VAL McDERMID – A Promising Start & A Change of Direction

My then-girlfriend read a lot of those books as well, and thought that this was how we were going to get rich, that we should harness my talent. Because I wasn’t at that point making very much money. I was barely making a living. I was going to write this massive door stopper of a book, and it was going to earn us millions in a six-way auction.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is one of the biggest names in crime fiction, Val McDermid, a number one bestselling author, her books have been translated into 40 languages and sold over 60 million copies worldwide. She’s written six novels featuring private investigator Kate Brannigan, and six about freelance journalist Lindsay Gordon, and a series of so far 11 thrillers featuring clinical psychologist Tony Hill spawned six series of the ITV drama, Wire in the Blood. Her latest novel, Still Life, the sixth in a series about DCI Karen Pirie, has just come out in paperback, and she co-created the BBC drama series, Traces, currently running on iPlayer. Dubbed Scotland’s Queen of Crime by, well, everyone, Val McDermid, welcome to the off-cut straw.

Thank you, it’s really nice to be here and do a deep dive into my past.

It sounds quite sinister. I can’t help noticing that in the introduction, I did say an awful lot of number sixes just then, six Kate Brannigan, six Lindsay Gordon, six Karen Piries. At the risk of sounding completely superficial, is six your lucky number by any chance?

It’s entirely accidental. The reason why there are six Brannigans and six Lindsay Gordon is because they kind of stopped speaking to me. I stopped having the ideas that worked for them. And the reason why we’re on six Karen Pirie is that’s just what the last one was and there will be more Karen Pirie. I’m absolutely sure of that.

Right, well, let’s kick off with your first off-cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Yeah, this is a pitch document with some sample dialogue for a TV series idea I had. It was going to be called WDC 2 and I wrote it in 2001 when I was living in Manchester.

Manchester, in the new millennium. Gunchester, Gaychester, Madchester. Schizophrenia City, a music scene that throws up talent like Morrissey, M People and Noel Gallagher with monotonous regularity. Drug and Club Capital of the UK, Centre of Academic Excellence, a year away from hosting the Commonwealth Games, light years away from Coronation Street. Against this dark, fragmented background, two women police officers try to hold back the night. Lee Kane and Maggie Peters move to the beat of the city centre. A pair of mavericks unwillingly yoke together to do the job in a way no-one has ever seen before.

Exterior, car park, night. Maggie and Lee are standing by the boot of a saloon car. The body language of the women is ambiguous. There is some kind of negotiation taking place, some jockeying for position. It could almost be the off-key prelude to a sexual encounter.

So what do we do now?

What do you want to do now?

I’ve never done this before.

You want me to show you? Take you by the hand?

You want me to do it right?

Maggie moves towards Lee. Just when a collision seems inevitable, she swerves and walks round to the driver’s door.

I’ll drive.

That’s a start.

As the car doors open, the interior lights up and we see a police radio and an interior that looks like a skip on wheels. Interior, moving car, moss side, night. Lee is driving. Maggie is leaning back in her seat, smoking. Through the car windows, we catch glimpses of tactical aid group vehicles and tag officers with their Kevlar vests. The streets are otherwise empty.

Testosterone City.

Ah, you’ve got to pity them. It’s all they’ve got left.

I don’t mind so much if it worked, but the crap. I’ve seen rookies with better arrest records. Soon as they show up at one end of the estate, everything moody funnels out the other end. Every bit of hooky gear, every packet of smack, every dodgy tow rag with a warrant outstanding. Only villains they catch are the ones other villains want them to catch.

You reckon we should just leave it alone then? Let the bad lads get on with it.

Have you listened to a word I’ve said all these weeks?

Only the important bits, white, no sugar.

We don’t just leave it alone. We go for something that works, not something that looks good.

Like what?

Like you and me, softly, softly, putting the word out and doing the business without any assistance from Mr. Heckler or Mr. Cock.

I’m glad you said that, because there’s something niggling at the back of my mind.

What kind of something?

Maggie lowers the window and flicks her cigarette into the night.

Now, when you sent this in, you described this as my idea for a minimalist cop series that nobody showed the slightest interest in making. Had you submitted it to people then?

Yeah, we tried it out on various television companies. Back in 2001, there wasn’t the great range of things like Netflix and Amazon. You were kind of stuck with the mainstream of BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, I think was around there. I’m not quite remember. And I’ve been doing quite a bit of work trying to get a series away with a friend of mine who was a television producer who had some track record. And I had this idea of a late night, half hour cop show that never goes into a police station. It’s these two women working the streets at night with a very different approach. And I thought it was a really good idea. I did a treatment that outlined 10 episodes. And even looking at it now, I still think, this is a good idea. Somebody should have made this. But probably the fact that they had a lesbian as one of the two lead roles didn’t help. We once pitched Lindsay Gordon, to ITV’s head of drama, must have been sometime in the 90s. And he sent the snotty-est letter back to the producer I was working with saying, are you stupid sending me this?

What?

The notion of having a lesbian in the lead role of a television drama that wasn’t all about angst and grief and pain and coming out was absolute anathema at that point. So that was probably part of the problem.

You’d already published some of the novels that became the Wire in the Blood TV series. Did you know the TV series for that was in the works when you wrote this?

It was sort of on the horizon. We’d had various interest in the books over the few years before that, but 2001 we’d just started talking to Coastal Productions, which is Robson Green’s production company who went on to make Wire in the Blood. So we were at the very early stages of negotiation and I was quietly confident that we might get something away this time after lots and lots of frustrations. When you start off in your career as a writer of novels, people come along and option your books for television or for film, and the first couple of times it happens, you get incredibly excited because you think, my book’s going to be on the telly, I’m going to be a film. And after this has happened a few times, you become quite sort of, oh yeah, it’s another option. So you don’t get overexcited about it, but yeah, by 2001 I was pretty sure something was going to happen.

Okay, time for another offcut now. Tell us about this one.

Oh, this is probably my first attempt at a crime story. I think I wrote it round about 1976, looking at the paper it’s typed on, and it’s called Birdman.

At the street door, the girl with blood on her hands forced some of the tautness out of her body and casually walked out into the street. Her caution was unnecessary. There was no one in sight. This was not after all where people were on the streets that hour of the night. And she walked easier in that assurance. Her eyes opened to catch any glimpse of a police car. Her steps rang out on the concrete as she walked on, not too slowly, but not quickly enough to catch attention should someone chance upon her. When she reached the main street, the girl with blood on her hands walked more slowly, letting the feeling of release flow through her bones, being sure that no one could or would suspect her. She had no motive known to anyone but herself and the murdered body lying on the rug. A crime of passion, yes, but not a passion anyone would guess at or believe in if it should cross their minds momentarily. She had loved that face that lay grinning in rage on the bloody rug. She had loved those fine bones that lay crushed under the weight of her death. They would never have comprehended, but most of all, she had loved herself. As the night fog began to thicken around her, she turned into her hallway and climbed her stairs till she stood before the door of her flat. The girl with blood on her hands dug the Yale key out of her trouser pocket and fumbled it into the lock. As she turned it, her mind was flooded with a vision of the room she had left and her relief flowed into the new shape of horror. She saw the picture she had created, an out of focus background and vivid against a stark white goatskin rug before the gas fire, a sprawled corpse with a skull like grin and a red stain slowly turning brown on a Navy and white striped sweater. The girl with blood on her hands pushed open the door to her flat with some violence. She walked down her hallway and into her bathroom. The girl with blood on her hands washed them under a gush of steaming water. She glanced once in the mirror. My face smiled back at me with a new look in the eyes.

21, you wrote this, you had been to school and university. So where were you at this point in your life and career?

I was a trainee journalist in Devon. And I was determined, I had been determined since I was about nine years old, that I was going to be a writer when I grew up. Ever since I’d read a book where one of the characters who was a writer opened a letter from her publisher and there was a check in it. And I realized she actually got paid for doing this. I thought, I could do that, I can tell lies. I spent most of my teens writing the kind of bad poetry and song lyrics that people do at that age. And occasionally trying to write bits of prose. I think the very first attempt at writing a crime story was when I was about 12 or 13 and we were looking at the Sherlock Holmes stories and our homework assignment was to write a detective story. And the only thing I remember about it was it was about a diamond robbery, but it hasn’t survived and probably just as well. But this was written at a time when I was trying to write literary fiction. I’d finished at Oxford and I thought that people like me should be writing the great English novel. But I’d read crime fiction all through my life, since I was about nine or 10. And I guess at that point I was trying on different forms and different styles of writing to see where I might land. And I wrote this because somebody had really, really annoyed me. She treated me really badly and I was very fed up. And so I wrote this story.

Where you were the murderer and she was presumably the victim, was she?

Yes, yes.

Did she ever get to see this?

No. So she never knew.

So this was the start of your writing of crime stories. Did you write more before you moved into writing a novel? Was it sort of one of a series or was it just a one-off random attempt?

It was a one-off. I was trying to, I think, understand the shape of short stories at the time and really struggling with how they work. And I’ve still, to this day, I don’t think I really understand how short stories work, even though, I mean, I’ve now published slightly fewer than I have published novels, oddly enough. But I still, I’m never quite sure that something’s the idea for a short story or if it’s actually the subplot of a novel.

Having written this short story, did you find yourself going, yes, this is what I need to do? Or did you then go and explore a load of other areas before you eventually came back to the crime novel?

The short story didn’t really open the door into crime for me as a fledgling writer. I think because I didn’t see the kind of work I wanted to do in the crime novels that were around at the time. Back in the 1970s, most of what was available in the UK certainly was village mysteries and police procedurals. And I reckon I didn’t know enough about the police to write about them in that fictitious way. And certainly, having grown up in Scottish mining communities, I didn’t understand English villages either. So, and they were very middle-class worlds that I didn’t really feel that I had the kind of understanding about that means you can write about them with authenticity. So it was, I suppose, it was a start of exploring that sort of psychological response that I didn’t feel there was anywhere I could go with it at that point. Ruth Rendell was doing a bit of this sort of psychological stuff. And of course, there was the work of Patricia Highsmith in the background, but I didn’t see myself writing those kind of books. And what really made it happen for me was two things really. William McElvaney’s book, Laidlaw, which is a Scottish, the start of the Scottish crime fiction boom really in the late 1970s. And that had a working class setting in Glasgow. But as well as very real feeling dialogue, what it also had was beautiful poetic language. The description was extraordinary. And so that was one strand. And the other was the arrival on these shores of the American New Wave feminist private eyes, like Sarah Paretsky. And I thought, oh yeah, this is the real thing. Here’s somebody who’s got a brain and a sense of humor and she doesn’t have to get the guys in every time it gets difficult. And it was kind of site specific. There was a sense that this story could only happen in Chicago because of the structure of the city and the kind of jobs people did and the kind of lives they led. So it felt organic. And I thought, this is what I want to write. And that was a good seven or eight years later, 82, Indemnity only came out. So it was a bit of time between me writing a first attempt at a crime story and actually finding something approximating to a voice.

Moving on now, let’s have your next off-cut.

Yeah, this is a poem called Pilot, as in Pontius Pilot. And I wrote it for my school magazine in 1972. And it was subsequently picked up by the Scotsman newspaper who did an annual review of school magazines and chose it as the best poem of the year in school magazine.

I thought you were a miracle or a saint when you first approached with your fingers poised. But no, you performed a surgical operation so clean that no blood remained on your ebony fingers, an appendectomy on the vague sunshiny happiness which I brought along with me in my universal gift. Then you handed me the do-it-yourself disposable two-piece balsa wood kit, rusty nails supplied at no extra cost. Now, on this spring hillside, it has grown dark and already the vultures are dicing for the entrails of my happiness which lie at my feet. As I look on, detached somehow, I cannot even make you the excuse of knowing not what you do. We both know about ghosts and resurrection and that sort of thing, but I am still not sure whether it is you or me who is the sun.

This is a very interesting poem. I noticed that you’d said that they thought it was about religion, but it wasn’t. Can you tell us the story behind this very sophisticated poem for, how old were you, 16, 17?

Yeah, 16, 17, yeah, that sort of age. Yeah, because I used religious imagery and religious metaphor, people assumed it was some sort of Christian sort of poem. And it wasn’t at all, it was a love poem. When in doubt, always go back to the notion that I’m probably writing something about love. So again, I suppose that the notion of love and death comes into play here. And it’s a poem that was inspired by someone who I was in love with and clearly was not in love with me, but was interested in the idea of me trying to become a writer. And so gave me a lot of support in that area, but didn’t understand what I was trying to say half the time. So I guess it’s a poem born of frustration and miscommunication and not always having the courage to say directly what was in my heart, because it was kind of difficult when I was like 16, 17 in the late 60s, early 70s in small town in Scotland where I was growing up. And there was no concept of gay life, gay culture. There were no lesbians. I’ve often said you’d be more likely to find a unicorn in Fife when I was growing up than an out lesbian. So I suppose there’s an element of willful obscurity going on that I’m kind of trying to hide. I was trying to say what I want to say, but also trying to hide myself at the same time.

Do you think the subject of the poem knew what you were trying to say, or did they think it was religious as well?

No, she knew, she understood that, but she didn’t want to acknowledge it.

Because it’s quite an angry poem, full of the kind of angst that those sort of poems should be.

Well, you know, that’s what you’re 16, you’re supposed to be full of angst. You’re supposed to say nobody understands me.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. Now I read that you had an unusual schooling that you were put up a year. Did the moving up affect your writing, the subjects you chose, do you think?

I don’t know, I think this was an experiment that Fife Council did for a while in 1960s, where they took the brightest two or three kids from each primary school class and sent us off to high school a year early. And it might have been easier on us if they’d just mixed us through the year, but they put us in a separate class, and we were called 1E, which was supposed to be E for early, but everybody would go, oh, it’s E for experiment. You’re just an experiment. And so by the time we became part of the school general population, we were already marked as outsiders. And that sense of expectation had been laid upon us. And your teachers would say, you should be doing better than that. You were in the E class. So I think what it did provoke in me was that sense of, I suppose defensiveness of being an outsider and not being part of the group in quite the same way as other people were. And that’s a good thing for a writer. That sort of that detachment, that sense of being on the outside and observing is a very useful facility.

And it presumably also spurred you on. Were you slightly competitive as a consequence?

I don’t know. It’s hard to say because you’ve only got the life you lived, but certainly I always had a sort of strong determination to do well. I think I was brought up in a household where the works of Robert Burns were as powerful as Holy Writ, really. My dad was a great Burns man, and I was brought up with the idea as the poem, A Man’s A Man For All That, that external things are not how you judge yourself. The rank is but the guinea stamp. The man is the gowd for all that. And that I should be the best I could be. And the only thing standing between me and being the best I could be was me. So I had that sense of not letting myself down. And I’ve always had that sort of terrible sort of sense of, you know, if you’ve got a talent and you don’t maximize it, then somehow it’s a sin against nature. Terrible Scottish Presbyterianism.

Well, it hasn’t served you too badly. Okay, next off cut, please. What’s this one?

This is a play that I wrote in the late 1970s. It started as one of my great English novels, which I wrote around about 1975, 76. Then it became a play and a radio play, and it’s called Like a Happy Ending.

Scene 12.

I told Olivia that you did not want to speak to her.

You did what? How dare you? Have you gone mad?

I have not. I have done the right thing at last. I have done what I should have done a long time ago. This so-called love that you and Olivia have been deluding yourselves about must stop. It can’t go on. I won’t have you see her again.

Don’t be ridiculous. We’re going on a holiday together tomorrow.

You’re not going anywhere. Can’t you see this thing is wrong?

What the hell are you saying? You must be out of your mind, right and wrong. What has that to do with anything? I love her. I love her. Can’t you understand that?

You don’t know what love means.

To you? You with all your bloody love, what have you done? You drove my father from me. You killed him, damn you. And now you dare to tell me what is right and what is wrong? You try to own me, that’s what it is. You pretend it’s because Liv’s a woman that you hate it, but you really don’t want me to have anyone but you. That’s why you forced my father to go.

Will you calm down and behave like a normal human being? You don’t know what you’re talking about. You worship your father without knowing the first thing about him or the way he treated people. Your father leaving us was the best thing that ever happened to us. That’s not true. It’s not. You put him on a pedestal. You’re doing the same thing with your precious Olivia, and there’s nothing for you either. Nothing. Nothing except a perverted way of life masquerading under the name of love. A life that means lies, that means losing your family, your church, all that you have held important in your life. Will you wake up to reality?

If that’s reality, you can stop it. What do you know about it? You never gave love in your life. You just demand it. All the time you demand it. You insist in your mind that I’m your mirror image. I’m not. I’m me. I love Olivia. I chose it. Our love is good and strong, and nothing you ever gave me has been anything like it. And I’m going to stick with her.

You can’t stop me. Can’t I? She won’t stay with you. She’ll get tired and go. Or you’ll get tired like your bloody father, too weak to carry the burden of loving.

No bloody wonder he got tired of it with you. I bloody hate you. Oh, God, how I’ve grown to hate you.

Put that phone down.

Fuck you, mother.

Get out.

Get out of here.

Get out of this house.

Janet holds her head high, stares at Elizabeth, then turns on her heel and walks out.

Oh, God, what have I done? I didn’t mean it to be like this. I only wanted to make it clear for her.

Goodness me.

Storm and Drang.

Tell me the story of this.

I wrote this novel, and it’s about this tortured human relationship. It’s kind of based around my first great love affair in my final year at Oxford, where I fell in love with someone who fell in love with me. But she had lots of conflicted history about her own family who were devout Catholics. There was all sorts of difficult stuff going on in the background, and it all imploded in a very dramatic way. And she tried to kill herself in the great lesbian tradition, unsuccessfully, thank goodness. But it was pretty traumatic, and it all blew up just before my finals, which I can’t help feeling didn’t entirely help. But I somehow got myself through all that, and with the general principle of everything is material, I decided that I was going to write this great English novel about this relationship. And it’s a novel that has three different voices, and it’s terrible. It’s really, truly terrible.

Can I ask, are you the voice in the scene that we just heard? Was that you or your girlfriend talking to her mother?

She was much posher than me.

So that was the relationship that existed between the girlfriend and the mother, not between you and your mother.

Yes, not between me and my mother. Obviously, I wasn’t present for these interactions, but they were reported back to me in some graphic detail. And also, my imagination let rip as well, because as usual, I was quite annoyed. And I wrote this novel. One thing I will say about it is that I actually finished it, and I started sending it off to publishers who sent it back pretty promptly, mostly my return of post. I’d say by the end, I was getting letters from people I hadn’t even sent it to. I’ve heard about this book, don’t send it to us. But I had a good friend who was an actor, and I showed it to her, and to this day, she will not tell me whether she was being diplomatic or if she really meant it, but she said, I don’t know much about novels, but I think this would make a great play. And I didn’t really know how to write a play, so I thought, well, just cross out the descriptions and leave in the dialogue and it will be a play. And so that was essentially what I did. I went through the manuscript and I kept the dialogue in that I thought worked, then wrote some extra scenes to cover the bits that crossed out. I went off to a local theatre. I was working in Plymouth at the time as a trainee journalist down there, and the local theatre company were doing a series of studio plays, new plays in the small space, and the director said, I’d love to do this. It’s perfect for what I have in mind. And so entirely by accident, at the age of 23, I was a professionally performed playwright.

That’s fantastic.

And I had no idea what I’d done right. On the back of it, I got an agent. We sold it to BBC Radio and it ended up, it was initially supposed to be for Radio 4, and they got cold feet because of the subject matter, and then it was going to go for Radio 3, and they got cold feet because of the subject matter, and it ended up on Radio Scotland. I think it was just because the producer was based in Edinburgh and he made it and he was determined it was going to go out somewhere. But I was working in Manchester by that time and I actually remember driving up the M6, halfway up the M6 to try and get reception to listen to it on the night it went out on air. It was ridiculous. Then I was sitting in the car park of the services at Fortin Services listening to the car radio for my magnum opus. And so that was where I suppose my paid writing life got started.

With that play. So nothing came of the book. It didn’t go on later to be published.

Oh, thank God. I’d have no career now, I think, if it had been.

Can I just ask what happens in the end? What is the like a happy ending?

Olivia, the other character, moves on with her life.

So the mother was right?

Yes, essentially. Well, she’s right because she’s not given a choice. The other one has basically a breakdown. And that’s what happened. This was also back in the nearer when, you know, like all lesbian novels had to end miserably. And the nearest you could get to a happy ending was somebody not killing themselves.

And they didn’t kill themselves in this?

No.

So it was like a happy ending.

Yeah.

Good title. Well done. OK, time for another off cut now. What have we got?

This is called Revenge. And in 1991, it was my attempt at writing a sort of Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins style bonkbuster novel.

Tears blurred the contessa’s vision as she hastily opened the paper to shut out the hateful print. A family funeral. Was that all they could find to say about the worst event of her whole life? While her eyes drifted over the pages, taking nothing in, she let her mind run free again over the hell of the last few days. As she flicked over another page on automatic pilot, she was shocked into awareness by the realization that her own face was staring back at her. Startled, she read the headline on the gossip page. Heart of Stone. Has Mickey got what it takes? The smart money says that David Stone’s vast personal fortune, as well as his holdings in the multinational Swordstone Corporation, will now pass into the hands of his born-again bimbo daughter Morgan, La Contessa di Fior Diligi. La Contessa, Mickey to her friends, used to be a serious young lady who won a scholarship to New College Oxford after a clutch of brilliant A-level results at St Margaret’s Lyme Regis. In her student days, Mickey, 24, boasted to anyone who’d listen that one day she’d be running Swordstone. But she never completed her economics degree, dropping out after her second year to marry the eligible Giancarlo, Conto di Fior Diligi, in a spectacular love match that took Italian high society by storm. After their secret wedding ceremony, held in private because Mickey’s mother was dying of cancer, Giancarlo whisked her away to the family palazzo in Trendi Fiorioli, where she became little more than a hostess and clothes horse, particularly after the birth of their daughter, Lisanne. They soon became the toast of the Florentine farcette, with Mickey appearing in fashion spreads in half the magazines on the continent and not just the ones owned by Swordstone, described as one of the loveliest women in Europe. The big question now is whether Mickey has the nerve or the nouse to take over her father’s business and whether the tough guys at Swordstone will just sit back and let her try. I used to read these books when I was growing up. When I looked at this, I thought, that’s spot on. Why didn’t it get published?

Because it was awful.

But they’re all awful. This is no worse than anything else. I thought it was exactly right.

Well, thank you. What it probably should have been was like much more media empire stuff. And it ended up being on a much more parochial scale. It was a mad, mad idea. My then girlfriend read a lot of those books as well and thought that this was how we were going to get rich, that we should harness my talent, because I wasn’t at that point making very much money.

Were you still a journalist or were you now a writer at this point?

I had just quit the day job. So I had jumped out of the mink lined cage into writing as a tax loss, which was for the first couple of years. I mean, everyone thought I was crazy when I gave up my job. I was the Northern Bureau Chief of a National Sunday newspaper. I had an expense account. I had a company car. I still had a pension because Robert Maxwell had jumped off his yacht at that point. And I threw it all up because I thought I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to take this chance. And so, as I said, my then girlfriend decided that this was what was going to make us rich. I was going to write this massive door stopper of a book, and it was going to earn us millions in a six-way auction.

That’s very precise.

Yeah, and so I wrote it. I was writing it side by side with writing the crime novel I was writing at the time, which would have been a Kate Brannigan novel. So it was almost like in the mornings I wrote this, and in the afternoon I was writing Kate Brannigan. And I finished it. I’ve got a tendency to finish things even when I should throw them in the bin. And it just didn’t sell. My agent, God bless her, tried so hard to sell it. And I think it just wasn’t quite bad enough in some ways.

I did like the little mention of her very good A-level results. I thought that was a really nice touch. The sort of thing that somebody like me who would have been reading it at 16, 17, would have gone, oh right, yes, yes, that’s important, that is, yes.

You’ve got to get good A-levels if you’re going to marry a rich Italian count.

Yeah, that’s the way to success. Do you reckon there’d be any chance to resurrect it? I mean, now that you are Val McDermid, would you be able to do anything with it, do you think? I mean, at the time you were just AN other writer, but now you have a bit of heft behind you, so to speak, do you think?

Oh, but it’s terrible. It’s really terrible. It’s that tabloid prose, you know, which I could write back then and to some degree still can write now with great facility, but there’s no depth to it. There’s no dare there, you know, and my heart would not be in it. I’m in the very privileged position of writing books that I’m passionate about and excited about, and I don’t need to go back and sort of retread things that even at the time that I was writing, it felt more like a job of work than something that had a hold on my heart.

No, fair enough. But speaking of something you used to love those books, I think I’d love to read a Val McDermid version of something like that. That would be brilliant. There would be the odd corpse in it, I suspect.

Absolutely, yes.

All right, let’s move on to the next offcut now. What is this one?

This is much more recent. It’s from December 2019, and it’s an idea that I had for a TV series called Skeletons.

Two heads are better than one, right? Especially at the dark intersection between love and death, that dangerous corner where sex and blood collide with the unthinkable and the unspeakable. When two smart people discover the excitement of the ultimate transgression, anything can happen. And it does. Chloe Summers is an artist working in mixed media, photography, collage, graphics, on the cusp of commercial success thanks to her last two exhibitions, Love and Food, Love and Marriage. Now she’s working on her third, the one that promises to break her out into the big time, Love and Death. But she’s stuck and struggling, trying to escape cliché and tried images. Her partner Colin Stevens, a senior crime scene investigator, is upset to see her so stressed. Bound together in a heady cocktail of heightened eroticism and emotional co-dependency, neither can be happy unless the other is too. Skeletons opens at a private view. Chloe and Colin are drinking champagne and mixing with the patrons and critics who can make or break a career. Chloe is depressed at her own lack of inspiration. Colin reads her despondency and feels helpless. Intercut with the sophisticated party, we see somewhere a killer is engaged in a stylized ballet of violence, creating a tableau of horror with the body of a young man at its heart. As Chloe and Colin arrive home, he gets a call out to a crime scene. It’s the end product of the killing we’ve already seen. It’s a scene so terrible, it’s beyond the experience of all the officers there, but it holds its own awful fascination. And as he works collecting trace evidence, Colin also obsessively takes photos on his phone. When he returns home, Chloe wakes up and he offers to show her the crime scene photos. Perhaps they will break her creative logjam, but the effect is one neither of them expects. The photos plug into the dark side of their relationship and fuel an erotic response neither expected, but both welcome in spite of themselves. Nothing has ever turned them on so much as this.

So this is the most recent off-cut you’ve given us and you said that the more you looked at it, the more ridiculous it seemed. Why was it ridiculous to you?

Because it just seemed to me to be the improbability of it really, that an artist and a crime scene technician would turn into a pair of crazed serial killers making artworks out of people’s bodies and end up confronting a real serial killer. I think it just got, it was ridiculously grungy. And it was a point where I thought, maybe I should stop writing this kind of book because I’m actually going to a point where this is just crazy. And I guess I just thought I could see this being made and I could see myself spending months of my life explaining why I’d written something so violent and turning horrible violence into such artistic beauty. And I thought, I just don’t want to go there.

Why was it called Skeletons?

I can’t remember now.

I was looking at that going, the answer’s in here somewhere and I can’t work out why is it called Skeletons?

Skeletons in your cupboard, I don’t know now. I mean, it’s one of those things where you knock it out and write lines like, a stylised ballet of violence. And you look at it and you think, I hate myself. Yeah, it just seemed to me to be a misstep, a misstep of the imagination. And that’s what happens, you know, one of the things about being a writer, well, one of the things I find, is ideas are everywhere. Ideas are cheap. Every day something occurs to me and I think, oh, maybe we could do something with that. And you chuck them away in the back of your head and some of them just disappear forever and some of them resurface and you’ll knock out two or three pages and see how that looks on the page. Does it make sense? Do I still like this? Am I interested in this? And a lot of it ends up in the bin. But these days, because we save everything to our hard drive or save everything to the cloud, it still sort of sits there. And, you know, maybe 15, 20 years ago, I would just have typed that up and then thought, nah, just bin it.

Right, it just survived because of modern technology.

Yeah, I suppose it’s an example of the things that, you know, that you play with and you think maybe this will go somewhere and maybe this will be something. And then once you actually look at it in the cold light of day, you realise for all sorts of reasons that it’s not something you want to write.

When you say you write out a couple of pages, do you mean you write out a couple of the pages of the book or is it like a treatment you write out, a description of what the project’s going to be?

It’s usually, I’ll write out something like a little bit of, a couple of pages of treatment and maybe a little bit of the opening or perhaps some dialogue between characters to see if it feels like a head I want to be inside or people whose company I want to be in for a while.

So it’s a document for you, it’s not a sales document to convince a publisher?

No, it’s for my reference. I think I drive my publisher slightly crazy because like I’m not ever really in a position to give her anything until I’m pretty much done with the first draft. You know, I’ll say well, it’s another Karen Puri and she goes to the Highlands.

That’s all you need to know.

Although that might change, she might end up going to the Borders.

Right, another offcut now. What’s this one?

This is a little note really. It’s called The Incense Thief. And it’s a sort of anecdote that I heard. And then I wrote a note that turned that again into more narrative form. And I think it’s a short story. And this happened in 2015.

Every three months, he steals the incense from the church, both sticks and cones. He tells himself he would buy it, except that he doesn’t know where the incense comes from. It’s in polythene bags with no identifying features. The truth is he doesn’t actually want to know where the incense comes from. Part of the pleasure of the incense is that it’s stolen. It smells of stealth. The incense is kept in the same room as the vestments. The vestry, he supposes, it’s called. It’s generally locked, except when there’s a service going on. It’s safe to leave it unlocked, then, because anyone walking round, from the nave to the vestry, would be visible to the whole congregation, as well as all the celebrants. What he’s figured out is that if he lurks behind a pillar in the Lady Chapel next to the vestry, he can get in and out without being seen. He can slip in and help himself loading his man bag with enough incense to see him through for another quarter. He never takes more than he needs. He’s not a common thief. He discovered it by chance. This isn’t his religion. He’d gone into the church because they have a not very good painting by John Duncan, Scottish symbolist painter whose work he’s grown interested in because Duncan married a woman he thought had found the Holy Grail. He smelled the incense and fell in love with it. He’s never smelt anything like it anywhere and he has to have it. It took weeks of plotting to work it out. What’s the story? Where does it go?

So is this going to be a mystery or crime thriller short story or would it have gone in a completely different direction?

I don’t know. I still don’t have the story. I’ve got the sort of starting point and I’ve got a sense of who this person is. But I don’t know where it goes from there and every now and again I pick it up and I take a look at it and I think it’s far too good to waste. It’s such a great jumping off point. And there are much stronger short story writers than I who could make a really special thing from it. But I’m not sure that I’m the person who can do it. But I kind of hold it to myself as a little jewel, as a little warming thing that I can take out and fondle. And I think that the opening is really strong. The first paragraph in particular, I think, really works as it is. So I don’t know where it’s going to go yet, but I’m not willing to let it go.

And you definitely think it’s a short story, not the beginning of a novel, because The Incense Thief is a really good title for a novel.

It is a really good title for a novel, but I’m not sure there’s enough… I certainly haven’t found enough to make a novel out of it. It’s really just an example of the way things will capture my attention and will sit there. And I live with the hope that one day they will take shape in my head and there will be a story or there will be a novel. And I think one of the great things about writing that you learn is to be patient, to be persistent, but to be patient with an idea, to let it sit, not to try and push it faster than it can go. I made a mistake of falling in love with an idea for a story. I had a great idea for a story. I thought this was a tremendous story. And I knew right from very early on what the story was about, who the characters were, where it took place, what the various beats in the story were. And so I just dived straight into it. And of course, I hadn’t let it percolate. I hadn’t let it settle. And I just couldn’t get anywhere with it. I couldn’t find the voice. I couldn’t find the tone.

You couldn’t force it or brainstorm it with someone. You don’t work that way at all.

No, it just… There was one element of it I couldn’t get to work. I couldn’t find a reason why one of the characters was behaving in a particular way. And I wrote the first 10,000 words of that book five times over the years, waiting somehow for me to make sense of it. And eventually it was 12 years, 12 years from me first sitting in an Oxford garden, having this brilliant idea for a thriller and actually finishing it and seeing it published.

Which one is it?

Trick of the Dark.

How many ideas do you have brewing at any one time?

Well, there’s always the book I’m writing now, which is, if you like, at the front. If you imagine my brain as a series of windows, that’s the window that’s at the front. And then sort of behind that will be the book I’m thinking about writing next. And that’s always the more exciting book. That’s always going to be the absolutely brilliant book. That’s going to be the one where it all comes together. It’s going to be a pure joy to write from start to finish. The next book’s always the best one. So the one I’m writing now, the next one is starting to take more concrete form behind that. And then in the hinterland of that, there will be three or four moderately well-formed ideas that I’m thinking, yeah, I could maybe work on that. Maybe think about that some more. I need to go for a walk and think about that or think about those characters. And then beyond that, if you like, in the far hinterland, there are vague shadows of ideas that might come to something or not.

Okay, we’ve now come to your final off-cut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

Yeah, this is an idea I had for a TV drama series. I started working on it in the early 2000s and it got to this form around about 2002 and it’s called Vertical Sheep.

Dr Anna Wild makes babies. She’s a medical scientist dedicated to her calling. It’s what she does day in, day out. A successfully implanted embryo is what she’s after. The Randolph Fertility Clinic is one of the best, but there are still many more would-be parents going home with empty arms and a sore heart than there are success stories. For Anna, it’s a vocation. Intelligent, sensitive, but driven, she’s willingly sacrificed an emotional life on the altar of saving and making lives. Tom, the clinic director, is her boss and mentor. He’s built himself a reputation for steady, unspectacular reliability in a world where conservatism is still regarded as one of the cardinal virtues. For 20 years, Anna has been his lieutenant, but she’s never really understood that while she’s driven by the desire to make women’s lives better, Tom has primarily seen fertility medicine as a clever career choice. And when his eye for the main chance leads him down avenues Anna wouldn’t even notice, it has a seismic effect for her, both personally and professionally. Since the days when Tom was a young doctor and Anna his most gifted student, her personal life has centered round her friendship with him and his artist wife Claire and with her brilliant fellow student Daisy, now working miles away in London. Not a big social circle, but all she wants or needs. As for men, she hasn’t had the time, or frankly the inclination for more than the occasional mild flirtation. The temptation of medicine was always stronger, and what you’ve never had, you don’t miss. Behind her competent, worldly-wise facade, she’s an emotional virgin. So when she finally does collide head-on with love, she doesn’t have the experience to know what’s happening to her. As Anna nears her 39th birthday, her world is busy, calm and ordered, and she expects it to stay that way. What she doesn’t know is that she’s about to be ambushed by three very different things, a flask of frozen tissue, the ambitions of a pharmaceutical giant, and love.

Where is this going to go? Is this science fiction?

It’s a drama set in a fertility clinic. It seemed to me that this was an area that hadn’t been covered by a recurring drama series, and it was absolutely ripe to be explored in that way. I have a friend who runs a fertility clinic, and over the years she’s talked to me a lot about her work and the pressures of the science and the pressures of the ethics, and I learned quite a lot about it over the years also from my own experiences in that area. I have a friend who is a television producer, and the two of us started working on this, putting a drama together. The title, Vertical Sheep, came from a lecture that my friend was telling me that she’d attended where one of the speakers said, well, we could do this with sheep now, and ultimately women are just vertical sheep. And that was a great title, great title for a drama. And we worked on it for quite a while. We worked up as a six-part drama, and I thought it was really strong, and we got it into development with an independent production company. And then what sometimes happens with this kind of development is you get a clash of personalities. And we were set to work with a particular script executive, and he was a nightmare. He just wanted to write the script that he wanted. He didn’t understand much of what we were trying to do. He didn’t understand much of the scientific basis for what we were writing about, and he didn’t want to understand. And every script meeting we had was a nightmare. Every time, there was stupid, pointless arguments. And in the end, I just reached the point where I thought, I never want to talk about this again. I never want to hear the words fertility clinic and drama in the same sentence. And so we walked away from it. And it just died because it had become toxic in my head because he had been so impossible to work with.

But you could redo it again now with another production company.

Probably, yeah. I mean, I would have to go right back to First Principles because it was 20 years ago and fertility medicine has been revolutionized in so many respects since then. I’d have to go back and look at the science again. But I still think there’s a great possibility for a series set in a fertility clinic. All human life is here. All sorts of people come through the door. And then you’ve got your medical staff who are pulled in various directions by what’s possible and what’s permissible. So, yeah, I think it’s still got great potential for somebody else to pick it up and run with. But one of the things I’ve always said about adaptation and about having adaptations of my work is that I would not work with people I didn’t like and I didn’t trust. And this completely bore out that determination that it destroyed the project for me because one person was just so impossible to work with.

We’ve come to the end of the show now of one final question. Having listened to these offcuts, is there anything you’ve noticed, anything that has surprised you at all about your own writing?

Yeah, there have been one or two moments where I’ve thought, you know, actually that’s not bad at all. I’d kind of probably dismissed that over the years. But that very first story, the Birdman story, I was really surprised by how well that worked, how chilling it was in places. It’s been interesting. There have been toe-curling moments, no doubt about that. But maybe what I need to do is go back and look in the offcut store and see if there’s something there that needs to be resurrected.

Are you somebody who does like to look back and check through stuff?

I like to go back and think about things that have interested me. There’s a reason why something is in the ideas folder or I tore something out of a magazine and stuck it in a file. So I need to go back and revisit things to see if they set another idea stirring, set another hair running for me. You need to take in, you need to suck in a lot of stuff for the good stuff to rise to the surface. You know, I think where a whale just sort of like sucks in great quantities of stuff through its rows of teeth to find the little gems that sustain it. It’s a bit like that. You have to take in a vast amount and wade through an awful lot of shit before you get to the good stuff.

Well, Val McDermid, it’s been fabulous to talk to you. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us.

It’s been a delight. Thank you.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Val McDermid. The offcuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Rachel Atkins, Christopher Kent, Kenny Blyth, Leah Marks and Beth Chalmers, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com, and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.