Juliet Stevenson
I stumbled upon Val McDermid’s work in a bizarre way. I was watching the latest MI-5 on DVD and there was a new female lead Hermione Norris. I liked her so I looked to see what else she was in and stumbled across Wire in the Blood a British series that starred Norris and Robson Green. In the last months I have been making my way through Wire in the Blood on DVD. Next, I’m going to start reading her books.
The good folks at PBS sent me a screener for a Place of Execution which airs tonight and next week starring Juliet Stevenson (A Previous Engagement and Bend it Like Beckham) and Greg Wise (Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility.) When I opened it I was excited to see that it was based on an original novel by Val McDermid. I knew immediately it would be good.
A Place of Execution tells two parallel stories, the first a 40 years old murder investigation of a 13-year-old girl from the small town of Scardale in the north of England, and the contemporary investigation by a journalist of that same unsolved murder that nobody can seem to forget. Stevenson plays Catherine Heathcote a workaholic journalist who can’t seem to find time for her troubled daughter, but her investigation into the murder opens up a new opportunity for mother and daughter to find a path back to each other and at the same time reveals a whole load of other personal issues that Catherine had no idea were a part of the story.
I submitted some questions to Val McDermid and she was kind enough to take the time to answer them.
Women & Hollywood: You write such strong female characters do you feel closer to any one of them in particular?
Val McDermid: It’s hard to choose because whenever I am in the thick of it with a book, those characters are always particularly immediate. But if I had to pick, I suspect I’d choose Carol Jordan. There’s something about the way her tenacity, her fierce commitment to justice and her intelligence all drive her to overcome her damage and her vulnerabilities that is very attractive to me.
W&H: I just read today that Jessica Mann has quit reviewing books because she feels that the content has become anti-woman and that women are equally responsible for creating this situation because they write graphic violence in order to sell books. Do you agree with Mann? Have crime novels become too graphically violent against women?
VM: I’ve grown so tired of my words being misquoted and manipulated on this subject, I’ve actually blogged on it this week for The Guardian.
Val McDermid
W&H: I have been obsessively watching the Wire in the Blood series on Netflix here in the states and love the relationship between Tony Hill and Carol Jordan- mutual respect with a little bit a sexual tension thrown in. How did you create such a real, respectful partnership?
VM: When I first wrote The Mermaids Singing, I didn’t intend it as the start of a series. So setting Carol and Tony in professional collusion but emotional opposition to each other was just another way of creating narrative tension in what was supposed to be a stand alone novel. But when I reached the end of that book, I realised that I had generated a dynamic between them that offered interesting possibilities, both personally and professionally. The more I’ve written about them, the more I’ve managed to find extra dimensions to their relationship, which is one of the reasons I keep returning to them. To me, what I did with them is no different from what I always do when I’m developing characters and relationships – I trawl through my mental database of friends and family and lovers and strangers overheard in bars and train carriages till I find some clues that offer me a way in. I’m a vampire, sucking all the life out of everyone I come into contact with so my creations can live!
W&H: You said this in an interview: “Women write about violence in a different way from men. While men may be victims of violence more often than women, they are still uncomfortable with the notion of themselves as victims. So they write about violence from the outside.” Can you elaborate on that?
VM: From being little girls, women are warned about the possibility of victimhood. ‘Don’t walk through the park alone.’ ‘Don’t stay out after dark.’ ‘Never talk to strange men.’ Our brothers and our male classmates get to do things and go places that we are warned off because unspecified “Bad Things” will happen to us. As we get older, elements of society are eager to point out to us that female victims of assault and rape ‘were asking for it’ and somehow contributed to their own downfall by not behaving ‘properly’. We are aware of the threat of dark alleys, the danger of men who have had too much to drink, the hazards of late-night car parks. Our experience of the world is very different from that of men.
It is ironic that most violence, statistically, is visited on young men. But those crimes are generally explosive moments that flow directly from confrontations fueled mostly by drink and drugs. It may sound callous, but this sort of crime isn’t very interesting to writers or readers.
What fascinates us as readers and writers are the dark crimes, the psychological impulses to violence, the corruption of the killer, the fear and terror they engender and the excitement of the chase to bring them to justice. Those are the crimes where the victims tend to be women, children or gay men.
When women write about that kind of crime, we write with the empathy of people who have been raised in an environment of potential victimhood. It doesn’t take much imaginative effort to put ourselves in the shoes of the victims and so we write from within the violence. When we do it well, that has the power to frighten all our readers. For male writers, who have been raised with a different mindset about their place in the world, it’s a much tougher journey to get to the same place.
W&H: Do you feel that your female characters are feminists?
VM: That begs the question of what a feminist is. I’m sure there are people who think my women are radical feministas and others who consider them to be hopelessly lily-livered and in thrall to the patriarchy! As far as I’m concerned, any woman who is determined to live her life on her own terms is a feminist. I would say that applies to my female protagonists. Of course there are other characters in my books who epitomize everything that would make a feminist tear her hair out…
W&H: The British seem to show strong women detectives on screen more than we do here in the US. For example Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect. Patricia Cornwell’s books have not yet made it to the screen and Sarah Paretsky’s one film based on her books was a disaster. Only Kathy Reichs has managed to get a very good series based on her books on the air. Why have you and other British crime authors been more successful getting your material translated.
VM: I don’t know why that should be. Perhaps it has something to do with the long tradition of adaptation on British TV. Agatha Christie’s work led the charge and her success led producers to see the detective novel as fertile ground for adaptation. It’s hard to think of a long-running British mystery series that they’ve not had a stab at. (And you should remember that what you see are the best of the bunch – you don’t get the slew of truly terrible turkeys that show up on our screens…)
W&H: Juliet Stevenson plays your female lead who is a workaholic mother whose daughter is desperate to find some connection to her mother. Yet Catherine has a fractured relationship to her own mother. First how great was it to have Juliet in the cast, what did she bring to the role, and second talk a little bit more about the character and what it might say about the state of women and mothers today.
VM: I’d discussed casting with Sandra Jobling, the executive producer, and Juliet’s name came up early. But neither of us really believed we’d get so lucky. So when we got the news that she’d agreed, we were literally screaming down the phone at each other. Juliet’s an intelligent, empathetic actress. Everything I’ve seen her in has grown in stature because of her presence. I love the intensity she brings to Catherine Heathcote. When you’re watching her, there’s never a moment when the suspension of disbelief even wavers.
Patrick Harbinson’s adaptation gave her a mother and daughter she lacked in the book, and by doing so, he found an extra twist to the story that works brilliantly in TV terms but I suspect would not have come off in the book. It’s one of those examples of how storytelling works differently in the two forms. I think he’s generated another dimension to the relationships in Catherine’s life, and it does raise interesting questions about modern women’s lives.
W&H: Do you have any advice for writers just starting out?
VM: Two things.
Make a space in your life for writing and do not compromise it. It doesn’t matter if it’s an hour every morning, one evening a week or an hour after the kids have gone to bed. Make that time sacrosanct. The words will soon pile up. I wrote my first four books on Monday afternoons between 2pm and 7pm.
Don’t get bogged down trying to write the perfect first chapter. You’ll never succeed. Just hammer on to the end. Get that first draft down. Then go back and make it better.
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