#val mcdermid

This is the kind of read that makes your skin shiver with excitement and takes sleeping completely out of the question. However predictable and at the same time implausible the plot outcome of the investigation may be, you still crave all the details of the gruesome crime committed in the past. McDermid’s sharp writing is excellent; she may perhaps be the best crime author of this generation. The descriptions of the various settings in the novel are particularly good: the sense of imminent foreboding never leaves you as the novel goes on and contributes to the feeling of dread felt by the head investigators.

Ethics, morality, feminism, life in the 60s, and much more are explored in this novel. 

It’s my first Tartan Noir novel, hence the first crime novel I read that is written by a Scottish writer. Perhaps that’s something that makes this book feel so different for me from the others; it’s nowhere close to the plainness and moodiness of the Nordic noir or American-written investigation novels. 

Many critics strike McDermid’s attention to detail and repetition, but that’s the kind of read I’m personally into. A must-read for all fans of crime fiction and those interested in the time the novel is set in – it gives a good feeling of that generation’s comforts and troubles.

But first, a little about the woman and her work. And where the woman is concerned, it will be a little. Elizabeth Mackintosh aka Gordon Daviot aka Josephine Tey was pathologically private. She never gave interviews, posed for publicity photos only under duress and managed to keep her private life a mystery. In the last year of her life, when she knew she was dying, she avoided contact even with her closest friends because she didn’t want anyone to know. Add to that the fascination in her fiction with questions of identity and gender, and the idea of a deep dark secret is irresistible. But sadly, at this distance, if there were such a secret, it’s probably destined to remain hidden.

... Questions of identity permeate her novels. Brat Farrar hinges on whether a young man is truly who he purports to be; The Franchise Affair turns on whether a mother and daughter have a secret life that verges on the perverse; Miss Pym Disposes is only a mystery because issues of sexuality were so deeply submerged in that time and place that they were unthinkable as part of the solution to a crime; To Love and Be Wise is entirely shaped by fixed notions of gender. Masks and the identities they hide run through her work like the unifying thread in a tapestry.

And it is that fascination with who we really are and what actually shapes our relationships that is the key to Tey’s role as the bridge between the golden age and contemporary crime fiction. She started writing at a time when the genre appeared only to have space for the most conventional of connections between men and women and where secrets were only valid when they had a direct bearing on the commission of a murder, either as clear motive or as red herring.

Even then, those secrets were defined within relatively narrow tramlines. Conventional secrets, you might say. Secrets my granny would have understood.

But Tey opened up the possibility of unconventional secrets. Homosexual desire, cross-dressing, sexual perversion – they were all hinted at, glimpsed in the shadows as a door closed or a curtain twitched. Tey was never vulgar nor titillating; she left space for the reader to forge their own understanding of what was underpinning her characters’ behaviour. Nevertheless, her world revealed a different set of psychological motivations.

Who's your favorite book character?