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Margaret Cannon: Also, we don't have, for reasons which I don't understand. We don't
have 'My Granny is a Pirate.'
Val McDermid: First of all, British publishers are crap, that's why.
[laughter]
MC: You said that. I didn't.
VM: It's fairly simple, I've just not been very good at selling foreign rights. So, if
anyone out there from Harper Collins Canada would like to publish 'My Granny is a Pirate,'
feel free.
[laughter]
MC: Now's your chance. Well, I can see that our time together is almost up, but there's
time for all of you to ask questions. Whoever has a question for Ms. McDermid or me, please
raise your arm.
VM: And if you don't put your hands up, we'll just start picking on people at random.
MC: Yeah, we will, at random.
[laughter]
VM: 'Cause we're evil.
MC: You, hiding back there, come on. Up.
S?: If you can line up behind the microphone, that'd be great.
MC: Oh, we have a microphone. Oh, good.
VM: Yes. So stand... Come and stand where we can see you, so we can throw things.
S?: Some of us are too short. [chuckle]
MC: That's okay, we can hear you. You can stand up where you are.
VM: We can adjust the microphone if you're too short.
[laughter]
S?: In your... When you have spare time, what do you like to read?
VM: I read generally, across the piece, I read fiction mostly. I only really read nonfiction
when it's to do with something I'm working on, researching maybe. So I read good crime
fiction, I read some general fiction, I read literary fiction, I'm always looking for good
stories that are well told. So as I said, I read a lot of crime fiction, but I also
read other writers as well. I just recently read Ian McEwan's new book, for example. I've
just read Denise Mina's new book, I've read... I'm just about to finish Megan Abbott's new
book. One of the things that I do every year that I love is the Harrogate Crime Writing
Festival, I moderate the new blood panel, so at this time of year, what happens is that
my post, it staggers up my darken path with bags full of new books, lots and lots of fresh
novels, so I get to read all these debut writers which is quite useful when I'm deciding who
needs to be taken out. [laughter] But it gives me kind of first dibs on a lot of really interesting
writers and some of the most exciting writers I've come across in recent years have included
Attica Locke, a young American writer, Belinda Bauer, SJ Watson...
MC: SJ Watson's fabulous.
VM: Yeah, and MJ McGrath, a young guy last year called David Mark, who has written this
wonderful, dark crime novel set on the street of Hull in the north of England, and I don't
think anybody's ever found anything to say about Hull before. [laughter] But it's a really,
really interesting debut novel. So that for me is one of the great joys. I love the chance
to encounter fresh, new voices at the start of their careers and try and pick out who
I think is gonna be somebody that we'll all be reading for a long time to come. This genre
is so exciting at the moment, isn't it? And there are so many talented writers coming
through.
MC: Fabulous writers.
VM: You almost don't have time to keep pace.
MC: No, it's true, and the quality of the writing gets better and better every year.
We were saying earlier just in passing, crime novels that we've cried over. I mean, there
are novels that are so good, and we were agreeing that one of the ones that we both just wept
over was 'On Beulah Height' by Reginald Hill, and as well as James Lee Burke can bring me
to my knees anytime. I mean, these are fabulous writers. They're just phenomenal.
VM: Yes, and sometimes... I remember Laurie King wrote a novel called 'With Child' some
years ago. I think it's the third or the fourth Martinelli novel and that just reduced me
to... And I was weeping. It wasn't just like a wee bit of watering of the eyes. It was
like the tears were running down my face and I think that's gotta be a mark of something.
S?: Do you get to meet the people who translate your books?
VM: I do sometimes get to meet my translators, but mostly it's kind of handing over your
baby into the hands of the unknown. Actually, just this evening before I came out, I had
an email from one of my German translators, asking me about something in the new book.
Some of them communicate with me fairly regularly, particularly relating to cultural matters,
but some of them don't, and even the best translators sometimes make mistakes. In fact,
my German translator, in 'A Place of Execution,' there's a point where the detective is searching
the bedroom of a missing 13-year-old girl, and this is in the 1960's, and he opens her
dressing table drawer, and he finds a sanitary belt and some towels. And unfortunately, my
German translator translated not the word for sanitary towels, but the word for bath
towels. So we're all imagining this wee lassie with very heavy periods. [laughter] But you
are entirely reliant on your friends who speak those languages, telling you if there's a
mistake.
MC: [chuckle] Yeah, that's just great.
S?: I have a question, but I guess you get this question a lot. What would be your advice
for like a aspiring writer?
VM: Do it. [laughter]
S?: Just do it?
VM: Stop talking about it and do it. I think the most important thing you can do, all joking
apart, is set aside some time that is sacrosanct, as your writing time. That has to depend on
your working life, your home life, your lifestyle generally, when you can do that. When I started
off, I was a full-time journalist, I was a northern bureau chief for a national newspaper
for some of the time, which was a pretty demanding job, but Mondays was my day off and Mondays,
most people were working. So I used to write on Monday afternoons from 2:00 to 7:00. I
did not answer the door, I did not answer the phone, I did not make social engagements
for Monday afternoons. And that was when I wrote, and it was a very productive way of
working for me because all week I would be excited about what I was gonna do in those
five hours. I'd be thinking about it, I'd be rehearsing dialogue scenes, I'd be planning
out what I was gonna do. And I'd also be thinking about what I'd done the week before and what
I needed to change.
VM: So when I actually sat down at the desk on a Monday afternoon, I was very focused,
very productive, and I wrote my first four books on Monday afternoons. Other people have
done it different ways. Mary Higgins Clark had several children and she used to... After
the children were in bed, and after she'd cook dinner, and had dinner with her husband,
she'd sit down at the kitchen table about 10:00 at night, and write for an hour every
night, and that was how she did it, that was the time she set aside for herself. But I
think you really have to make that commitment to yourself, 'cause if you won't commit to
yourself, why would anyone else commit to you? That's the best advice I can give you,
is to make that commitment to yourself.
MC: You also mentioned earlier in the back, that all writers evolve, like it gets better
as you go along and you learn from what you're doing and I think that's an important thing
to remember.
VM: It is, and the more you do it, the better you get, the stronger you get, if you commit
to getting better. Some writers never actually develop, they just write the same book again,
and again, and again, and again, and we all know who they are. [laughter] But we don't
want to do that because we have greater ambition for ourselves in this room, don't we? Yes.
S?: Could you tell us a bit more about where Tony Hill came from and do you also get any
input on the actors that are chosen when you do a series?
VM: Tony Hill came from strange recesses of my mind, really. After I read 'The Silence
of the Lambs', I became interested. It was actually, first it was 'Red Dragon', then
'The Silence of the Lambs.' I became interested in the idea of profiling, and I tried to find
out how it happens in the UK, and we do it differently in the UK. Both here and in the
US, you train up police officers in the art of behavioural psychology. In the UK, we have
traditionally used clinical psychologists working with the police, in an advisory role.
And right from the beginning, that seemed to me to be something that was gonna be fraught
with tension because the police never really like outsiders coming into an investigation.
So right away, I thought there was a dynamic there that would be interesting to work with.
But the difficulty was, I really didn't know how this worked in practise and I didn't know
anybody who did.
VM: And it so happened that I was watching the local news one night, and there was a
guy being interviewed who was a clinical psychologist who did some work with the police. So I made
a note of his name and where he worked, and I rang him up. I said "I wanna write a book
about a profiler. Can I come and talk to you?" And he said, "How do I know you're not a nutter?"
[laughter]
VM: It's a fair question. So I said, "Well, how about if I send you a couple of my books
and you can decide?" So I sent him a couple of the Kate Brannigan books and I heard nothing
for a couple of weeks. Then the phone rang one day and he said, "Hi, it's me," he said,
"I read your books." he said, "My wife read your books. We've decided you're not a nutter."
[laughter]
VM: So he agreed to meet me for lunch, and we had lunch, and we got on very well, and
he talked me through, essentially, how he drew up a profile for the police, and that
essentially, became Tony Hill's working method. And we met a few times after that, and he
actually took me subsequent to the place that he worked, which was a secure mental hospital.
I was slightly anxious about whether I was gonna get out, but he actually took me through
a couple of live profiles of real cases that he was working on, and although I actually
found the whole process quite unnerving, it was also incredibly useful to go through something
right from crime scene photographs through to the finished profile that he was doing.
VM: And I thought it was incredibly generous of him to share that with me, and he's continued
to be very generous over the years with his advice. So the Tony Hill method comes from
what he took me through all those years ago. I did acknowledge him in the first couple
of books in the acknowledgements, but after that, he said to me, he rang up and said,
"Could you leave my name out of the books in future?" And I was a little bit concerned
because I thought maybe I had done something that had upset him professionally. I said,
"Have I got something wrong? Has it been an embarrassment to you?" And he said, "No, it's
not that. It's just, it's my wife," he said, "She's fed up with the people at work saying
to her, 'So, can you and Mike not get it up?'"
[laughter]
VM: 'Cause people are sometimes very literal about these things. And the actual character
and the characteristics of Tony came from... When I was writing 'The Mermaid Singing,'
I planned that as a stand-alone. And so, as I was saying earlier, the stand-alone, the
story comes first and then you develop the characters to fit in with what you need them
to do within the story. And Tony's impotence is a plot point in 'The Mermaid Singing'.
That's why it happened that way, and that's why several things happened the way they do,
and then I found I was writing a series, and I was stuck with these things. So there you
go, that's how it goes. As far as input into the TV series goes, I was very lucky working
with Coastal Productions because they involved me at every stage of the process.
VM: Obviously, it was gonna be Robson Green playing Tony Hill from the start because Coastal
is partly his company, and I was quite happy with that because I thought he was a good
actor. And from the conversations that we had earlier on in the process, it was clear
that he got what I was aiming for. And right through the process, he would phone me up
about aspects of a script or aspects of the character. I remember him phoning me up one
night quite late in the evening and saying, "If Tony was going to wear a hat, what kind
of hat would it be?"
[laughter]
VM: So there was that eye for detail. He did work very hard to bringing it to life and
I was very well-served by the production and yeah, I was involved in a lot of conversations
about actors. And he is the only one though, who actually physically resembles the character
in my head, so then when I'm writing the books, I see Robson. But with all the other characters,
Carol Jordan in particular, I see the character in my head. I see my Carol Jordan. I don't
see Hermione, even though she did a fantastic job because she's not physically like the
Carol that was in my head to begin with. Yes, sir.
S?: You mentioned the importance of a serious commitment to a writing routine. What about
research? To what extent is that important and to what extent do you rely on active research?
The story you mentioned with the clinical psychologist is one example there, but in
general, to what extent do you rely on...
VM: It depends on the book. Some books require quite a lot of research. If it's something
I don't know very much about or if it's a time period, for example. But other books
don't require very much. With "The Vanishing Point," the principle research that I had
to do was, go to the dentist and read the magazines in the waiting room to find out
something about the public face of celebrity lifestyle. I read a couple of celebrity autobiographies,
but this book, for example, didn't need very much in the way of research 'cause most of
the stuff that I was dealing with I kind of knew about anyway. But other books, like for
example, "A Place of Execution," I was talking about that earlier, most of that's set in
the early 1960's. My memory of 1963, when I was eight years old, is mostly what comics
I was reading and what sweets I was eating, which isn't really very helpful when you're
trying to recreate the whole ambiance of 1963.
VM: So with that, for example, I spent quite a lot of time in newspaper archives and also
reading novels that were written in 1963 that had that sort of smell of time and listening
to the music of the time as well, so those are also ways into... But generally speaking,
when I find... The research I like to do best and what research I actually find most useful,
is when I can go and talk to somebody who does this stuff for real. Now, that doesn't
necessarily have to be a forensic scientist. It could be any profession really that I'm
dealing with in the book that I need to go and talk to, somebody who does it for real.
Because they answer the questions that you have, but they also answer the questions you
didn't know you should be asking, and what they often give you is what I call the sociology
of the knowledge. They give you those little anecdotes, the little side perspective, the
funny thing that happened to one of their colleagues or a terrible thing that happened
to somebody who's doing the job. And that is the kind of detail that makes the book
come alive. I want you to feel that I've spent six months working in a pathology lab or working
for the transport security agency... Maybe not.
MC: Maybe not.
[laughter]
VM: But there is that sense...
MC: But you've been through a lot of lines, I can tell.
VM: Yeah. [laughter]
MC: And a lot of airports.
VM: But it's... So they don't have to give it the... It's not... I often say, "It's not
accuracy that matters, it's authenticity." you don't have to tell the reader everything
you found out, you just give them a couple of facts and then something that makes it
feel authentic. And I'm a Gemini, I fondly believe that with three facts I can talk for
half an hour on any subject.
[laughter]
MC: Do we have anybody else?
VM: They've all gone shy.
MC: They've gone shy.
VM: I find that hard to believe in Canada, you know.
MC: I do too. Oh well.
VM: With all that good Scottish blood out there.
[laughter]
VM: That'd be good enough to give us a song.
MC: Well I, for one, have had a wonderful time. Thank you so much.
VM: Thank you. Thank you.
[applause]
VM: Thank you so much.
MC: 'Vanishing Point', good book. Margaret Cannon says so.
VM: Get it as Christmas gift.
[laughter]