Presenter: Hello and welcome back to Edinburgh, and our second open-book special from one of the world’s greatest festivals in breadth and ambition. And this is the most literary of cities, the home of Arthur Conan-Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, of Muriel Spark and J.K. Rowling. So it’s fitting that today we’ll be talking to three Scottish writers. We’re investigating crime – from whodunit, to why, and howdunits. Readers do remain fascinated by murder, mystery and the underbellies of societies past and present. Why does crime chime so strongly and are there limits to its investigative remit? Joining me are: the debut novelist and winner of The Telegraph Harvill Secker crime writing competition, Abir Mukherjee. His book, A Rising Man, is set in India, at the time of the Raj. Lucy Ribchester, author of The Hourglass Factory, which rather incongruously combined music-hall frolics with the Suffragettes, and whose second novel, The Amber Shadows, is a mysterious adventure among the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. And last, but certainly not least, a writer whose mantelpiece must positively be sagging, groaning under all those trophies; she’s won just about every single crime writing prize around. Earlier this month she received the outstanding contribution to crime fiction accolade, from the Harrogate Festival – who else? But Val McDermid. Please join me in welcoming all of them here today.
Applause
Thank you, now the early crime critic Ronald Knox, penned his ten rules of detective fiction back in 1929, these included the illuminating of not more than one secret passage of room, and making sure the Watson sidekick was slightly less clever than the reader. And perhaps the most obvious, making sure that the detective himself (it was only himself in those days), doesn’t commit the crime. So after 30 novels, Val, do you have any such golden rules?
Val: I don’t think so, no, I think everything is up for grabs, um, the Ronald Knox rules are um, we read them now and laugh at them, but at the time when they came out writers took them very seriously, and they contain such other gems as ‘there shall be no Chinaman in the story’. And there shall be no twins, identical twins are verboten, and the solution mustn’t come to the detective in a dream. Now I have read crime novels that break all of those with gay abandon, so I think these days, because the genre has transformed itself and continually reinvents itself, I think nothing is off-limits, there are no rules, you find the way to tell your own story.
Presenter:Abir, did you investigate the rules of the genre before you set out on your first novel?
Abir: I did, which was a shame because my first novel was going to be about a dreaming Chinaman… so I had to start again. I think, for me… the only rule is forget Knox’s rules! You follow your heart, you follow the story you want to tell, and the characters will tell it for you I think.
Presenter: Lucy, with you in particular, you exist at a sort of peripheral line, don’t you, between historic fiction and crime fiction, so perhaps there are less rules at that end of the scale…
Lucy: I think if I’d known there were rules, then I would have been too terrified to probably try writing a crime novel. But no, I really just set out to write the kind of book I wanted to read which I think is why the books are so eclectic; particularly with The Hourglass Factory I was very interested in it starting out as a play, I was very interested in sort of very over-the-top Jacobean drama that we had just been studying at university and combining that with my love of Agatha Christie – those two things kind of came together and I think that’s always how I’ll approach writing, just try and kind of to not think of them as being genre pieces but just as something I want to read.
Presenter: Well, Val McDermid, you haven’t quite beaten Agatha Christie’s record yet, but today we’ll be talking about your thirtieth novel and the fourth in your series featuring the feisty, headstrong and fiercely independent DCI Karen Pirie. In Out of Bounds we find your Fife-born police- Scotland employee running the historic cases unit of 2, and mourning the murder of her colleague and partner at home, who was killed in the line of duty. Now you’ve created four other long-running characters along with a host of standalones, so what was it that made you put DCI Pirie at the centre of your auspicious thirtieth novel?
Val: Well, I didn’t intend Karen to be a series character when I first created her, she has a small part to play in The Distant Echo but it’s a crucial part and so after that book it seemed to me that she was an increasingly vocal presence in my head and she demanded to be written about.