If you were expecting a grim mansion on a dark, doomy street, you’d be disappointed. It doesn’t look like the sort of place one of Britain’s most successful crime writers might hole up, this spruce little cul-de-sac in a cosy, well-heeled suburb of south Manchester. But this is where Val McDermid, on whose novels the popular Wire In The Blood TV series is based, lives when she’s in town.

Fans of detective thrillers and/ or lesbian fiction will also recognise her as author of the Lindsay Gordon books (starting with Report For Murder). It’s the Tony Hill/ Carol Jordan series, though, providing the inspiration for Wire In The Blood, which command billboards in tube stations and mainstream acclaim. Crime fiction has always been a realm of the queer (think of Patricia Highsmith), and lesbian detective fiction was one of the most popular ‘cross-breed’ genres to emerge from the 1980s lesbian publishing boom, but McDermid is a rare beast – a lesbian writer who’s crossed from sub-genre to mainstream and who, when she wants to, nips back.



Ushering me into the front room (kids’ photos, soft carpet, author’s copies neatly stowed on the bookshelves), she reappears with coffees and a plate piled with biscuits. McDermid, now 51, has a bluff, pleasant presence; stout, ruddy faced, white-haired and unmistakably dykey. And Lord, she can talk. Before my questions begin she’s off, recalling the old days of shorthand and public phone boxes: the torment of journalists before pocket Dictaphones and mobiles eased the way. Her accent – Scottish over-layered with regional English – veers all over the map as she adopts appropriate tones to enliven her anecdotes. She’s a born storyteller, that much is plain.

‘I always wanted to write, from the point I realised that this was a job, that the books didn’t just arrive in the library by magic, that somebody actually wrote them and got paid money for it, like being a teacher or a miner,’ she recounts. (From a ‘very working-class’ family, both her grandfathers were miners.)

Academically forward, she left school at 17 to go to Oxford University (where she came out) and subsequently entered a graduate training scheme in journalism, a decision based partly on self-knowledge and partly on misapprehension: ‘I knew I was going to have to get a job, but I also knew that I was essentially unemployable, having always had real problems with authority. I’m a Gemini with Gemini rising, so my boredom threshold is incredibly low. So I was stuck with something that was non-hierarchical and wasn’t some 9-5 existence where I’d be on the same bus every morning. It seemed to me that journalism was the only possible option. And I had this quaint notion that journalism was something to do with writing, which I was swiftly disabused of. Honing your sentences to a magnificent, lambent state is not usually what being a journalist is all about. It’s more like, “Fuck, I’ve got five minutes to get this in or I miss my deadline”, standing in the pouring rain, in a phone box, with a puddle forming round your feet, shouting down the line at some deaf copy-taker.’

She excelled in the ‘ferociously competitive environment’ of the training scheme, winning the title Trainee Journalist of the Year at 22, and the accompanying prize of an interview with Prince Charles. ‘They have hard toilet paper in Windsor Castle,’ she reveals. ‘Isn’t that depressing? You’d think the richest woman in the world would have nice soft toilet paper, but no. But they do have little hand-towels with EIIR embroidered on them.’

A first job on Scottish paper, the Daily Record, led to work for the Mirror Group in Manchester, but before long she was falling out of love with her trade and the tabloids: ‘I believed that working-class people deserved news media that was entertaining as well as informative, but by the early mid-80s Murdoch had started the relentless slide into the gutter that everyone else followed. I just felt there was no place for someone like me in that world any more, so I started digging my escape tunnel.’

Modest about staff cuts that elevated her to the position, she describes the pressures of working through the Lockerbie and Hillsborough disasters as Northern Bureau Chief, and the rampant institutional sexism that kept female journalists out. ‘When I went to Manchester to work for the Mirror Group, they employed 137 journalists there and three were women. When a job vacancy came up I recommended a woman I knew to the editor and he said, “Why would we take on another woman? We’ve already got you.” That’s how it was. One did what one could to change people’s attitudes, but it was like a brick wall.’

By the time she was able to seize voluntary redundancy she’d already published her first Lindsay Gordon book with feminist publisher The Women’s Press. As a full-time novelist, she found her former career stood her in good stead: ‘Writers who’ve been journalists are very workmanlike about it. The news doesn’t wait for you to be in the mood to write the story. You quickly learn that whatever’s going on in your own life, you can still get some words down on paper. That was the most valuable thing I knew, even on the really bad days, at least to try to get something down. But that sense of a job of work, rather than the belief that you have been singled out to be the vessel of this extraordinary gift from the muse – it’s about discipline.’

After modest success with her lesbian amateur sleuth, McDermid switched tracks to produce a new series featuring Kate Brannigan, a straight female PI, somewhat in the mould of Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski, with a lesbian best friend. Her later novels completed the shift towards mainstream but her work still provides gay readers with a strong sense of recognition.

‘I write about the world as I experience it,’ she explains. ‘I don’t live in a ghetto. I don’t just have lesbian friends, I don’t just do lesbian things. There’s undoubtedly a place for “our literature”, which doesn’t have very much to say to straight people, but I also think it’s very important that our world is there, embedded in the rest of the world, so that the mainstream novel has gay characters. One of the reasons I wrote the Kate Brannigan books was entirely subversive. I figured that a really good way to get straight people to read lesbian crime fiction was to write a successful series with a straight character. And that has been borne out both by sales figures and the reactions I get from straight readers. I get all kinds of people, male, female, straight, gay coming up and saying how much they like the Lindsay Gordon books. And some of them have gone on to read books by authors like Stella Duffy and Manda Scott because they’ve read a lesbian crime novel and it hasn’t frightened them.’

She continues to pursue the story that ‘burns brightest’ for her, using different formats and characters to explore different concerns. The sixth Lindsay Gordon book, Hostage To Murder, deals with issues of parenthood and was published soon after McDermid became a parent herself. She shares custody with her ex-partner of their five-year-old son.

‘Any close relationship with young children alters your sense of how safe the world is,’ she comments, but maintains that she’s always been able to close the door on her work after 6pm. Nevertheless, it must be hard to live with a lot of the information she comes by in the cause of research. One true tale she retells leaves me with such bad heebie-jeebies, I’ve been trying to forget it ever since.

Though she alludes to difficult events in recent years, McDermid’s personal life now appears blissful and calm. Lately married to her American partner, publisher Kelly Smith, she spends downtime at her east coast retreat in Northumberland, walking on the beach, with imaginary dogs Rita and Delores, ‘re-setting the zeroes’.

In October she’ll be reading at Britain’s largest lesbian gathering, the York Lesbian Arts Festival, which she’s supported since its inception six years ago. She looks forward particularly to ‘the uplift of being in this space with all these dykes. It doesn’t matter what kind of lesbian you are, you’re included. It’s a big tent.’

Given the numbers that show up, that’s a good thing: ‘The woman from the Arts Council last year was gobsmacked to be at these panels and there were 400 people in the room where normally she sees eight. It’s fantastic to see the level of enthusiasm for lesbian arts and culture generally. And for me one of the highpoints is the conversation you have with other writers. We sat down on the Saturday night with this extraordinary ever-expanding group of people and talked about everything from what’s your favourite flower to who’s slept with Dusty Springfield! It was wild.’

And guess what? No-one got murdered…


www.valmcdermid.com

www.ylaf.co.uk