Val McDermid

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is the writer Val McDermott. Crime fiction is her chosen genre, and the millions of novels she sells examine and dissect the darkest recesses of human behaviour. Violence, murder, abduction indeed, it's difficult to imagine a subject she'd shy away from. She once described herself as a mixture of hard bitten, cynical hack,

Presenter0:57

and Pollyanna.

Presenter0:59

It would seem the two sides of her nature are perfectly reflected in her formative years. Brought up in a secure home by parents who were very happily married, she was the first State school educated Scot to win a place at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She was just sixteen so far so perfect. Yet after graduation she chose tabloid journalism as her trade, and, by all accounts, fitted right in with the hard working, balshy, boozing culture at the time.

Presenter1:27

On the subject of her considerable success she is admirably concise. She says I think there are three elements to any literary career. You have to have a modicum of talent, you've got to work hard, and you've got to be lucky. So I wonder, Val McDermott um deadlines from publishers, writer's block, endless publicity tours. How lucky do you feel day to day?

Val McDermid1:50

Yeah.

Presenter1:50

But to be a writer

Val McDermid1:50

Mostly I feel very lucky because it's the one thing in the world I ever wanted to do and they pay me money for it. So what's not to like? I don't have a boss. I don't have anybody telling me what time I have to be in the office or what time to knock off. Um I deliver a book a year, but that doesn't feel like a pressure. That feels like the pace at which my imagination works.

Presenter2:09

You divide your time between Manchester and uh the Northumbrian coast. So why? Uh Uh

Val McDermid2:15

I divide my time because my life is complicated and spend more of my time in Northumberland and I love being up there because I grew up by the sea on the east coast of Scotland and I realised about 10-11 years ago that I really really missed being by the sea and so I bought a house on the Northumberland coast. It's a small village but it's very much a community and there's always stuff going on and there are lots of interesting lives there to connect with. So I find that very stimulating but I also find it a great place to write. There's something for me about being by water that seems to get the whole creative process flowing. That sounds like one of those terrible pathetic fallacy things. Oh, it's the nature that does it. But I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the rhythm of the water, the change. Every day the sea is different, every day the river estuary is different. And I find that quite stimulating to write. And Manchester is there for all the city things.

Presenter3:05

And how often do you manage to get to Starks Park to see the Race Rovers play these days? Not as often as I would like, but when I can I do. That's a shame. I had this image of you and Ian Rankin and Gordon Brown kind of all standing there together,'cause they're fans too, I guess. Yes. Depends on occasion, yes. Standing there in the director's box munching pies. Right, let's go to the music list then, Val McDermott. Your first disc of the day. Why have you chosen it and what is it? Um, I think

Val McDermid3:28

I think Bruce Springsteen's a terrific songwriter, terrific performer, there's a great energy in his work. Uh sometimes when you're writing you need something with real energy to get you fired up, and this is one of those tracks that always does it for me. He's got that great line in the middle of the song as well about how fed up he is and I'm just sitting here trying to write this book and we all know that feeling.

Val McDermid3:47

I get up in the evening Yeah.

Speaker 13:49

Uh

Val McDermid3:49

Uh

Val McDermid3:51

Yeah.

Speaker 13:51

Uh

Val McDermid3:51

Uh

Speaker 13:51

Yeah. Ain't got nothing to say, I come home in the morning.

Speaker 13:57

I go to bed feeling the same way. I ain't nothing but tired.

Speaker 14:03

Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself.

Speaker 14:11

I can use just

Speaker 24:11

The little hope, you can't start a fight

Speaker 24:15

Uh

Speaker 14:16

You can't start a fire without a spot. His guns behind.

Presenter4:23

That was Bruce Springsteen and Dancing in the Dark. What is it, I wonder, Val McDermott, about crime fiction that excites so much snobbery?

Val McDermid4:32

I think it's generally ignorance these days. When the genre had its first golden age, uh you'd have to be honest and say most of what was being produced was not of particularly high standard in terms of literature, in terms of character development. It was pretty much a a a puzzle. But the genre has come to embrace such a a broad church. There are now people writing crime fiction who I think can stand shoulder to shoulder with writers of any kind of fiction, and generally I find that people who are dismissive of it are simply dismissive of something they don't know.

Presenter5:00

Tell me more then about the actual process of writing, all of the things that go together to make the kind of convincing crime novels that you write.

Val McDermid5:08

It generally starts with a small idea, something that makes me go, I didn't know that, or something that makes me go, yeah, but what if that happened instead? And from that, I start playing with the idea. And generally, this is a process that will take years. I think probably the longest was a book called A Place of Execution, which was about 20 years in the making from the first idea to being actually ready to write it. So patience is a really important part of the process. And over the years, bits fall into place. It's about building connections and telling myself stories. Sometimes when I find I have technical things that I need to know about, I'll go and talk to an expert and then I'll make some notes because that's technical stuff you need to get right. But mostly it happens in my head and then I start to write.

Presenter5:49

So, how do you index that in your head then? Do you have a very sort of clinical process? I think I put that there for a while and I'll keep it bubbling away, but right now I'm writing this.

Presenter5:59

Yeah.

Val McDermid5:59

The nearest I've come to being able to categorise it over the years is is to think of it as a bunch of supermarket trolleys rattling around in the back of my head. And every time you add something to the trolley, it sends you in more in one direction than another. So it is that kind of process of all these half filled supermarket trolleys bouncing around in the back of my brain.

Presenter6:16

Now, of course, you're not writing horror, but you are writing often about a lot of horrible things I mentioned in the introduction, you know, abduction, murder you know, you write about domestic violence, you write about torture, all sorts of horrendous things. Do you find that easy?

Presenter6:32

I don't find

Val McDermid6:32

any of it easy as such. I think all the things that I write about are things that happen in the world. And so I think whatever I'm writing about, whether it's it's love or death, I have to approach it in the same way, to try to be honest, to try to understand the motive springs of this kind of behaviour.

Presenter6:49

I wonder if there is any relevance in being a woman and writing this sort of stuff.

Val McDermid6:54

I think there is a difference from the way women write about violence and the way men write about it. Little girls grow up with a sense of the threat of the world. Every single one of us who is a woman over the age of ten years old has walked down a street and heard footsteps behind them and immediately gone flash forward to the movie of the terrible things that are about to happen to us. That's not how men grow up thinking of themselves in the world. Women have that imaginative experience of victimhood before they ever encounter it often. And so we're writing about it from the inside. And I find that mostly, with a few notable exceptions, mostly when men write about violence they write about it as a spectator. And if you're writing about something fearful from the point of view of the person who's scared, then it's much more scary.

Presenter7:39

A number of your books revolve around the notion of the past casting a long shadow, and and I wonder if that's something that is just a suitable thing for you to use as a vehicle to to foster creativity, or if it is something that generally you believe in life.

Val McDermid7:53

Uh

Presenter7:54

Yeah. Yeah. It kind of

Val McDermid7:54

It crept up on me, the the way of using the past in that way. It sort of started off as a a means of telling a story.

Val McDermid8:01

I certainly don't think I'm someone who who dwells on the past. I I see my life as as moving forward a bit like a sh

Presenter8:04

Bye.

Presenter8:08

Jark, you know.

Val McDermid8:09

Um

Presenter8:11

Let's go then to your second choice of the morning. Tell me about this. And it is, you are travelling to the past, I think, with this one. Very much so.

Val McDermid8:16

Mm.

Presenter8:17

My father

Val McDermid8:17

My father was a great character. He was one of those people who are described as the life and soul of the party in a good way. Whenever we had a family party, everybody had their own turn. And The Road in the Miles to Dundee was the song that my father always sang. And it's a it's a great song, it's a song of generosity and kindness. So it really sums up my my dad to me. And he had a very sweet tenor voice. He was the the lead tenor of the Bow Hill People's Burns Club concert party. And listening to Kenneth McKellar, who has an even greater voice, just takes me back like a time machine to all those nights I sat under tables listening to my dad sing.

Speaker 28:55

Cold winter was howling o'er moor and o'er mountain, And wild was the sodge of the dark rolling sea, When I met about daybreak a bonny young lassie, Who asked me the road and the milestidundi?

Presenter9:21

That was Kenneth McKellar singing The Road and the Miles to Dundee. And you yourself, Bal McDermott, you've got a cracking voice. I heard you singing along when we were listening to the tracks before we came in. You inherited your father's talent for singing.

Val McDermid9:31

I did, I think. I got definitely got it from him. My mother could sing too, but she had quite a sort of thin soprano voice that she always felt very self conscious about in comparison to us belting out from the back seat and the front seat as we as we drove along through the the country roads of Fife.

Presenter9:44

You were born, yes, in Kirkodie, in Fife, you were brought up in, famous for being uh well, it was famous to me, at least, as a Scot, for being the home of linoleum. It was the biggest linoleum exporter in the world. Could you smell the linseed oil as you walked down the streets?

Val McDermid9:56

You could smell it as you came through on the the train and it's it's a smell now that that takes me back to my childhood if I if I'd smelled inseed oil at all. And because we had the the east coast facing beach, we had those concrete tank traps left over from the Second World War and I remember as a child asking my dad, What what are they? and him s he said, Oh, they're tank traps to stop the Germans invading us. Hitler wanted our linoleum And I think I was probably about fourteen and actually doing the Second World War in history at school before I realised that actually linoleum wasn't one of the causes of the Second World War.

Presenter10:26

Second World War. It was a mining community too then. It's it's easy to look back on those times, you know, through rose-tinted spectacles and think, you know, it was full employment and honest, hard toil. But actually when you think about mining communities, you know, that they were riddled with people who who died down the mines, it was very unpleasant and hard work for a lot of individuals. What do you remember of it personally within your family?

Val McDermid10:47

I do remember that sense of community. I was lucky, I suppose, I grew up in a family where we didn't have men who went out and spent their wages on drink. We had one of those solid, decent working class families. And I do remember that great sense of support and solidarity that was there through the good times and the bad times. This is not to say that these were all lovely, lovely, warm-hearted, splendid people, they weren't. But there was a strong sense of people doing things together.

Presenter11:12

Your grandfather took you down the mine, is that right?

Val McDermid11:14

He did once when I was probably about six. Strictly illegal. Can you can you imagine health and safety and

Presenter11:20

No, you took a sexual down the pit. I remember going down a pit as an adult and it was a pretty terrifying experience.

Val McDermid11:25

As a six-year-old, what did you make of it? I I felt as if I was descending into the bowels of hell, really. It was y the cage seems to drop like a stone and your stomach goes with it. And what I remember most vividly is is the the heat and the stink. It it stunk of of the smell of the coal, the smell of men working in a confined space, and I was very glad to get back to the surface and to be taken to the pit canteen for steamed pudding and custard.

Presenter11:52

Um tell me more about your dad.

Val McDermid11:54

My dad was a good fun, he was clever. But as usual for clever boys of that generation, working class, there was no option of him staying on at school after 14. He started work as a painter and decorator. Then the war came along and he lied about his age to get into the Black Watch. He was on the battery at the Forth Bridge when my grandfather, my other grandfather, was sent to jail for black marketeering. So my grandma, who had no money coming in, went off to the army and she daubed in my dad basically and said he'd signed up underage. So he then became a riveter in the shipyards. And later in the 1950s, when he saw the way that heavy industry was going, he left the shipyard and ended up working for the town council.

Presenter12:35

So was he a man of independent mind? I mean, was he somebody who sort of encouraged you to think then for yourself? Yes, it wasn't all.

Val McDermid12:41

Yes, he didn't always like the outcome of that, it has to be said. We were very alike temperamentally, so much of my teenage years was a bit of a battleground. Uh he didn't particularly uh agree with some of my political positions. So what were yours and what were his? Oh, I was way out there on the left. I was right up there. Totally radical lefty. Let's have some music, Val.

Presenter13:01

McDermott, it's your third. Tell me about this.

Val McDermid13:03

Well it's Shipbuilding, Elvis Costello, which ties in of course neatly with my dad as well, but this is a song that shows that when songwriting is at its best it can do just much more than just be a piece of fluff. It's an absolutely heartbreaking song, it's a beautiful song. And in a way it's kind of like crime fiction, you know, at its best it does much more than it says on the tin.

Presenter13:23

Is it worth it?

Speaker 113:28

And you have to call it

Speaker 213:31

And the shoes fall away

Speaker 213:35

And a bicycle on the boy's birthday It's just a rumor that was spread around town By the women and children Soon will be shipbuilding

Presenter13:52

Yeah.

Presenter13:54

Shipbuilding, Elvis Costello. So, Van McDermott, you were a clever girl, and at one point your family moved opposite the library, and I understand that you were in and out of that place on a daily basis. What were you reading? Crime fiction? I wonder what were you reading?

Val McDermid14:06

Nothing. No, there was no crime fiction unless you count Enid Blyton really and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Uh I just worked my way round the fiction shelves. Um and although you could take four books out at a time, two of them had to be non-fiction. Heaven forfend you should just have unmitigated pleasure. Um so I was reading really anything I could get my hands on and the library did become my my second home.

Presenter14:28

Um, growing up in Fife, you've said that you felt different from other people. Can you articulate that feeling?

Val McDermid14:34

I felt like an outsider. I didn't feel that my concerns were the same as the concerns of my contemporaries. I grew up in Kirkorian and I went to a school that was very strongly academic. But Fife was in many ways quite a parochial, quite a closed world. And generally speaking, in Fife, if you were bright, you went to Edinburgh or St Andrews University. If you weren't quite so bright, you went to Dundee or Stirling. And then you came back to Fife. Probably 85-90% of the people who taught me were from Fife. And I wanted something beyond those horizons. But I just assumed that was because the one thing I really wanted was to be a writer. Because in the 1960s, in Fife, there were no lesbians. They didn't exist. It wasn't even a word that crossed people's horizon, really. So I had no way of realising what my sexuality was and what that meant for me. Did you spend a lot of time?

Presenter15:28

A lot of time alone?

Val McDermid15:29

Yes. Uh I had a had a big Labrador retriever and the two of us used to often just go off for the day by ourselves, me and the Doug, and a book.

Presenter15:37

Now, here's something from your younger years that might help us figure out a bit more about you. You'd been to England just once, you went on a week's holiday to Blackpool, and you decided that you were going to go to Oxford University based on one weekend at Blackpool. Yes, that's quite a leap at the age of well. You went for the interview at 16, you were offered a place, you attended Oxford University from the age of 17. How did you find it?

Val McDermid15:52

Yes, that's hard.

Val McDermid15:58

Yeah.

Val McDermid16:05

It was a complete culture shock. It was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I mean, I ended up going there because of the books I'd read from the library, you know,'cause I'd read the Shaley School books and when people left the Shaley School books they either went to the Sorbonne or Oxford or the Kensington School of Needlework. And I knew I wasn't even going to the Kensington School of Needlework. And my French wasn't good enough for the Sorbonne, so that only left Oxford. Um, it was everything was different, even the vegetables were different. The accent was different. Nobody understood a word I said. You know, I come for fife ken where folks talk like that.

Val McDermid16:33

Where the spugs fly back with sketch the stew out of the rain. Aye. And nobody understood what I was saying, Ken. Tell me about the vegetables. Well, things I'd never seen before. I mean, mushrooms came out of a tin. I'd never seen a mushroom as a mushroom. I'd never seen red peppers or green peppers. I'd never seen watercress or celery. First time we went to an Italian restaurant, I looked at this and said, Pasta, what the hell's this? I knew what a pizza was, though. So I ordered a pizza. And this round flat thing came in. I'm like, that's not a pizza.

Presenter16:37

Tell me.

Val McDermid16:58

And everybody's looking at me like I'm completely mad. It's not a pizza. Pizza's half moon shaped and covered in batter.

Val McDermid17:05

And everybody's like, she is just seriously from another planet. There will be a few people listening who actually know what we're talking about. Deep fried pizza.

Presenter17:14

Delicious. Let's have some music then, Val McDermott. We're on uh we're on

Val McDermid17:17

On your fourth choice. This is the Allegro from the Brandenburg number six, and it's a wonderful piece of music. But this was one of my first experiences of classical music. And when I went to Oxford, one of the things that people tended to do was after dinner and evening, you'd go back to somebody's room and they'd put on some music generally. And this was one of the first pieces of classical music that I heard that actually something went ping inside my head, and I thought, that is amazing. There was something about the way that the music was constructed that really

Val McDermid17:46

Seemed to feed into my brain in a way that made everything sharper and brighter. And this also I have to say I associate with my first love because my final year at Oxford, I finally actually managed to fall in love with someone who fell in love with me. And when I hear this music, sometimes I can still picture sort of an autumn afternoon with the sun fading from the sky, sitting by a gas fire toasting crumpets, and you know, and and. So it takes me back in a good way as well to those years.

Presenter19:17

Part of the Allegro from Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. Six played by the English Baroque soloists with the conductor John Elliott Gardner.

Presenter19:26

So, Val McDermott, that was the music you toasted crumpets to and fell in love to, really, as well. That was the moment then that you realised what feeling different was about, was it?

Val McDermid19:35

Yeah. I think it was the it was the light bulb went on in my head. Was it difficult to reconcile? Not really, it just once it happens it

Presenter19:44

It's the most natural thing in the world. How did your mother deal with your sexuality, given that she was of the generation she was?

Val McDermid19:50

It was never an issue for either of my parents. You know, I s some sometimes people say, How do you think about writing a memoir? I go, Well, how can I write a memoir? I've got no bloody conflict My parents just took it in their stride and it was never ever

Presenter20:05

An issue with them. What were the other things at university that were hugely significant? What were the other things it gave you? I I learned to think.

Val McDermid20:12

I think I I found it tremendously exciting to be somewhere where you were judged principally by the quality of your mind and the quality of your discourse and not anything about where you came from or who you were or anything like that. You obviously didn't lack uh a fair degree of self-confidence. Well, I I suppose I grew up with uh the the notion that I was as good as anybody else. I mean, you know, my father had instilled in me that idea of, you know, call no man your master. And if you want to do something, then go for it.

Presenter20:42

Did you have your heart broken at university?

Val McDermid20:45

Oh yes. I was uh destroyed with grief.

Val McDermid20:49

But as you can see I somehow survived.

Presenter20:51

Right. What did you do? How did that manifest itself?

Val McDermid20:54

I wrote I wrote a lot of poetry, uh really quite bad poetry when you look at it now, but I wrote poetry. I also started writing prose fiction. And when I when I left Oxford I I started seriously t attempting to write a novel for the first time, and that a lot of that was about coming to terms with with what had happened.

Presenter21:12

Let's have some music to mend our broken hearts then. What are we going to hear now?

Val McDermid21:14

Right, then what do we got?

Val McDermid21:15

We're going to have Freeman in Paris from Joni Mitchell. The first time I properly went abroad was in my second year at Oxford, and my friend Fiona and I hitchhiked to Paris. And she had friends there, she said, that we could stay with. And her friends, as it turned out, had an apartment right opposite the Lysee Palace. So we got to stay in the maids' quarters. But we had no money, we were absolutely skint. And so I had taken my guitar and I literally did that busking in the metro. She was the pretty one, she went round with the hat, and I did the singing with the guitar. And this song always reminds me of that trip and that first adventure across the channel.

Presenter21:50

I was a free man in Paris, I felt unfettered and alive There was nobody calling me up for favours And no one's future to decide You know I go back there tomorrow But for the work I've taken on Stoking the Starmaker machinery Behind the popular song

Presenter22:20

Jonie Mitchell with Free Man in Paris. So, Valmont Damage, you you worked for a while at the Scottish tabloid, The Daily Record. That was in the mid seventies, and I'd like you, please, if you will, to

Presenter22:30

Uh just paint me a little picture of the culture in the newsroom at the Daily Record in the 1970s.

Val McDermid22:37

Masculine. There were three women reporters on the whole staff. When I joined, it's only been in the past six months that women had been allowed to wear trousers to work. Right. And it had also been relatively recent that women were allowed to do the night shift, because you wouldn't want women to be exposed to the horrors of a Glasgow night. No, indeed. And it was a culture of humongous amounts of alcohol. And I was being blessed or cursed with a very hard head for drink. So I did pretty well in that culture. I could hold my own. Could they make sense of you? I don't know that they ever really made sense of me, but what they liked was that I just went out and did the job. My nickname on the record was Killer.

Presenter23:19

Was it?

Val McDermid23:19

Oh, cause I just

Presenter23:21

went out and got the stories. When you were at the Daily Record and you were doing all the things that were required of you, what happened to your writing ambitions? Did you just think, well, you know, really it's pie in the sky? Because there you were, you know, an Oxford educated, smart girl.

Val McDermid23:34

Well, I went into tabloid journalism out of a sense, I think, of misplaced idealism because I believed that working people deserved newspapers that were informative and entertaining, and that if people like me walked away from that, then there was not really much prospect of it happening. As it turned out, I was completely wrong. The opposite happened. But all the time that I was working in newspapers, I was trying to write, trying to write fiction. I liked working the night shifts at the record because you got up at lunchtime, you went and had lunch with your pals, and then you had all afternoon to write. Being a journalist was always only what I did to pay the bills until I could be a writer.

Presenter24:07

When did you hold your first book printed with its uh dust jacket on in your hands?

Val McDermid24:12

87, um, ten days after my dad died, which was took all the guilt off the gingerbread, it has to be said. It is. Yeah. He'd seen the the cover flat, the jacket, but he never held the book in his hand. Um, and he died very suddenly, uh, out of the blue, really. He was uh going out onto the bowling green to play the finals of a Bulls match and he just dropped down dead with a massive heart attack. So it wasn't a time when your family was able to luxuriate in any way. No, we weren't popping the champagne corks. Uh it kind of went past me in a blur, really.

Presenter24:39

No, we weren't popping the champagne cup

Val McDermid24:45

And I have to say, you know, it was a first novel published by a feminist press. It was a paperback original at a time when paperbacks didn't get reviewed. So it was published in a sort of like, you know, echoing silence. So, really, the fact that I wasn't paying attention, there was nothing much to pay attention to, apart from the delight of actually finally having this book that I had worked so hard for so long to make. Let's have some music, Val. What are we going to hear now?

Presenter25:10

Yeah.

Val McDermid25:11

What we're going to hear now is the great Leonard Cohen. Joni Mitchell was one sort of bookend of my teens and Leonard Cohen was the other. And when I was thirteen I got a guitar and this was one of the very first songs I learned to play. So it has a very warm place in my heart. And over the years I have to say, you know, people talk about pushing a baby in a pram as a babe magnet. Let me tell you, singing them Leonard Cohen is another babe magnet.

Presenter25:34

I love you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm Your hair upon the pillow Like a sleepy golden star Yes, many love before us And know that we are not new in city

Presenter25:56

And in force they smiled like me and you, but now it's come to distances and say goodbye, Leonard Cohen singing it there, and you were accompanying him, Valmont Dermot. Still sing and play the guitar. Only for friends.

Val McDermid26:13

Um I don't uh perform publicly really anymore. Occasionally I get dragged into doing things, but it's it is kicking and screaming these days.

Presenter26:13

But

Presenter26:20

You are mother to Cameron, who is now twelve. Sometimes when we become parents, it it causes us to look back a bit at the sort of parents our parents were. Do you do that?

Presenter26:31

Sometimes here

Val McDermid26:31

my mother's voice coming out of my mouth and go like, No, no Um, I th yes, I think it does. I I I mean, one does look at one's own childhood and you go like, um, I'm never gonna do that But you I mean you you obviously l you learn from your own experience. Your mother lived not just to see your first book but many

Presenter26:47

Any of the subsequent books since would actually make it

Val McDermid26:49

She was very proud of it. Um she told everybody that except me really, mostly. But yes, she enjoyed it. And she enjoyed my books. She was a big fan of my books. She liked my work. How did you get on with your mum?

Val McDermid27:01

Um

Val McDermid27:02

We got on okay. We had a relationship that was sometimes quite difficult because I think we were just very, very different people. You know, my mum had spent her childhood being my grandfather's little princess, and then for my father, she was always his little princess. So she'd spent her life being danced attention on. But having said that, she was a very social person, she had lots of friends, she had a very active life. And, you know, she had great feminist instincts as well. You know, and this sounds like slightly mad, but she had a great feminist revolution in Kirkcotti Bowling Club to give the ladies equal rights of green time, which may sound like a slightly daft thing, but it was a big deal for those women playing bowls every afternoon that they could now play in the evenings as well. She didn't step aside the

Presenter27:44

Set in love.

Val McDermid27:44

allow you to be the little princess? I think she would have quite liked me to be a little princess, but I was too busy climbing trees and playing in the woods with my pals. Uh I was not the dream daughter I think that she she would have liked. Did you perplex her? I think I perplexed both my parents. Were it not for the fact that I looked so like my parents, I think they would have thought I was a changeling.

Val McDermid28:04

But, that doesn't mean they didn't care about me and didn't support me all along the way.

Presenter28:08

Time for some music, Velmac Dermas. We're on your oh, your seventh.

Val McDermid28:11

Well, this is the wonderful Aretha Franklin Say a Little Prayer. And this is a song I would have on my desert island to remind me of my wife and my kid. Kelly, my wife, has got a terrible voice. She won't mind me saying this. I'm sure she won't mind me saying this, but she's got the most tuneless voice I've ever heard. And so when we're in the car together, I forbid her to sing. But my son is much more tolerant. So when the pair of them are in the car together, they put on Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder and the Supremes, and they sing along at the top of their voices. And they love to sing this song together. And whenever I hear it, it brings a smile to my face because it reminds me of the two of them driving along, singing away at the top of their voices, thoroughly happy.

Speaker 128:50

Oh man, I wake up

Speaker 128:54

For I pull out my makeup, make up a selling print for you.

Speaker 129:01

I'm combing my hair now.

Speaker 129:05

And wondering what just to when I play a little prayer for you.

Presenter29:20

That was Aretha Franklin and Say a Little Prayer. We should talk for a moment, I think, about the idea of crime as entertainment. You know, th there's a view that turning murder, acts of sexual violence into books and T V dramas is tasteless. What do you think of that?

Val McDermid29:37

Well, I think we live in a society where these things happen. Do we want to not understand them? Generally it seems to me that one of the best ways to try and understand human beings, to understand the way we live, is to explore it through fiction. And I think that the best of crime fiction is exactly about that. It's about trying to understand why we do the things we do. You know, it could be said, I think there's some truth in this, that we get the crimes we deserve as a society. And until we actually start to understand what those crimes are and how they arise, there's not much prospect of putting them right.

Presenter30:10

I have read, Val MacDermott, that when you were once asked to describe your life in six words, the words were, They said I couldn't do it. Is that what gives you the most delight?

Val McDermid30:19

I think I get a certain amount of delight from that, yes, um from from achieving the things that uh people like me are not supposed to achieve. There's a pleasure in that.

Presenter30:28

And your father's b Bernseyan, if we can call it that, philosophy of a man's a man for all that, do you try to to pass that on to your son?

Val McDermid30:36

Yes, yes, very much so. And and Burden's is still, you know, part of my life too. I mean, I I tend to do the immortal memory at the village Burden's supper. Um it's interesting, I think, as as you get older somehow these traditions of your youth uh reinvent themselves in in

Presenter30:51

A new form. You live, as we mentioned earlier, in Northumberland, and you talked about how important it was creatively for you to live by the water. I'm casting you away. You will permanently be surrounded by water on this island. I'm imagining you're probably quite a practical soul. It won't hold too many fears for you.

Val McDermid31:05

It'll be fine. I mean I I I do worry slightly that I have become a little deskilled in recent years because my wife is very, very practical and all the things that I've spent my adult life doing she's sort of kind of subverted and taken from me. But I'm sure I can manage to to look after myself reasonably well. And how will you cope with the loneliness? Uh make up people in my head to talk to as as I normally do. It won't be very much different from from normal life really. It's time for you.

Presenter31:33

Your final piece of music then, Velmac Vermont. What are we going to hear?

Val McDermid31:35

Well, what we're going to hear is a kind of portmanteau choice. The song is Downtown Lights, and it's a song originally from the Blue Nile, a terrific Scottish band. And their lead singer and songwriter, Paul Buchanan, I think has an extraordinary gift. Whenever I hear his songs for the first time, I feel as if I've always known them, as if they've always been part of my musical memory. And the version of it I have chosen is by a guy called Rab Noakes. And Rab's from Fife. And when I was a teenager growing up and playing in folk clubs and singing with other folk singers, Rab was really one of my heroes. And I used to sometimes sing with him and Barbara Dixon and Archie Fisher and various other people in the Elbow Room and Kirkardi. So this song, I suppose, incorporates my life now and my life then, so many of the things that have shaped me and made me who I am. So for me, it's a great song to finish with.

Speaker 232:31

Sometimes I walk away Uh

Val McDermid32:37

Then all I really wanna do

Presenter32:42

Uh

Presenter32:45

Is love then hold you right?

Presenter32:51

There is just one thing I

Val McDermid32:55

I can say

Presenter32:56

Yeah.

Val McDermid32:59

Nobody loves you

Presenter33:05

The downtown lights, Rap Noakes, singing there. So it's time, Val, for me to uh give you the books. I give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take another book along to the island to read. What would you like?

Val McDermid33:16

Lights tick.

Presenter33:17

Yeah.

Val McDermid33:17

I think I'd like to take the complete works of Robert Louis Stevenson, all smashed up into one big volume. Okay, you may have that. And a luxury, too. I would like a computer, a solar powered laptop, fired up with a new game every month. It can only be used for games.

Presenter33:34

Right. Are you a gamer? I am a gamer. Right. And one to save, which track would you save from the waves? I think probably the Bach, because it incorporates so many different moods. Right. It's yours, Val McDermott. Thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. It's been a pleasure.

Presenter34:30

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio4.