48 LISTENER SEPTEMBER 14 2019
BOOKS&CULTURE
AL
AM
Y
last, novel in her series featuring
profiler Tony Hill and detective
Carol Jordan – the duo that starred
in the Wire in the Blood television
series. But this won’t be your typi-
cal author tour.
In a break from her usual routine
of writing, festivals, supporting her
hometown Kirkcaldy’s professional
football club, Raith Rovers FC, and
band gigs, McDermid will spend
two months a year for the next
three years as a visiting professor of
Scottish studies and crime fiction
at the University of Otago.
Fellow Scottish crime writer
Liam McIlvanney has taught in
Dunedin for a decade and has long
been trying to lure McDermid.
Now that her teenage son is head-
ing off to university, the time is
right. McDermid’s wife, Jo Sharp,
a professor at the University of St
Andrews school of geography and
sustainable development, will alsobe working at Otago. “It’s really exciting,
because it gives us a chance to get a greater
sense of your country,” says McDermid.
“We’ll get to know people, the places,
because it’s not just a quick in-and-out
visit. I’m delighted to take that up.”
As a visiting professor, McDermid says,
she’ll be lecturing, including a public lec-
ture, doing seminar work and mentoring
masters students in the creative-writing
programme. “You can’t teach someone
to be a writer, but what you can do is
teach someone who’s got basic talent
and is willing to work how to make their
work better,” she says. “I’ll be talking to
students about their work, discussing their
problems, what they’re working on, and
seeing if I can be of assistance.”
McIlvanney believes McDermid will
be perfect for the role. “As well as being a
superb crime writer, Val has a formidable
intellect – as anyone who has witnessed
her interventions on the BBC’s QuestionTime can attest,” he says. “She is also, as
I know from personal experience, a wise
and generous mentor. She not only under-
stands what it takes to succeed as a crime
writer, but also can convey this to aspiring
writers with clarity and cogency. Her wit,
honesty and sympathy make her a natural
teacher.”T
he first student from a Scottish state
school to be admitted to the Uni-
versity of Oxford, McDermid taught
herself to write novels while working as a
young journalist in England.
“I’d wanted to write since I was about
nine years old,” she says. “I used to read
these Chalet School girls’ boarding-school
stories set in Austria and Switzerland. One
of the things I liked was that time passes
and events have consequences. It’s not
like Miss Marple, where it doesn’t matter
what order you read them in because she
stays basically the same.”
After one of the schoolgirls left to
become, rather metafictionally, a writer
of girls’ school stories, a light bulb went
off for young library-goer McDermid.
“In one book, she got a letter from her
publisher with a cheque. That was the first
time it dawned on me that writing was
something you could get paid money for
... I thought I would do that. I could tell
lies.”After graduating from Oxford,
McDermid felt ready to tackle her first
novel. “You know what it’s like when
you’re 20, you know everything, no
one can tell you anything, the secrets of
the universe are yours,” she says with a
grin. Her “truly terrible” attempt at the
great British novel was rejected by every
publisher she could find in the Writers’ &
Artists’ Yearbook.
An actor pal said it might make a
better play. “I thought, ‘A play, that’s
easy, you just cross out description and
keep everything in dialogue,’ so I kind
of did that and wrote extra scenes to
cover the bits I’d crossed out, went to the
local theatre and to my astonishment
and delight, the directors wanted to run
a series of new plays and thought mine
was perfect.”
Like a Happy Ending was performed in
Plymouth in 1978 and later adapted for
BBC radio. Unfortunately, McDermid
didn’t understand what she’d done right,
so couldn’t replicate it. After being fired by
her agent – “pretty much the low point of
my literary career” – McDermid realised
she had to write something she under-
stood deep in her bones. For the lifelong
crime fan, another light bulb flared when
she read Sarah Paretsky’s first novel,
Indemnity Only, in the early 1980s.
“Here’s a book with a femaleHer “truly terrible”
attempt at the great
British novel was rejected
by every publisher shecould find in the Writers’ &
Artists’ Yearbook.