Back in Print: Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon

My Canada Day treat is this delight: the first volume in Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series, her first set of novels.

Report for Murder, first published in 1987, was McDermid’s début; she was a newspaper journalist when she created the UK’s first lesbian detective, an amateur investigator who is also a reporter when the series opens.

The books were originally published with the UK’s small The Women’s Press. I have fond memories of the covers of those early books, and the Press’s 2003 demise was a source of grief to many of us.

As McDermid recalled in a podcast interview, the six books in the Lindsay Gordon series “were paperback originals at a time when paperbacks were not reviewed,” but readers’ enthusiasm made up for the absence of official notice: “the books went out there and they found the readership from word of mouth and from booksellers, [who] put it in the customers’ hands and said, I think you’ll like this. And I did okay. But I mean, there was no money in it, really.”

McDermid then decided to try to craft more commercial stories and characters, starting with her Kate Brannigan P.I. books.

Her Carol Jordan/Tony Hill books have been bestsellers, adapted as television miniseries. They’re heavy on sexual pathology, and a bit grim and graphic for my tastes, but they’re extraordinarily popular.

McDermid has continued to create wonderful characters. I think her current Karen Pirie series may be her best, overall, with the complex stories and characterizations and the inclusion of the socio-political concerns that she first addressed in her early books.

Lindsay is a wonderful character. I’m looking forward to our reunion today.

In Report for Murder, she’s attending a fancy girls’ school weekend event that features a renowned alum, a cellist who will be performing at a benefit concert. When the musician is strangled, Lindsay is on the spot to hunt down the culprit.

Since I’m immersed in Nancy Drew and children’s serial mystery fiction research this week, here’s McDermid’s nod to the famous titian-haired sleuth:

“I’d read mystery fiction from childhood—Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys. I started Agatha Christie when I was very young, Chandler and Hammett—all the classics. The two that influenced me most were Ruth Rendell and Sara Paretsky. Paretsky opened up my eyes to writing something that wasn’t a village mystery.”

Paretsky, incidentally, has a new series début out this fall; I’ve just started reading Bad Company, courtesy of NetGalley, and it’s an intriguing departure from the V.I. Warshawski novels, with a 70-something former CIA agent as the protagonist. Comments Paretsky (who is 79), “With V.I. Warshawski, I wanted to change the traditional depiction of women in crime fiction. With Lily, I’m hoping to challenge clichéd ideas of older women and what we can do.”

And Val McDermid, who has a raft of events coming up, including at Bloody Scotland in September, is 71. Louise Penny’s Newsletter this morning notes that today is her 68th birthday. And Agatha Christie, you may recall, wrote write up to Sleeping Murder, which she composed at age 85/86; it was published posthumously, in 1976.

Here’s hoping that McDermid and co. continue in this grand tradition of later-in-life crime writing.