Big Daddy beat me up, reveals Val McDermid
SCOTS crime writer Val McDermid has told how she was once beaten up by wrestler Big Daddy.
She said the ‘terrifying experience’ occurred nearly 40 years ago when she was a young newspaper reporter based in Manchester.
She was sent to the West Yorkshire home of the 6ft 6in, 35stone wrestler, whose real name was Shirley Crabtree, to ask about a domestic matter, only to be met with a barrage of blows from the star, who died aged 67 in 1997.
Speaking ahead of her appearance at the Bloody Scotland crime writing festival in Stirling this weekend, Miss McDermid said the incident left her bruised and badly shaken but later helped her write accurately about the effects of violence on victims in her novels.
She said: ‘That was a pretty terrifying experience. I chapped his door and identified myself, and he went mental. The thing I did not realise was I was the sixth person on his doorstep that week asking about the same story he clearly did not want to talk about. He came at me fists flying. I was scrambling up the stairs out of his yard trying to get away and he was laying into me from behind.
‘When I think back to that now, I still get a frisson of unease and discomfort. It’s one of the things that’s informed the way I write about violence because you read novels where the detective gets beaten up and the next day they’re jumping out of bed and raring to go. That’s not how it is.
‘The next few days, I did not want to get out of bed. For about six months afterwards, every time I chapped a door, there was that moment of anxiety.’
Miss McDermid, 66, grew up in Kirkcaldy, Fife, and has sold more than 17million books throughout the world, which have been translated into more than 40 languages.
She is famed for her Wire in The Blood novels featuring clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan.
She said her time in newspapers had helped her write her latest thriller, 1979, in which the leading character, Allie Burns, is a young female reporter for a fictional Glasgow tabloid.
Miss McDermid said the story formed in her head at the beginning of lockdown when she realised it would be impossible to write a novel set in the present day due to the uncertainties of Covid and what lay ahead. It is likely to be the first of a series of five Allie Burns novels set at ten-year intervals up to 2019.