TRICK OF THE DARK
Val McDermid
From the
author of the Tony Hill books which ABC TV's 'Wire in the Blood' series is based
on, comes a fantastic standalone thriller from one of the all time greats of crime
fiction
'Death is a hollow drum whose beat has measured out
my adult life.' So writes Jay Macallan Stewart in her latest volume of memoirs.
But nobody has ever asked whether that has been by accident or design. Nobody,
that is, until Jay turns her sights on newly-wed and freshly-widowed Magda Newsam.
For Magda's mother Corinna is an Oxford don who knows enough of Jay's history
to be very afraid indeed. Determined to protect her daughter, Corinna turns to
clinical psychologist Charlie Flint. But it's not the best time for Charlie. Her
career is in ruins. Pilloried by the press, under investigation by her peers,
she's barred from the profiling work she loves. What Corinna's asking may be her
last chance at redemption. But as Charlie digs into the past and its trail of
bodies she starts to realise the price of truth may be more than she wants to
pay.
Val McDermid is the author of 22 bestselling novels,
which have been translated into 30 languages and have sold over 10 million copies.
Val grew up in a small town called Kirkcaldy on the East Coast of Scotland in
the heart of the Fyfe coalfield. At just 17 she was accepted to read English at
Oxford and went on to become a journalist though always yearned to be a novelist.
Her first novel was published in 1987. www.valmcdermid.com
The
Perception Of Crime Fiction: Val McDermid Speaks
Julian Maynard-Smith
In
Fever of the Bone, Val McDermid's latest novel, Tony Hill and Carol Jordan track
down a serial killer who is hunting apparently unconnected teenagers via a social
networking website.
A child's murder is every parent's worst
nightmare, and a subject that needs to be handled with the utmost sensitivity.
Debates have raged about the level of violence in serial-killer novels (most recently
when Jessica Mann declared that she would no longer review novels filled with
'sadistic misogyny') - but one of Val McDermid's strengths is the way in which
she humanises her victims, rather than simply setting them up as meat for killers.
'I think in the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan stories that's
at the heart of what I've tried to do. It's about the judgments we make about
victims. Recently we've had the Kercher case, and one of the things I wanted to
write about is what it means to be touched by that victimhood. As a journalist,
I worked in Manchester for a long time and you couldn't escape the long shadow
of the Moors murders. I was often in the company of the families of Ian Brady's
and Myra Hindley's victims. In a way I've always had that in the back of my mind.
It made me aware of the way that violent death contaminates the lives of everyone
it comes into contact with. It's so easy to get caught up in the violence but
you have to control it when you're writing. You have to find the right balance.
You're writing fiction that touches on some of the darkest places of people's
lives. It's only readers who can make the final judgment if I've got that right.
I weigh things up as they seem to work for me. It's a tough call.
'I
generally give real-life cases a wide berth. As an outsider you can think you
know what happened, but inadvertently you can be trampling on people's grief and
that causes more pain to the people involved than you intended. Some things happen
in the most bizarre ways - you write something that appears in the headlines.
Life imitates art. You have to step back from it and not allow it to implode inside
the book.'
A particularly creepy coincidence occurred when
Val was writing a section of Wire in the Blood in which the police think that
a missing girl is a runaway and don't take her disappearance seriously. 'There
was a case in Cheshire where a twelve-year-old girl had gone missing, and she'd
been hanging out with travellers. On the very day where I was writing the section
about the body being found, the victim was found. The really freaky thing was
that my character had the same name as the missing girl.'
In
Fever of the Bone, one of the couples whose child goes missing is Julie and Kath:
close to the bone for a novelist who is herself a married lesbian with a son?
'It's very easy to conflate the fiction with the reality when the facts coincide,
but I'm very definitely not writing my own life, in spite of what might seem,
a direct correspondence. Everything is transformed by the process of creating
fiction from reality and it would be unwise to draw conclusions from that.'
To
read the rest of this interview please go to: http://www.crimetime.co.uk/mag/index.php/showarticle/1421
AUSTRALIAN
EVENTS SCHEDULE FOR VAL MACDIARMID
Val McDermid will tour
Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Dates:
Friday 27 August Melbourne
10am
MELBOURNE WRITERS FESIVAL EVENT: Val McDermid in conversation
Venue: BMW Edge,
Federation Square
Saturday 28 August Melbourne
11.30am MELBOURNE
WRITERS FESIVAL EVENT: In the Mind of Crime
Venue: BMW Edge, Federation Square
Panelists:
Val McDermid, Michael Robotham
7pm MELBOURNE WRITERS FESIVAL
EVENT: Sisters in Crime - Davitt Awards
Sunday 29 August Melbourne
3
- 5pm MELBOURNE WRITERS FESIVAL EVENT: Sofitel Soirees
Venue: Sofitel, Collins
St
Monday 30 August Sydney
12.30-3pm EVENT: Sydney Morning
Herald/Dymocks Literary Lunch
Venue: City Four Seasons hotel, 199 George St,
Sydney NSW
To book: 02 94494366
6pm EVENT: Camden Council
Library Services, Visiting Author- Val McDermid
Venue: Camden Civic Centre,
Oxley Street, Camden NSW 2570
To book: Call Narellan Library 4645 5039 or Camden
Library 4654 7951
Tuesday 31 August Sydney
6 for 6.30pm
EVENT: Gleebooks, Val McDermid in conversation with Michael Robotham
Venue:
upstairs in the event space at Gleebooks 49 Glebe Point Rd
Tickets $10/7
Bookings
via www.gleebooks.com.au or 02 9660 2333.
Wednesday 1 September
Sydney
12.45 for 1pm CONFIRMED EVENT: Writers at Stanton Library
Venue:
Stanton Library, 234 Miller Street, NORTH SYDNEY
Thursday
2 September Brisbane
11am BRISBANE WRITERS FESTIVAL EVENT: Writing about Crooks:
Conversations with Richard Fidler LIVE
7pm BWF EVENT: Visiting
Writer Evening One
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Val McDermid, Joe Bageant
Friday
3 September Brisbane
3.30pm BWF EVENT: Trick of the Successful Crime Writer
Val McDermid
Saturday 4 September Brisbane
4pm BWF EVENT:
Crafting Crime
Val McDermid, Michael Robotham, Garry Disher, J J Cooper
Sunday
5 September Brisbane
10am BWF EVENT: Psychologists Make Great Detectives: Criminal
Profiling in Fiction
'Trick Of The Dark' is available now.
