Val McDermid: 'I'm working class – I wouldn't be able to go to Oxford now'

The titan of tartan noir talks about misogynistic trolls, Scottish independence and why this government is taking Britain back to Victorian levels of inequality

‘We’re going back to Bleak House’ … Scottish author Val McDermid in St Cuthbert’s graveyard, Edinburgh Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

Hannah Ellis-Petersen

Tuesday 25 August 2015 The Guardian

Val McDermid is standing in St Cuthbert’s graveyard in Edinburgh, surveying the weathered tombs without much enthusiasm. This interview venue – my choice – came from the misguided belief that an author who has spent her life writing about murder might feel at home surrounded by graves. It turns out that the atmosphere of the place is completely lost on her.

“His talents adored the profession of his choice, his life recommended the gospel which he preached in every relation of life,” I read aloud off a 19th-century gravestone. “He died universally regretted.”
There’s a pause. “Well, he sounds like he was fun on a Saturday night,” says McDermid, who gives a short, sharp laugh and wanders off.

The Scottish novelist is not one to mince her words, either in her books or in person. Now 60, McDermid emerged in the late 1980s with her pioneering Lindsay Gordon series, which featured the “shocking’” inclusion of a cynical lesbian journalist as the main protagonist, and since then she has published dozens of bloody and suspense-filled novels, selling more than 11m copies around the world. Lauded by critics, in 2010 she was awarded one of the highest accolades in crime fiction: the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding achievement. Her appearance at the Edinburgh book festival tonight, where she will be interviewed by Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon, sold out instantly.
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