LISTENER SEPTEMBER 14 2019Books & Culture
T
wenty years ago, Val McDermid
was peering through binoculars
on the Otago Peninsula. It was her
first visit to New Zealand, and the
Scottish author had been tour-
ing the country for the Listener
Women’s Book Festival. McDer-
mid asked a woman from a readers’ group
what was one thing she must do on her free
afternoon in Dunedin. “She sent me out to the
harbour to look at the albatrosses, and that was
one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done
in my life.”
As she talks, McDermid raises her arm to her
torso to marvel at the memory of the birds’ size
and waves a bright wristband – evidence of the
Glastonbury Festival a few weeks before where
she sang with her band, the Fun Lovin’ Crime
Writers. The six-piece have become a fixture
at book festivals, playing sets of crime-themedcovers. McDermid does a mean I Fought the Law.
We’re talking in the Old Swan Hotel in
Harrogate, Yorkshire, site of Agatha Christie’s
reappearance after an 11-day vanishing act in
1926, now the venue for the Theakston Old
Peculier Crime Writing Festival that McDer-
mid helped establish in 2004. She annually
chairs a “New Blood” panel, highlighting fresh
voices she picks after reading dozens of debuts.
This year’s selection included Nigerian author
Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose My Sister, the Serial
Killer, was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.
McDermid was a judge for the 2018 prize.
Here, in Harrogate, as on the Glastonbury
stage, McDermid is a rock star. It takes us 30
minutes to go a few metres from the chalk
outline by the hotel entrance to the lifts. Read-
ers, writers, even the Scottish First Minister,
all want a chat or photo with the “queen of
crime”. Later, McDermid confesses that she
finds it all a bit odd, even startling,
at times. “I don’t think of what I’m
writing in terms of how other people
are going to respond ... Just before,
that woman who was nearly in tears
because she was meeting me, that’s
hard to get my head around.”M
cDermid is reminiscing
about albatrosses because
she’s returning to Otago
this month, on the heels of How
the Dead Speak, her latest, perhapsDunedin’s
don of crime
Scottish “queen of crime” Val McDermid is heading
to New Zealand, but not just to promote her latest
book – she’s also taking up a teaching position at the
University of Otago. by CRAIG SISTERSON
BOOKS • MUSIC • FILM
Far from done: Val
McDermid; left, as
a young reporter
in 1981.