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BRITCOM 4
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00:00The Pan-American Jumbo Jets with more than 250 people on board has crashed.
00:06There was a terrible explosion and the whole sky lit up and it was absolutely raining fire.
00:10The optical lights are still hovering overhead and ambulances are making their way to and from the hospital in country.
00:17As the news flash came on the television, the phone rang and it was the news desk saying, get to Lockerbie now.
00:23Ninety-three football fans, most if not all Liverpool supporters, have been crushed to death at the FA Cup semi-final at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough Ground.
00:35I was at Hillsborough within 45 minutes of it starting.
00:39It is the people dead, right?
00:44I'd been a journalist for like 14 years. I think we probably all ended up with some level of PTSD.
00:51And I just thought, I can't keep doing this.
00:55I wanted to be a writer and I just took this leap in the dark.
01:00I thought, if I fail, I'll go back to journalism.
01:02But I've no intention of failing.
01:09The person I'm about to introduce, the phrase rock star is kind of overused in our culture.
01:15But this woman is truly a rock star.
01:18The numbers are always difficult to get your head around.
01:20Supposedly, I'm approaching 20 million.
01:23It's quite strange to think of all those people reading Karen Pirie or Tony Hill and Carol Jordan.
01:32Let's call her what she really is.
01:34The Queen of Crime, Val McDermott!
01:39My principal concerns, I suppose, are injustice and unfairness.
01:43But I don't think I know how to write a book that doesn't have a dead body in it.
01:46Does anything make you nervous about doing a documentary like this?
02:11Not really, I mean, because I think I'm quite open about my past, my history.
02:18I think it's quite useful to be open about it because lots of people want to be writers.
02:24And I think that by listening to somebody like me, they'll get a secret, they'll get the trick.
02:32Here amongst all these boxes of mostly books are various archives of photographs.
02:38There's some old ones here.
02:43When I was born, I was taken away from my parents into the isolation hospital at Craigtown
02:48because both my parents had TB.
02:51And my parents didn't see me for three months because they didn't have a car and there wasn't a bus service.
02:56So this is my dad coming to collect me from the hospital when I was three months old.
03:03He'd borrowed a car.
03:07Me and my mum.
03:10You get a wee push on a swing.
03:12See, she was always dressing me in pretty dresses, which really was a waste of effort.
03:17I think my mother wanted a little princess, but she got me.
03:20I was a classic tomboy.
03:21I always wanted to be climbing trees and running about.
03:24So I think I was, in many respects, a disappointing child.
03:29This was me when I was four, showing off my great legs.
03:35I was very close to my dad, I think, because we were very like each other temperamentally.
03:41My dad was a great Burns man.
03:44He loved the work of Robert Burns and he was a member of the Bowhill People's Burns Club.
03:52I love their Burns suppers.
03:54It's an amazing night out.
03:55I love all the trees and how you came.
03:58Come and meet in a blue band.
04:00I guess I grew up with the poems of Burns dinging in my ears.
04:05And that, I think, in many ways shaped my world view.
04:09The understanding that I was as good as anybody else.
04:12I should call no man my master.
04:13I spent a lot of time with my grandparents when I was growing up, because my mum worked, and they were my childcare in the school holidays.
04:24They lived in East Dreams, which was a mere eight miles away, but, you know, felt like quite a distance.
04:29My granddad was a miner.
04:33At that time, the Michael was one of the most prosperous pits in the country.
04:37It was a very successful pit.
04:40My granddad once thought that it would be a good idea to take me down in the cage to see what the pit was like.
04:45And it was an absolutely shocking experience.
04:52The speed that the cage descended at, you kind of left your stomach on the surface.
04:56And then you ended up in this place of darkness and smells and heat.
05:09I wasn't there for very long.
05:12But it did give me an insight into what life was like for the guys who did do that job.
05:20We want to show you some archive from East Weems to do with the mines.
05:26In the early hours of Saturday morning, a seam of coal a mile underground caught fire.
05:41That was a terrible, terrible day in 1967.
05:46I was eight.
05:48Thick, acrid smoke and flame spread quickly.
05:51More than 300 men were coming to the end of the night shift.
05:56I used to go to the Weems on the bus, and you could see the smoke.
06:05The smoke and the dirt everywhere.
06:08Just this, everything was covered in this kind of shroud of grey.
06:11They knew that six men had come out dead.
06:19Three men were still underground, dead.
06:22But they also knew the consequences of what was going to happen if they couldn't put the fire out.
06:27It just felt, there was a sense of desolation and fear.
06:37The men who are tackling this blaze know they are fighting for very high stakes indeed.
06:41The purse is 44 million tons of coal and jobs for over a thousand men for many years to come.
06:47It was palpable, the effect that it was having on people in the village who understood what was going on,
06:58who understood that not just their livelihoods, but the place where they lived was under threat.
07:03You ask any miner or his family in Fife tonight, and they'll tell you it's a great fight to win.
07:13They didn't win.
07:14They couldn't put the fire out.
07:15They eventually sealed it with concrete.
07:19I mean, it was essentially the day that East Dreams died, along with the men who lost their lives.
07:26I think quite a lot about that experience, because it was very much part of the landscape of my world.
07:38And I would invent stories for myself to exercise my imagination.
07:47One of the great attractions of East Dreams was the caves.
07:51So we played there when we were kids, and I used to tell horror stories to the other kids.
07:57We'd have candles.
08:03I tell these stories about ghosts and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night.
08:09I don't know what it is about murder and mayhem specifically that interests me,
08:14but I think we grow up with that sense of fear.
08:18We understand that sense of something bad can happen.
08:21It's like being scared in a safe way.
08:26It's like when you go on the roller coaster, and you scream and scream and scream,
08:30and then you get off and you go and join the queue to do it all over again.
08:32In an odd kind of way, my grandparents contributed to the career I have now,
08:46because they were not readers, but they had a copy of Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage.
08:51And because I was a quick reader, I'd get through my library books pretty quickly before I was due to go home.
08:57And so I would fall back on Agatha Christie, and The Murder at the Vicarage, I would read and reread again and again.
09:04I realised Agatha Christie had written more than one book, and I was determined I was going to track these down and read them.
09:10But they were in the adult library.
09:12It's the children's library where I spent so much of my youth.
09:22Hi there. Hello, how are you guys?
09:24Good to see you again.
09:26It's nice to be back here again.
09:28As I see, I've got plenty of crime and thriller sections as well.
09:30I'm always so happy to see that.
09:32Absolutely. You've got your extensive section of that, I guess.
09:36I was lucky that Kirkcaldy Library had a really good crime fiction section.
09:41So I read my way through Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Niall Marsh, and then into the Americans, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett.
09:48And it was a great education in the world of crime fiction.
09:52I think what I loved about crime fiction was the way that stories unfolded, the way that you could figure out what was happening, the way that you could try and get ahead of the story.
10:04As a writer, your reading life feeds into what you write as much as your personal experience.
10:12We brought you these to have a look.
10:16Oh, the Shelley school.
10:19Oh, is that when Cornelia had her accident?
10:22I love the Shelley school books particularly because in some ways, they were actually my introduction to proper series fiction.
10:32And of course, it's a very privileged, very privileged school.
10:35I remember saying to my parents, why can't I go to a school in Switzerland?
10:39My mum and dad just burst out laughing, you know.
10:42Folkfaker Coddy, didn't you go to Switzerland boarding schools, you know?
10:46One of the Shelley school books had a character who grew up to become a writer.
10:49And in one book, she gets a letter from her publisher and the letter contains a cheque.
10:54You know, do you remember cheques?
10:56And I thought, you get paid money for doing this.
10:59It's a job.
10:59And at the age of nine, ten, I was decided that was what I was going to be.
11:03I was going to tell stories.
11:05This one's Jo, who's by this time gone off into the world outside to write books.
11:11She clearly wasn't very happy with this one because she was burning the pages.
11:14Every time I said I was going to be a writer, everybody just laughed at me, literally.
11:17Family, friends, even teachers laughed.
11:20But I was just, I was determined.
11:34The school I went to, Kirkcaldy High School,
11:37Fife Council had this scheme in the 1960s that they thought was a really great idea
11:42of taking a few kids from each of the primary schools that fed into the high school,
11:47taking them up a year early.
11:49And we were one E.
11:51It was supposed to be E for early, but everybody said,
11:53Oh, you're the experiment.
11:55It was tricky building friendships because, you know,
11:59everybody else knew you were one of the weird kids.
12:02I wanted to get out into the wider world and find myself, express myself.
12:07All the girls in the Charlie School went to Oxford, so I could go to Oxford.
12:12It was insane, insane.
12:14You know, people like me didn't go to Oxford.
12:15Nobody from my school had ever gone to Oxford.
12:21I went to St Hilda's because it had the prettiest prospectus.
12:31This takes me back to my misspent youth.
12:37Ah, punting.
12:49I've often said, you know, I wanted to be Joni Mitchell, but I didn't have the hair.
12:55St Hilda's women have become known over the years as the Hilda Beasts.
12:58We did enjoy ourselves.
13:00I was the captain of the darts team for a while,
13:03and we'd play the men's colleges at darts, and those were some wild nights.
13:06I felt that I had found a place where I could belong.
13:12What I didn't understand when I left Crocodi was that one of the reasons why I felt so out of place
13:17was because of my sexuality, because there were no lesbians in Fife in the 1960s.
13:21You'd been more likely to find a unicorn than an out lesbian.
13:24I had my first great love affair, my first great heartbreak.
13:34Your first love affair is always something that stays with you forever because it's all fresh, it's new.
13:39You've never been here before.
13:41These emotions are overwhelming.
13:43And for me, this was doubly exciting because this was a woman.
13:49And I suddenly found myself catapulted into a relationship of great intensity and great sort of emotional vibrancy.
13:59Yeah, it was great until the peels came off.
14:03How did you cope when the wheels came off?
14:06I was absolutely heartbroken, but you know, you just have to get your head down and get on with things.
14:10Did you write about it?
14:12Yes.
14:15But yeah, I guess it's something that I took into myself.
14:19My first attempt at a novel after I left Oxford was based around that relationship.
14:25It's a terrible novel.
14:27It's truly terrible.
14:28I still have it.
14:29Sometimes I fish it out and remind myself how badly I can write.
14:34Can you give us an example of that?
14:36Absolutely not.
14:40But yeah, it was something that shaped me.
14:45It shaped me in lots of ways.
14:51I struggled in my last year at Oxford because I didn't know what I was going to do for a living.
14:55I wanted to be a writer, but I knew you didn't go straight into being a writer.
14:59And there was all sorts of things that I didn't want to do.
15:02I've often thought to myself that I've got a bit of a problem with authority.
15:08I'm not good at doing what I'm telling.
15:09Well, I'm not good at taking orders.
15:11And I looked around and it seemed to me that journalism was the only answer.
15:18And I went to The Daily Record in Glasgow in 1977.
15:21I went into tabloid journalism because I'd grown up in a household where we read The Daily Record and I thought that working people genuinely deserve newspapers that were entertaining and informative.
15:39The Daily Record passed all other nationals in Scotland.
15:42We had two office pubs with the copycat and the off-the-record.
15:48They were sort of flanked the building and they tended to be a deadison of one or the other.
15:56Oh, Jack Foley.
15:58He was a night sub.
15:59He was a good guy, yeah.
16:00Everybody drank on the job to the extent that the management actually employed editorial drivers.
16:07They were working on the principle that you were going to have had a drink so you'd need somebody to drive you.
16:12You think about it now, people will listen to this and they'll go, like, you're making that up.
16:15But, no, it's how it was.
16:20Women in journalism in the 1970s was not an easy place to be.
16:26It was very much a man's world.
16:30It was focused around being the toughest and the hardest and the hardest-nosed.
16:36And at that time, we only had three news reporters who were women.
16:41There was a tendency for women reporters to be sent out on women's stories.
16:45I mean, the number of miracle babies I covered over those years was quite remarkable.
16:50Honest, you would think that in the west of Scotland, no baby was ever born normally.
16:55They were all sort of miracle babies that nobody expected.
17:00Natalie is the baby that doctors said Phyllis could never have.
17:03You could write these things with your eyes closed.
17:06I don't think they knew what to do with me at all.
17:08You know, I mean, I was, what, 22, Gallus, an Oxford graduate.
17:15They sent me to do a death knock.
17:19And it was four teenagers who had died in a car crash.
17:22And I was sent to go and get collect pictures, as they were called, and get quotes from their parents about what they'd been like and how devastated they were by the death of their children.
17:33And I knew perfectly well that if I did not come back with those four collects, I might as well just never go back into the office again.
17:40Because that would have been it.
17:41I think they were trying to break me, yeah.
17:43You had to stand up for yourself, absolutely.
17:48And that was, that was not always easy.
17:51I mean, some days you'd go home at the end of your shift feeling completely wrung out and strung out.
17:56But on the other hand, I felt this is all rich experience.
18:01And I ended up with a nickname from the deputy news editor who started calling me Killer.
18:08Just call you Killer because you always come back with a story.
18:11The thing I liked about journalism most was the people.
18:16You went out, you chapped a door, you spoke to somebody, you got a snapshot of their lives.
18:21And that has been, you know, the database for my fiction for years.
18:26I'd started writing my first proper novel, Report for Murder, which was published by a small feminist publishing house.
18:34Caroline looked horrified.
18:36You mean you work for the gutter press?
18:38You're supposed to be a socialist and a feminist.
18:41How can you possibly do that?
18:42I reckon that if people like me cop out, then it's certainly not going to get any better.
18:48In fact, it's bound to get worse.
18:51Report for Murder, which is set at a girls' boarding school, was based on a weekend I spent at a very, very posh English girls' boarding school where one of my tutors was a governor.
19:03And she said, I want you to come and talk to the sixth form about being a journalist.
19:06And I thought, right, okay, fine, I'll do that.
19:09The protagonist, Lindsay Gordon, she's a Scottish journalist and a lesbian.
19:14But she is not me.
19:16She's a very different personality from me.
19:18She's much more stubborn and much more difficult, I think, than me.
19:21She came out of my head as a gay character.
19:25I wanted to write about the lives that I understood.
19:30And I didn't want to live half a life.
19:32I didn't want to lie about who I was.
19:34I didn't want to lie about my life experience.
19:36And also there was a part of me that felt I did not want the next generation of young women growing up to have nothing that showed their lives, that had no template for what a lesbian life could be.
19:49Report for Murder was not reviewed at all.
19:52It became part of a sort of subculture of lesbian fiction.
19:56I knew I wasn't going to be able to afford to support myself with that kind of level of income.
20:01And I'd already started working for Mirror Group newspapers in Manchester.
20:17The investigations team of the Sunday people was the tabloid equivalent of the Sunday Times investigative department.
20:24Anything that was dodgy or criminal, we'd uncover it.
20:28It gave me a great deal of satisfaction to do the investigative journalism.
20:34I really enjoyed it.
20:35I did a big series about the women in prison, which was so successful that the Home Office threatened to take away my passport because I wouldn't give up my sources.
20:44That's quite a lot of pressure coming from above.
20:47Yeah, but I was also quite, you know, up for it.
20:51Yeah, make a martyr of me. Go on, make a martyr of me.
20:54Well, somebody shout action or what?
20:56Robert Maxwell took over and that was a pretty disastrous day for Mirror Group newspapers.
21:09The order goes out, stand up when Mr Maxwell comes in and extinguish all cigarettes.
21:14Could you come a little bit closer, please?
21:21He was a deeply unpleasant man. He was a bully. He was aggressive. He was a liar.
21:28I asked, when will you restore the editions in Manchester as you promised to do?
21:35And he stood up and walked around the table and he was a big man.
21:39I mean, he wasn't just a fat man. He was big. He was over six feet.
21:42And he towered over me and just stuck his face in mine and said, are you calling me a liar?
21:47And I'm sorry, my courage failed me at that point because I knew what he did with people who crossed him and I just said, no.
21:55If I'd said yes, I would have been out the door.
21:57And as the newsgroup papers, News of the World Sun, started to crawl into the gutter and become obsessed with the sex lives of soap stars, everybody followed suit.
22:11Who can have the most shocking stories, who could have the most astonishing headline, scandalised sort of stories that were really not stories at all.
22:25That was, I think, the start of the real collapse of inequality in British journalism, British tabloid journalism, I should say.
22:33I used this real story in 1989 and gave Ali Burns the story.
22:42One of the reasons that I started writing the Ali Burns novels was to get out of writing a memoir.
22:48And I mean, I've often said that many people would have to die before I could write a memoir without fear of libel.
22:53He curled his lip.
22:54A great story for a different paper.
22:56Ali, you know perfectly well what we do here.
22:59We do sensationalism.
23:01We do lowest common denominator.
23:03We stir the shit.
23:05We didn't used to.
23:07We used to do journalism.
23:13Yeah, I was sent out to talk to the wrestler, Big Daddy, very famous wrestler, who beat me up.
23:23I went out to talk to him about a story that we had, and I got as far as ringing his doorbell, and he opened the door and just went mad.
23:34At 24 stones, Big Daddy, wrestling superstar.
23:38God, what a sight.
23:40Of course, much of it is pure theatre.
23:45The tactics used may be questionable, but you always know who's going to come out on top.
23:50A freelance had had a tip that Big Daddy's wife had left him for another woman.
24:00Unfortunately, he'd given this tip to other reporters before us, and each one of those reporters had knocked on the door and had the story denied and been shouted at.
24:10I mean, all I said was, I'm Val McDermott from the people, and he's just lost it.
24:15And I tried to get away from him.
24:17He's punching me and kicking me, and I tried to get up the stairs, and he was punching me in the ribs and trying to grab hold of me.
24:26It was absolutely terrifying.
24:28I was really shaken up.
24:30I mean, literally shaking.
24:32The damage it really caused me was every time I knocked on the door, for a good six months or so, I was, like, stepping back well out of the reach of the person who opened the door.
24:40I was anxious.
24:42I was afraid it would happen again.
24:45I don't think they would have been so excited and so keen on him if they had had a sense of what he was really capable of.
24:59I'd been a journalist for, like, 14 years, and I think that the year that finally did for me was, well, the six months, really, where I covered Lockerbie and the M1 air crash and then Hillsborough, like most of the journalists who were working on them.
25:15I think we probably all ended up with some level of PTSD.
25:22Good evening.
25:23A Pan-American Boeing 747 airliner flying from London to New York crashed tonight in the Scottish borders.
25:30It came down on the village of Lockerbie in Dumfreeshire.
25:34First reports say it crashed into a petrol station in the centre of the town, burst into flames and sent a fireball 300 feet into the air.
25:44As the news flash came on the television, the phone rang, and it was the news desk saying, get to Lockerbie now.
25:49I knew Lockerbie quite a bit because my great aunt lived in Lockerbie, so I'd visited Lockerbie on a regular basis.
26:01Police say there have been many casualties.
26:04They don't yet know how many or if anybody on the plane survived.
26:08To be honest, I mean, a lot of it is just a blank to me now.
26:15It's a blur to me now.
26:16But I just remember the wreckage and the fire and the shock and the horror on people's faces.
26:29People just couldn't take it in, me included.
26:32I couldn't take it in.
26:33It just dropped out of the sky.
26:34And just seeing the destruction and the horror of it was just terrible.
26:42I mean, people were walking into the police station with bits of bodies and there was just a sense of disbelief of how could this happen?
26:51What happened?
27:01You have to put yourself to one side and report what's in front of you.
27:04And that's the only way to deal with it.
27:14It's difficult to talk about it now because a lot of it is in the bit of my head that is closed off.
27:19I still don't think about it.
27:24I'm best aware of Hillsborough, I guess, because I wrote about it for 1989, so I had to open that door.
27:34And look at it again.
27:3793 football fans, most if not all Liverpool supporters, have been crushed to death at the FA Cup semi-final at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough ground.
27:45As thousands of supporters packed into the central terrace area, the mood changed dramatically.
27:55The fans here sensed the danger looming.
28:01Police struggled to relieve the massive pressure while many of the fans sought to scale the iron barriers.
28:06I got the call and I was at Hillsborough within 45 minutes of it starting.
28:22It was horrifying.
28:23You couldn't focus on any one thing because your eye was always being pulled somewhere else.
28:36It was, it was, it was awful.
28:41Later on in the day, I was taken to the gymnasium where the bodies were, the body bags were, and it was just, it's unbelievable.
28:54It's the kind of thing you see in a war zone.
28:55You see it on the news in a war zone.
28:56And to see that in your own backyard, as it were, was just awful.
29:02Hillsborough was a pivotal moment for British tabloid newspapers because the Sun believed the lies that the police told them about the Liverpool fans looting the dead and urinating on the dead.
29:26And those of us who were there knew that that was a fiction, that it was a complete lie.
29:31And yet the Sun ran with it.
29:35Did you feel pressure from above, similar pressure, to go that way?
29:38No.
29:41No, we reported what we saw.
29:53By the time the final edition had left the presses, Ali was so exhausted she could barely speak in sentences.
29:59They left the hospital, turning their backs on the catastrophe.
30:05Ali walked to the car at Rhoda's side, moving like an old woman, every step slow and cautious.
30:11They sat in silence in the car, staring out across the city lights.
30:16Finally, Rona spoke.
30:18Rona, I don't know how you do this.
30:22Ali turned the key in the ignition.
30:25I'm really not sure I have another one of these in me.
30:28Rona, I'm truly scared of what this job is doing to me.
30:31And it just eats a chunk out of you.
30:42And you either take it into yourself and feel their pain and feel their empathy, and that damages you in one way.
30:52Or you build a wall and hide behind it.
30:55And that damages you in another way.
30:58And I got, after Hillsborough, I remember thinking, I can't do this again.
31:03I left Mirror Group Newspapers in April 1991, and I thought, I really need to find a way to write books that will enable me to make a living out of writing books.
31:19I suppose at that point, what I was most afraid of was failure.
31:26I thought, you know, it was the old imposter syndrome kicking in, you know, which does kick in from time to time.
31:31Can I do this?
31:32Can I really, am I really good enough?
31:34Yeah, I was anxious about that.
31:36But everybody else was telling me I was mad.
31:38So I kind of felt, sod it, I've got to do this.
31:41You know, I've got to show them I can do this.
31:49I like to bring the sunshine into this room.
31:53When I come in here on the darkest of days, this colour just awakens me up.
32:01What I'm trying to do is write a novel that people will enjoy, but that will also perhaps give them pause.
32:08And that's part of, I think, what the crime novel allows you to do.
32:11When I started out, the UK's contribution to crime fiction was almost all home counties, middle class, middle aged.
32:24And I arrived at crime fiction at a time where there was a whole bunch of us doing something different.
32:29One of the things for me that's really interesting about writing contemporary crime fiction is the way that you can deal with class.
32:42I started writing Kate Brannigan novels, all set in Manchester in the 1990s.
32:48So it had been savaged by Thatcherism.
32:50And it was in the process of trying to haul itself up by its bootstraps.
32:53I wanted to see if the American private eye style would work in a UK setting.
33:03Kate Brannigan is a private eye.
33:05She's a small, red-headed, kickboxer, talks a lot about her granny Brannigan, and just generally kicks ass.
33:13She's smart-mouthed, she's sassy.
33:15And you know that thing where you always think three days later, I should have said that?
33:19She gets to say it in the moment.
33:21I wanted Kate to be a straight woman for two reasons, really.
33:39I mean, the principal one was, can I do this convincingly?
33:42And the other thing was, quite frankly, I wanted to sell books.
33:45I wanted to be published by one of the mainstream legacy publishers, and that wasn't ever going
33:51to happen at that point in time, writing a lesbian protagonist.
33:55But there was something of a backlash, wasn't there?
33:58I'm not poster girl for anybody, except myself.
34:03I write the books that I write because I'm telling a story that works.
34:07Not every character can tell the same kind of story.
34:18So a private eye novel, for example, is written in the first person.
34:21The reader knows everything at the same time.
34:23The detective knows it.
34:25A cop can tell a different story from a different perspective.
34:28When I came to write The Mermaids Singing, this idea just popped into my head, fully formed.
34:35The idea of a profiler working with the police, and the idea of the particular kind of killer,
34:40and that it was going to be young men who were the victims, not young women.
34:44And you do write quite graphic scenes of violence.
34:48I'm writing books that touch on the darkest places that human beings go to, so that we
34:56can understand this, so that we don't just dismiss it.
35:01I think there is a sense of exploring your fears.
35:07We take from that the power of adrenaline, and the power that makes us feel strong, that
35:12makes us, even if it's an illusion, feel that we can survive situations.
35:16It's survivability is inherent in the genre.
35:22The Mermaid Singing was a game changer for me.
35:25It won the gold dagger in 1995, against all the odds.
35:29Because at that time, the books that tended to win the gold dagger were kind of traditional,
35:34conventional, sort of P.D. James, Colin Dexter, Ruth Rendell School, and the younger
35:41writers sort of coming through tended to get the silver dagger, which was like the runner-up
35:44prize. So I was completely gobsmacked, and that transformed my career.
35:50And the other thing that that ultimately led to was the television series Wire in the Blood.
35:54Right, how am I doing? Am I a bit, um...
36:00A wee bit flaky, as usual, darling.
36:01Oh, gosh.
36:02In The Wine and the Blood, we meet Jack O'Vance.
36:05I had realised that it was possible to tell stories in fiction that you couldn't tell in journalism,
36:11you know, because I'd had stories that had been knocked down by the lawyers.
36:14I'd had stories that we all suspected, but we couldn't prove.
36:16It reminded me of having met Jimmy Savile in my early days as a journalist, when I was
36:21just a baby journalist in 1976, and I was sent to interview him because he was opening
36:26a garden fete, and he was horrible.
36:29And so later on, when I moved to work in Manchester, people would either phone us up or they'd come
36:36into the office and claim that they had been molested, abused, uh, sexually harmed by Jimmy
36:43Savile. And it was heartbreaking because there was nothing we could do with these allegations.
36:49There was no evidence. We all knew Savile was a predator, and it was impossible to expose him.
36:56I just want to avoid overexposure and overkill.
36:59Er, what was it? Ignore us again?
37:00You're opening a charity football match. Jason will be there. You just turn up and be you.
37:05That's why they love you.
37:06Yeah, I had the kernel of the sort of idea that celebrity was the new shield, that if
37:11you were famous enough, er, and if you're on the telly enough, then people would not believe
37:15you could do these kind of things. And that became kind of the, the foundation stone of
37:20the character of Jack O'Vance. People were so accustomed to Vance's open sincerity, so
37:26familiar with his very public probity, it never crossed their minds to look for the catch.
37:31I just want to go home.
37:39People say, oh, you shouldn't write about violence. You should write about violence against women.
37:43But, you know, when men stop committing acts of horrific violence against women, I'll stop
37:47writing about them. I'm reflecting the world that's out there. And honest to God, some of
37:53the things that I've heard from forensic scientists and from, from police officers, you think, I can't
37:59put that in a book because it's just too much.
38:01Is this what an investigation usually looks like? Only when we're close to catching the
38:09perpetrator. This is particularly strong. We're just missing one thing that will convict
38:14our man. The crime novel offers, I suppose, a kind of consolation, because although bad things
38:20happen, generally the people who do the bad things get what's coming to them in one way or
38:25another.
38:37One of the reasons why I wanted to move back to Scotland was I wanted to be by the sea.
38:41I grew up by the sea and there's something about water that seems to me to release those
38:48little roadblocks in your head between you and the next chapter or you and the next scene.
38:57Whenever I go across the fourth rail bridge, I'm always tempted by Inshmickery below with
39:02its ruins of the wartime battery.
39:04Would it be a good place to hide a body?
39:07Probably. The problem you'd have with putting a body on Inshmickery is getting it there.
39:11It's not very easy to land on it. Killing people is easy. Disposing of bodies is hard.
39:16I moved back to Scotland in 2014 and I moved back for the classic reason of love. My partner,
39:29the wonderful Jo Sharp, is a geography professor in St Andrews. And so she was not very moveable
39:36in that sense. So I decided it was time to come back to Scotland. I had a great idea for
39:43a cold case set in Fife. It had to be in a university town and it had to be somewhere
39:48that was relatively small and St Andrews was the only place where I could think of to make
39:52it work. So that was the starting point for the book that became The Distant Echo.
39:58Yes, Piri. D.I. Lees, welcome to Serious Crime. Happy to have you. Pleasure to be here, sir.
40:09I've created Karen Piri. She's from Fife. She's Thrawn. She's gallus. She's opinionated.
40:16She doesn't like authority. She's not glamorous. I gather you're from Fife, Piri.
40:22Methyl, sir. You remember it then? Rosie Duff murder. Would have been all over the news.
40:27I was three, sir. Three. Jesus. The more I wrote Karen Piri, the more I thought this is
40:32really interesting. There's so many good stories I could tell in the context of a cold case investigation.
40:38And I thought, you know, The Minor Strike, a lot of people didn't know the truth of what
40:43happened to families and the people in The Minor Strike. They covered it as a journalist.
40:48But also, it was always part of my past, my history.
40:56I felt it was something I wanted to write about, but it took me a long time to find The Voice.
41:01A lot of what lies behind that is the need to not forget.
41:08It was barely nine o'clock, but there was hardly a light showing.
41:14People couldn't afford the electricity. They went down the welfare for a bit of light or heat,
41:20or they went to bed, hoping that they might sleep long enough for the nightmare to be over when they woke.
41:29You find ways to use your own experience in not necessarily recognisable ways.
41:35So I think particularly for a crime writer, where you're often writing about the darkest side of life,
41:40where you're dealing with people who are in grief or people who are in a state of anger or jealousy or rage,
41:45whatever, all the motivations for murder, you have to look at your own experience of those emotions.
41:50What set me off? What, what, when I was grieving for that person, what stages did I go through?
41:55What made me realise that I could move forward? What made me more angry? What made me feel humiliated?
42:02And you take those experiences of your own and you transform them into something that you can give to your characters.
42:08I'm writing Karam Piri at the moment, I'm writing a Karam Piri, which I think is going to be called Silent Bones.
42:21We're finished putting the second Karam Piri on the screen, A Darker Domain, and that has been filmed in Fife.
42:27As long as the ideas are still there, as long as the passion and enthusiasm are still there, I'll be writing.
42:36And what else would I do?
42:40I think women are such good crime writers because we understand and fear.
42:45We're told everywhere is dangerous.
42:48And we live with that understanding, that visceral understanding of what fear is and what darkness is.
42:53I'm willing to accept criticism, but I find it extraordinary that people somehow think I should be sitting at home writing mimsy little village mysteries.
43:04That's fine, there's a place for that, but it's not my place.
43:08I want to write stories that have their roots in how people actually behave in the world and why they behave the way they behave in the world.
43:16And I'm not going to stop because somebody thinks I shouldn't be writing this.
43:21Who's got the right to tell me what I should be writing? Nobody.
43:24The only person who's got the right to tell me what I should be writing is me.
43:28Listen to me.
43:29Thanks for coming to my book aboutmesi and Sentai.
43:35I want to read how people are sent.
43:50I want to read more collections to them sometimes.
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