other crime writers turning out for the event include authors Mark Billingham, Stuart McBride, and Swedish author, literary critic and academic Arne Dahl. He will be giving a special guest lecture at UEA, sponsored by The Times/ Sunday Times Crime Club, to explore how crime fiction can make sense of today’s turbulent geopolitical times.
The festival, which takes place 14th – 17th September 2017, claims to be the fastest growing crime festival in the UK and is the result of a partnership between Writers’ Centre Norwich and the University of East Anglia (UEA). It is also part of a city-wide celebration of events and fringe activities in the UK’s first UNESCO City of Literature.
August 1, 2017
Todd and Haddad among Polari shortlistees…
Matthew Todd, Bantam author and award-winning editorial director of gay magazine Attitude, is among the six authors shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize, awarded annually to a writer whose first book (whether poetry, prose, fiction or non-fiction) explores what it is to be LGBT.
This year’s “eclectic” shortlist, spanning crime fiction, short story and memoir, was revealed on Monday evening (31st July) at the Polari Literary Salon in London’s Southbank Centre. It brings together three male and three female writers, hailing from Kuwait to Cardiff, whose work was said by the judges to offer a range of perspectives on the LGBT experience.
Todd (pictured), currently editorial director of Attitude, is shortlisted for Straight Jacket (Bantam). The book explores why statistics show a disproportionate number of gay people suffer from mental health problems and offers advice how to overcome difficult issues.
Joining him on the shortlist are Chitra Ramaswamy, Saleem Haddad, Jules Grant, Crystal Jeans, and Orlando Ortega-Medina.
Haddad is shortlisted for Guapa (Europa Editions UK), the story of a young gay man set in a post-Arab Spring dictatorship in the Middle East over the course of one day, highlighted as part of W H Smith Travel’s gay literature promotion to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales.
Ramaswamy is shortlisted for Expecting (Saraband), a memoir about the author’s experience of pregnancy while in a relationship with another woman.
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