Murder In Mind; With 20 novels to her name, Val McDermid has made a

by Susan Flockhart

SOME minds are beautiful. Others are poisoned with depravity. By the looks of things, Val McDermid's grey matter must be as black as her coalmining roots. She may be smart, charming and almost as cheery as her toucan-print shirt, but the Kirkcaldy-born author has just revealed the tawdry state of her psyche. Asked where she dredged up the notion of a murder weapon fashioned from a razor-studded dildo, the multi-award-winning crime novelist hangs her head in shame. "Oh, God!" she groans, and admits it emerged fully formed from the recesses of her head.

In her new novel, The Torment Of Others, this hideous implement is used to inflict slow, torturous death upon its female victims. What if some genuine psychopath picks up on the idea? "People who are predisposed to do this kind of thing are not reading my books," she replies. "They're hanging out on weird websites."

Actually, there are two sick minds at work in this, McDermid's 20th novel - a tense, psychological thriller featuring Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, the forensic psychologist and police detective played by Robson Green and Hermione Norris in the TV adaptation of her books. As well as the dildo demon, there's a paedophile who lures small boys to a quiet glen before abusing them and dumping them in a shallow grave. Three years ago, McDermid speculated that the recent birth of her son would make it hard to write about atrocities against children. Parenthood has changed her perspective, she says now. "It gives you more insight; you can't help thinking how you'd feel if that happened to your child."

Doesn't she worry about colluding with the contemporary culture of fearfulness? "One function of crime fiction," she counters, "is to act as a reassurance: yes, terrible things happen, but there are people out there who make it stop happening." Our police may have a poor record at tackling burglary and car theft - "the sort of crime that has a horrible impact on many people's lives" - but they're pretty good at resolving the biggies such as rape, murder and serious assault, and for McDermid, the challenge is to write about these "without hysteria".

A former tabloid journalist, she considers the red-top obsession with naming and shaming paedophiles a "sick" way of avoiding the real issues. "During those paedophile hunts, no-one in authority stood up and said what we all know to be the case: that children are not at risk from the stranger in the dirty raincoat. Your children are at risk from the men you bring into your home. The vast majority of sexual abuse is committed by people known to the child. Diverting attention on to the stranger, the weirdo, means you don't have to take responsibility for what's going on under your own roof."

McDermid finds it disturbing that victims of high-profile child murders - such as Sarah Payne, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman - are construed as more important than the victims of domestic violence who die every week. Her new book has DCI Carol Jordan ruminating over the different emotional response to child killings and the series of prostitute murders blighting Bradfield - a fictional city loosely based on McDermid's adopted hometown of Manchester. "Emotionally," she says, "I can understand it. But philosophically, in humanitarian terms, it makes me very uncomfortable that we get so wound up about one murder, and don't give a damn about all these others."

Exhaustive coverage of child murders also stokes the flames of parental panic, of the kind that has many of McDermid's friends spending their lives ferrying their children around rather than let them loose on the big scary world. Growing up in Kirkcaldy during the 1960s, McDermid - an only child - would spend entire days wandering around with her dog and her packed lunch. "Nobody thought twice about it. That's the kind of life I want for my son."

These days, McDermid cares for three-and-a-half-year-old Cameron for only half of the week, having split from his natural mother, her partner of 11 years, a year ago. "It's complicated," she admits, "but in practical terms it works out quite well." Cameron was conceived through donor insemination after two-and-a-half years of trying, and having legally established joint parenting rights shortly after his birth, there was "no dragging things through the courts. We sorted it out between us." So it's an amicable arrangement? "When children are involved, there's a kind of moral obligation to be civilised," she says, after a pause. "It's very difficult at times, but you walk the line because the most important person in all of this is your child."

She's never experienced prejudice related to her lesbian parenthood, but then she lives in leafy middle-class suburbia surrounded by like-minded liberal left-wingers "who don't believe the country is about to be dragged to the edge of abyss because we have asylum seekers". If anyone has a problem with her domestic set-up, they haven't the nerve to say it to her face. The nursery Cameron attends is "totally cool. He came home on Mother's Day with two Mother's Day cards. It's not an issue."

McDermid's own childhood was happy. ("A dreadful handicap for a writer. What can I draw on? I've no misery!") From an early age, she knew she felt "different", but put it down to the fact she wanted to be a writer. "When I realised I was gay, no-one stopped speaking to me, I wasn't cast adrift for bringing disgrace and shame upon the family."

But Fife was a "parochial" place back then. With no openly gay role models, McDermid longed to spread her wings and when she was offered a place at Oxford University aged just 16, she grabbed it. "I know people in Fife of my generation who are still so far in the closet they're in Narnia, because they feel being out is impossible. It's tragic, and I've never been interested in a life half-lived."

After university, McDermid slipped into tabloid journalism in the north of England, later fulfilling a childhood ambition of working for the Daily Record in Glasgow. "That was when the Daily Record was a newspaper," she says drily. "When I was growing up, the tabloid press still had this notion that working class people had the right to be informed as well as entertained." Working on stories like the Moors and Yorkshire Ripper murders, she became intrigued by the impact of crime on people's lives and her debut novel, Report For Murder - the first in a series featuring lesbian journalist Lindsay Gordon - was published in 1987. Reporting on the Hillsborough disaster, having to file hourly copy from a football ground full of bodies, took a heavy emotional toll and in 1991, with her third Lindsay Gordon novel in progress, she took voluntary redundancy.

Since then, her writing career has exploded. A new series of novels featuring straight private investigator Kate Brannigan brought her profile into the international mainstream, and The Mermaids Singing - her first Hill/Jordan vehicle - won the Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger Award. Now 49, McDermid divides her time between work and parenthood. "I have a great life," she says. Sure, there are days when writing feels "like carving granite with a teaspoon", but usually she loves it. "I don't have to sit in traffic or in an office. If it's not a morning for taking my boy to nursery, I can sit in my jammies until lunchtime if I want. When you're talking about hard work, it's not like going down the pit and cutting coal," which is what her grandfathers both did for a living. Her father - a shipyard worker-turned-insurance salesman - tragically died a week before her first novel was published.

McDermid was raised with a working-class socialist's loathing for inequality and "the narrow bigoted view that anybody who isn't me is therefore wrong". Yet she's no ideological zealot, and predicts her inclusion of a gay sexual predator in The Torment Of Others could raise hackles among the gay and feminist orthodoxy. Crime fiction disproportionately portrays victims as female and perpetrators as male, yet there's "a tiny minority" within the gay community who will accept only positive representations of their fellows. "But it's not my job to be the poster girl for any particular group," insists McDermid. "There's good and bad in every community. To pretend otherwise only gives ammunition to your enemies."