Life and times

Crime writer Val Mcdermid

I WENT TO Cambridge recently to hear Ali Smith talking at her alma mater, Newnham College, which involved four hours each way on some of the shoogliest trains in the UK. London North Eastern Railway (LNER) has been promising us lovely new trains for years now. They’ve just come into service but only as far as Leeds. In a comment that doesn’t bode well for those of us in Scotland, one of the train crew told me, ‘The trouble is, the line north of Newcastle is very bendy.’

LNER should not take this as permission, but it was worth every boneshaking swerve and jolt to hear Ali Smith talking about her own journey from working-class Inverness to Cambridge and her brilliant literary career beyond. I’ve heard her speak many times and she’s always incisive, generous, vivid, erudite and funny. It was an electrifying evening, made so by Ali’s alchemical gift of transmuting life into art. No wonder Nicola Sturgeon calls her ‘Scotland’s greatest living writer’.

The event was followed by a private dinner in Newnham, the kind of glittering, glamorous, intellectually stimulating evening people believe is typical of a writer’s life, although the reality is more like the last evening I spent in the company of the vice-principal of Newnham, when dinner consisted of fish and chips and scurrilous gossip in a parked car after a book event…

FILMING HAS RECENTLY started on a six-part crime drama called Traces that has its roots in research I did five years ago for my non-fiction book Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime. Talking to the scientists I interviewed for the project, I was struck by one common thread – their unhappiness at their fictional portrayal, particularly on television: pathologists running around interviewing witnesses; one individual who is expert in every discipline; tests that either don’t exist or whose power and accuracy are distorted.

I wondered whether it might be possible to write a drama that showed the reality. I wasn’t worried whether it would be thrilling enough, because I’ve had plenty of ‘wow’ moments in the company of forensic experts. I sat down with forensic anthropologist Dame Professor Sue Black and forensic chemist Professor Niamh Nic Daéid and talked through my idea. Then I wrote a short pitch and a longer outline.

But I know I’m not a television scriptwriter. The grammar of the visual storytelling is a foreign language to me. I had to find a production company that could pair me up with a terrific scriptwriter and find a broadcaster willing to take a chance on something as ridiculous as a crime drama that tells it like it is.

And so it was that on the morning after the nation was glued to the final episode of Line of Duty, I was sitting in a bar in Manchester watching its star, Martin Compston, and Holly Windsor filming their first scenes in Traces.

THERE’S A NEW exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery that asks how we look at an image. It’s called The Long Look: The Making of a Portrait, and artist Audrey Grant has drawn portraits of me as part of it. There are two finished drawings shown, but each of those is the 18th version. I sat in a chair for more than 70 hours while Audrey reworked each drawing. I see something of myself in every one. But it’s not always what I want you to see…

My Scotland, by Val Mcdermid, is out now (Sphere, £20). Traces will air in November on UKTV/ALIBI

One of the train crew told me, ‘The trouble is, the line north of Newcastle is very bendy’