Scottish - Writer | June 4, 1955 -
I don't think of myself as Scottish or lesbian when I sit down and write. I am glad I have broken out of that limited audience.
Val McDermid
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I did want to be Joni Mitchell for quite a long time.
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I'd like to be more spontaneous.
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I am the despair of my accountant; I am the plastic bags of receipts.
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I have a vernacular house on the seaside in Northumberland and an Edwardian semi in south Manchester. They're both exactly as big as they need to be. I can't be doing with an ostentatious, big house - you can only be in one room at a time.
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Growing up in Fife, you were aware that there were these creatures called lesbians, but it was in the realms of complete freakishness. And I didn't feel like a freak.
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The thing is that quite a few of my books have ended up as they are because of conversations I've had over the years with forensic scientists.
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I think Jane Austen builds suspense well in a couple of places, but she squanders it, and she gets to the endgame too quickly. So I will be working on those things.
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The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from.
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I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.
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It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan.
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We all present versions of ourselves. The person you are at work is not the same person you are at home. The face we present in our most intimate relationships is not the face we present to the world.
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