Val McDermid

I create my bad characters, if you like, in the same way that I create all my characters. I think about them in terms of what I need them to do in this particular story, what tasks they’re required to do, and how they’re going to have to do them. And then I start thinking about what kind of person would do that in that particular way. Why would they choose this particular line of approach rather than the other one? And gradually, over a period of having conversations with myself and thinking about what their function is within the book, they start to take shape.

I’ve got quite a strong conviction that there’s no such thing as a completely good or a completely bad person. I think we all exist in varying degrees of greyness. And what holds us in place mostly is social expectations. It’s taboos. It’s fear of being caught. It’s fear of disappointing the people we love, all of these things. And so I think that we’re all capable of behaving in ways that we don’t entirely approve of and when we look back at them, we don’t entirely approve of in the moment. So it’s just a case of, I suppose, stretching that beyond what I would do or what anybody I know would do, and imagining another set of choices.

I want my baddies to be comprehensible to my readers because, in my experience, generally, people who do terrible things have a very good reason for it inside their own heads. They don’t just do it at random. They don’t just think, aha, I’m going to wake up tomorrow and do something totally hideous. Within their own heads, it makes sense. So when I’m writing a character, I want it to make sense to the reader so it feels authentic to them when they’re reading it. It feels believable to them. So in that sense, I have to, if not quite have my readers identify with the character, to find what they do comprehensible and believable.

I don’t particularly worry about the likeability because I think, by and large, my readership is pretty sophisticated. They can identify the difference between a person doing bad things and a person doing good things. I don’t want to make my bad characters the heroes of the book, though. Even when I’ve created characters that readers want to see come back, like Jacko Vance in the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books, in my head, it’s always very clear that they are not the heroes of the story. It’s not their story. It still remains the story of my protagonists.

It seems to me that most villainous behaviour has, in the heads of the person who is doing it, a rational reason. It’s not something random. And so even if it’s not the way I would respond or my reader would respond, I want to build in, if you like, to their character a set of preconditions that make it credible for them to respond in that way. Now, that might be a practical set of circumstances. They’ve been dumbed down, as it were, by society. Or it might be a more emotional response. Or it might be a completely dysfunctional response. But it has to be something that’s not going to have the reader going, nobody would do that, because it’s important to me to maintain constantly that sense with the reader believing in what they’re reading. So they go forward on my side, as it were. Asking someone to read a crime novel is asking them to come on a journey of suspension of disbelief. So every step I take on that journey has to be about strengthening that suspension of disbelief. And that means making it all credible and possible.

It’s quite clear to me that over the years, that my readers have very strong relationships with my characters, both the protagonists and the villains. And I totally understand that because I’m a reader, first and foremost, and I have exactly that same response. There are certain series that I pick up the next one, excited to find out what’s going to happen to the protagonist next because I care about them. So yeah, it’s important to me that readers form that relationship. And I think that one of the things that makes me feel most heartened about my work is the way that readers do respond to those characters.

I don’t explicitly set out to construct a sense of empathy with the villains, but I do want them to be rounded human beings. I don’t want them to just be baddies. I want them to have more to them than that, in the same way that when I’m writing protagonists, I don’t want them to be straightforwardly, uncomplicatedly good people doing good things for all the right reasons. Sometimes, we do the right things for the wrong reasons. And sometimes, we do the wrong things for the right reasons. And so I want to try and make all my characters have that kind of balance. And if I’ve done my job properly, then the readers will have a sense of empathy, not just with the villains, but with other characters in the book, even characters who have quite a fleeting role. I want them to care.

To be honest, when I’m writing, when I’m creating characters, when I’m developing a story, I don’t think about readers. I think when you start thinking about how people are going to respond to the work and you start second-guessing yourself, I think, that way, disaster lies, because you’re not any longer writing what’s in your heart and in your head. You’re censoring yourself every step of the way. And I don’t want to do that. And sometimes, people take offence at what I write. And sometimes, they love it all the more. But what I’m doing when I’m making the book is trying to make it as good as it can possibly be. And I’m not looking over my shoulder at what anybody else might think.

It’s the case, certainly, that people get upset about what happens to some of my characters sometimes. They have a sense of ownership, I suppose, that makes them feel that I’ve got no right to do the things that I do to my characters. And they can get quite upset if I kill someone off that they particularly like or if I make one of my characters endure some suffering that they’re not very happy about. I have had several encounters with readers who- I mean, it’s not taken to the extreme of actually being abusive towards me or anything like that, but they just go, I’m so disappointed you did that, or, I can’t believe you did that, and why can’t you put this right? And so, yeah. I mean, as a reader, I understand this perfectly because there are times when I’m reading someone’s novel and I’m like, I can’t believe you just did that. So, I mean, it’s- I suppose I take it as a compliment that people get so engaged with my characters. And people often bring up issues of how I’ve approached a particular plot, what I’ve done to develop a particular plot, and asked me why I made the choices that I made. And the most honest answer I can give to that is because it seemed like a good thing to do at the time. For me, it’s always narrative necessity, I suppose, that drives the decisions I make. And sometimes, I’ve looked back at books and thought, I can’t believe I did that myself. I can’t quite- wow. That was a bold move. But at the time, it seemed like the only choice I could make.

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 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, that is-- 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 end the chapter with a car going over a cliff, that has suspense not because there’s a car going over the cliff, but because, who is 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.

I’ve never created a world where everybody was morally deviant because I would feel- I would struggle to find solid ground to stand on. You have to have a standpoint as a writer. And I know- I have friends, colleagues who are quite capable of imagining this entire universe of deviance and immorality, but it’s not something that I feel comfortable in. And also, I think- I guess it’s a bit old fashioned, but I still think that the crime novel is, at its heart, a moral landscape. And if you don’t take seriously the morality of murder, then you’re writing in a vacuum. You’re writing something that’s essentially empty and meaningless. So for me, there has to be some kind of moral compass at the heart of the book.