2.1 Val McDermid

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A photograph of Val McDermid.

Val McDermid is a best-selling and international award winning Scottish crime writer. She is perhaps best known for her Wire in the Blood series which features a clinical psychologist (Dr Tony Hill) and DCI Carol Jordan, but she has written three other series of crime fiction. Alongside crime fiction Val has written graphic novels, non-fiction and a children’s picture book, as well as writing for both radio and theatre.

In this video, Val McDermid was asked about how she draws readers into the story worlds that she creates.

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VAL MCDERMID

For me, the main technique, I suppose, that I’m aware of using to draw people into my world is that sense of creating rounded characters, of not making them one-dimensional, but to try and give them a life, a hinterland. And it’s one of the things that I felt very strongly when I started writing crime fiction, that I’d read too many books where the victims were treated so casually.

They were kind of just cardboard cutouts who were only there to be murdered and mutilated and strewn around the highways of America. And I was determined that one of the things that I would do would be to give my victims a hinterland, to give them a life, to try and have the reader feel something, at least for the lives that had been snuffed out and not just to treat it like a parlour game.

So for me, I guess, I suppose what I’m always trying to do is to have my readers invested in characters, because that’s what makes you read. That’s where suspense comes from. It’s caring what happens next. Not as a bare fact, but because it has an impact on characters you care about. When you’ve got-- when you end a chapter with a car going over a cliff that has suspense, not because there’s a car going over the cliff, but because who’s in that car? Why do they matter to me? Or who’s sitting on the beach down below that car? It’s their fate that matters. And that’s where the suspense comes from. So for me, it’s always about trying to build that sense of engagement with characters.

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So, to Val the key to engaging readers and immersing them in the story world is through the creation of characters that the reader both understands and cares about.

Next, you will consider how a different author engages their readers.