Interview: Val McDermid is excited for her future novels

Val McDermid, for whom the books just keep coming, will speak at the Book Festival tonight.

Scotland's most revered crime writer, Val McDermid, publishes her 30th novel this week '“ but she has no intention of stopping there, finds Susan Mansfield.

Perhaps books are a bit like birthdays: you don’t really add up how many you’ve written until you hit a significant milestone. And then someone, your publisher, for example, reminds you that your next book will be your 30th. “It’s still quite astonishing to me,” says Val McDermid, who received an award at this year’s Harrogate Crime Writing Festival for her outstanding contribution to the genre. “When I started I thought I had five or six books in me; they just kept coming.”

If one were to pause at this milestone and take stock, one might note the following: that McDermid is one of Scotland’s (and the UK’s) best-loved crime writers, with sales of 11 million books worldwide. That Nicola Sturgeon is a fan, and interviewed her at last year’s Edinburgh Book Festival. That she is also a highly versatile author – of TV and radio drama, a book on forensics and even a picture book for children, all the while not breaking her stride with a steady output of whodunnits. A former tabloid journalist whose approach to writing is hard-working and businesslike, she has been so good at simply getting on with it that we are perhaps slow to notice how much she has achieved.

Her audience at the Book Festival today will be treated to a preview of her new (and 30th) novel, Out Of Bounds, to be published later this week. In it, McDermid is back with DCI Karen Pirie at the Cold Cases Unit, now based in Edinburgh. A DNA test on a young joyrider in Fife sparks fresh inquiries into a murder which happened 20 years ago. Meanwhile, another suspicious death leads Pirie to revisit a helicopter crash in the 1970s, a case definitely not within her remit, and certain to land her in trouble. It’s the kind of pacy, intelligent page-turner we’ve come to expect.

Val is to release her 30th novel

Even after 29 years and 30 books (“four books in 18 months once, madness”) she never feels short of ideas. They lodge themselves in her mind – anecdotes, snippets of stories, what ifs – where they percolate slowly into plots. “It can be years, a dozen years or more, until a story finally forms. I find I have to be willing to accumulate all sorts of clutter in the back of my head in the hope that it will make sense of itself. Sometimes I think of it as being like a giant compost heap, where all the extraneous matter rots away and you’re left with things that fit together in ways you hadn’t quite considered before.”

She’s comfortable with producing a book a year. “It seems to be the rate at which my imagination works. There’s always a queue of books in my head, ideas which are not quite ready to roll but are nearly there. If I didn’t have a deadline, I would just sit and do nothing all day. In journalism, nobody ever writes anything before the deadline.”