The art of becoming a best-selling crime writer
Val McDermid is one of the biggest names in crime writing. The award-winning author has published 27 novels, short stories, non-fiction and a children’s book and has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. She tells Elisa Bray about how patience is the most important quality for longevity as an author, that there’s no formula for writing books, how writers get bogged down in accuracy and how playing computer games helps her to write.
Q. How did the idea for Out of Bounds come about? A.
The first inkling of the idea came about three or four years ago; I was at a forensic science conference in London. I was working on my non-fiction book about forensic science at the time and I’d gone to this conference in London and one of the sessions I went to was led by two police officers from Greater Manchester Police. They had developed the familial DNA connections and that allowed cold cases to be examined in a different way — the idea being that you get someone who’s committed another offence and when their DNA is put into the database you get a familial connection with an old crime. So what you can tell from that is that the original crime was committed by a close male relative of the person you’ve got in custody now or whose DNA you have now and that then makes it possible to reopen those old cases in a different light. I started thinking that’s really interesting and potentially there’s some good stories to be had there.
Q. Do you go to many con-
got, but sometimes, through the course of talking to them, other things emerge that suggest a different direction or different story altogether. For most books there’ll be a point when I have to pick up the phone or have a meeting with someone when there’s something I don’t know enough about.
Q. Where does the inspiration come from in general? A.
It comes from all over. It can be something I overhear on the bus, an anecdote somebody tells me or something I hear on the radio that just makes me think, “oh that’s interesting, I didn’t know that. What if this happened instead?” I think it’s a function of being endlessly nosey.
Q. Where do you store those ideas? A.
In the back of my head. I do take a notebook around with me, but that’s generally for detail if I’m interested in something. For example, some years ago I wrote a book called The Last Temptation which is set on the waterways of Europe, so I spent two weeks wandering round central Europe looking at rivers and canals, talking to people who work on boats, going on boats, and making notes about things. The technical stuff you have to make notes about because that’s the stuff you have to get right, but the story ideas and the rest of it... I tend to figure that if it’s not interesting enough for me to remember, why would it be interesting enough for someone to read about it? I like to think about the back of my head as a compost heap — you chuck everything in there and what survives is the really interesting stuff. THE INDEPENDENT