In Fever of the Bone, Val McDermid's latest novel, Tony Hill and Carol Jordan track down a serial killer who is hunting apparently unconnected teenagers via a social networking website.
A child's murder is every parent's worst nightmare, and a subject that needs to be handled with the utmost sensitivity. Debates have raged about the level of violence in serial-killer novels (most recently when Jessica Mann declared that she would no longer review novels filled with 'sadistic misogyny') – but one of Val McDermid's strengths is the way in which she humanises her victims, rather than simply setting them up as meat for killers.
'I think in the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan stories that's at the heart of what I've tried to do. It's about the judgments we make about victims. Recently we've had the Kercher case, and one of the things I wanted to write about is what it means to be touched by that victimhood. As a journalist, I worked in Manchester for a long time and you couldn't escape the long shadow of the Moors murders. I was often in the company of the families of Ian Brady's and Myra Hindley's victims. In a way I've always had that in the back of my mind. It made me aware of the way that violent death contaminates the lives of everyone it comes into contact with. It's so easy to get caught up in the violence but you have to control it when you're writing. You have to find the right balance. You're writing fiction that touches on some of the darkest places of people's lives. It's only readers who can make the final judgment if I've got that right. I weigh things up as they seem to work for me. It's a tough call.
'I generally give real-life cases a wide berth. As an outsider you can think you know what happened, but inadvertently you can be trampling on people's grief and that causes more pain to the people involved than you intended. Some things happen in the most bizarre ways – you write something that appears in the headlines. Life imitates art. You have to step back from it and not allow it to implode inside the book.'
A particularly creepy coincidence occurred when Val was writing a section of Wire in the Blood in which the police think that a missing girl is a runaway and don't take her disappearance seriously. 'There was a case in Cheshire where a twelve-year-old girl had gone missing, and she'd been hanging out with travellers. On the very day where I was writing the section about the body being found, the victim was found. The really freaky thing was that my character had the same name as the missing girl.'
In Fever of the Bone, one of the couples whose child goes missing is Julie and Kath: close to the bone for a novelist who is herself a married lesbian with a son? 'It's very easy to conflate the fiction with the reality when the facts coincide, but I'm very definitely not writing my own life, in spite of what might seem, a direct correspondence. Everything is transformed by the process of creating fiction from reality and it would be unwise to draw conclusions from that.'
One characteristic of the Tony Hill / Carol Jordan series, continued in Fever of the Bone, is how infrequently it's about men killing women. Is this a deliberate attempt to invert stereotypes? 'I don't think of it in those terms. It's about the way the story works out. I am conscious of the realities – I've been told by those who know about these things that you are most likely to die at the hands of a serial killer if you're a young gay man. But I think it's always interesting to explore what happens when people are wrong-footed. The contemporary crime novel has become the place where you can explore the unpredictable. Crime fiction has always been an area where writers have explored the edges of things.'
So why is crime fiction often perceived as somehow 'beneath', or at least separate from, literary fiction? 'It's an artificial construct that book publishers and sellers find handy. Like is not compared with like. My boy came out with a wonderful line about literary fiction when he asked, "Is that what you write?" In the literary novel, I explained, there's less concentration on what happened; it's more about the characters. "So there's no blood and gore in literary fiction? It's vegan, then?" I'll quite happily stick to non-vegan fiction!'
And fans of the series will quite happily stick with the relationship between Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. Why, I ask Val, is their relationship so fascinating?
'I think it's because it's never been consummated. It tantalises people. It has a life beyond the page. When you pick up a new novel, you can imagine what they've been up to when they're gone. The Mermaids Singing was intended as a standalone. When you're writing a series novel, you're always constrained by the experiences you've given them, the qualities they have. So when I'm thinking about a Tony Hill story, it's constrained by his history and what he's capable of. With a standalone I'm not constrained by any of these "why are they the way they are?" questions. With The Mermaids Singing, the fact of Tony's impotence is a plot point, necessary to make the story work. So the relationship between him and Carol is not just about unresolved sexual tension; there's a very good reason why Tony is wary of a relationship that could lead to physical consummation. Also, the idea of being cured by a good woman, for want of a better cliché. Carol wants to be the person who makes Tony better.
'There are things always at the back of your head, such as Tony's hideous mother, Vanessa. I had the skeleton outline of who she was and what she was. Please god I'm not saying that the characters have a life of their own – you can't make up stuff you have no connection to – but as you work with the characters, gleeful possibilities open up in front of you.'
In Fever of the Bone, those possibilities include Carol Jordan's having to contend with a new boss – and an incompetent profiler, a graduate fresh from police training but lacking any real experience. In addition to providing some comic relief, the character of Tim Parker is perfect for highlighting the challenges of profiling.
'It's always interesting to create these tensions within the novel. Tensions between Carol and her new boss, then having this numpty thrust into the middle. Tony's natural instinct is not to be unpleasant to people, but equally he has no time to waste with niceties when people's lives are at stake. The whole profiling thing is more than just common sense. It's also about probabilities, and Tony will sometimes admit that he doesn't initially consider the option that takes him to the killer, because it's not statistically likely. The profilers I've met take their jobs very seriously. This is such a difficult job, because so much is riding on it. When I go to bed I know that nobody's going to die. But if you're a profiler, you're constantly on edge and there are so many things that could go wrong. I have amazing respect for people who do it for real. A couple of times when there's been serial-killer stuff in the press, I get phone calls from the press asking for a profile. They don't seem to understand the difference between fact and fiction. The difference is that I can make the facts fit the story.'
Unfortunately, that's precisely what happened in the real-life case of the Wimbledon Common murder of Rachel Nickell, when profiler Paul Britton was involved in a sting operation against an innocent suspect, Colin Stagg. There's a thinly veiled reference to this in Killing the Shadows. 'That was one of the rare occasions where I was so outraged by what had happened to Rachel Nickell's family as a result of the arrogance of that investigation. It's taken them years to get anything approaching closure. It set back the cause of profiling in this country by years. After Paul Britton, the police just didn't talk about working with psychologists.'
Tony Hill often struggles with sceptical police, and certainly his methods for working himself into the minds of killers verge on the bizarre. On occasion, he will place two chairs opposite each other, jumping from one to the other as he 'interviews' the unknown killer. I ask Val whether this is how she works, or whether she sees herself more as a stage director, on the outside of her characters. 'I'm both, really. When I'm planning and thinking about a scene or an encounter, I'm very much in the encounter. When I'm marching up the beach lecturing the dog, I don't physically move from character to character but I do speak in different voices. That's in the planning-it-out phases. But when I'm actually writing it, it's almost like I'm directing a scene in my head. I will refine dialogue again and again. Luckily everyone in my village knows I'm not a mad woman; people think you're talking to the dog. And mobile phones are useful. People think you're using your hands-free mobile phone. I'm gabbling away to the voices in my head, which is a slightly different headset.'
As well as role-playing, the unconscious is a huge aid to creativity. 'Very often I'm not quite sure how to resolve a situation, how a scene's going to work out, so generally last thing at night, going to sleep, I will run through the scenario. In the shower, water falls on head, idea falls into brain. It's very practical. All those things I can't figure out sitting at the computer screen my unconscious does while I'm asleep.'
Fourteen years have elapsed since the Tony Hill / Carol Jordan series started. Novelists have two approaches to aging their characters: either aging them in real time (like Ian Rankin with Rebus) or suspending time (like Ruth Rendell, whose Wexford has remained between middle age and retirement since 1964). What about Tony and Carol? 'Real-ish. They've not aged as much as the years that have gone by. I don't think they've aged 14 years – more like ten years, and I don't tie things to reality quite as neatly as Ian does. So I've given myself a wee bit more flexibility, but they're not frozen in aspic. It's interesting with series characters to see how they change and carry their history with them.'
Just as characters grow through series, so too do society and technology, and a key component in Fever of the Bone is a social networking website RigMarole (neatly reprised in real life at http://rigmarole.ning.com). ' I think that what's hard is trying to identify what's a real trend and what's a fad. I've had to rely on my own feel for the zeitgeist, to go with things that will be valid ten years down the line. I was very conscious of that with the Kate Brannigan novels. My godson has been reading them recently – where I mentioned a phone box he asked, "Why didn't she just use a mobile?"'
Similarly, in the second Lindsay Gordon novel, the latest computer technology comprised a Commodore PET, for which programs came on a cassette tape. 'You read that now – it's only 18 years ago, I guess – but it's like ancient history in terms of technology. You must always make the technology serve the story. My pal Sue Black, the Professor of Anatomy at the University of Dundee, her big thing is identity. She recently identified a paedophile in court by a unique pattern of freckles on the back of his hand. That kind of thing – it's fascinating, it's exciting, it's full of potential. When I wrote Killing the Shadows, the guy who invented geographical profiling was beta-testing it. Not long after the book was finished, it became a reality. I was sitting in a hotel room, having a coffee trying to render myself human, and there was Kim Rossmo [geographical profiler] talking about the Washington sniper case. But I can't let the technology seduce me; the heart of the book has to be about the characters.'
One intriguing feature of the Tony Hill / Carol Jordan series is that all the novel titles are lines from the poems of TS Eliot (Fever of the Bone being a line from Eliot's poem Whispers of Immortality). 'Eliot's always been a favourite of mine, but the ongoing use of the Eliot titles is kind of accidental. With Mermaids, the thing that linked Tony and the killer psychologically was the sense of a glass wall between them and the rest of the world. I was reminded of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. The lines of Prufrock are heartbreaking. I used a quote from it as the title for that book, and when I came to the next one my editor suggested finding another title from Eliot. And so I got hooked into that idea of using the Eliot titles. Outside crime fiction, I also read other fiction. I read quite a lot of short stories, mostly vegan short stories. Too often, crime short stories are overly dependent on the twist of the tale.'
On the subject of editorial influence, Val adds, ' I have had tremendous editorial support: first from Julia Wisdom (HarperCollins), then David Shelley (Little, Brown), who've worked with me to make those books the best they can be. If a good editor is in tune with what you're doing, they will unerringly put their fingers on the things that you realise need to be changed. You ignore them at your peril.'
Fever of the Bone is available in paperback in February from
Little, Brown
