Embrace the cold with Val McDermid

 Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Scottish crime writer Val McDermid, whose books often veer into dark and creepy territory, relishes the coming of winter.

Many people may regard it as a season to be endured rather than enjoyed, but for McDermid it’s ‘the chosen season of creativity’, a time when the bleakness of the ­landscape ‘makes it easy to follow strange tracks in my mind’.

Skating into Christmas 

Part of a series where well-known authors muse on the seasons, this slender book offers an insight into McDermid’s work habits.

Her thrillers, including the Wire In The Blood and recently televised Karen Pirie series, have made her one of Britain’s most successful writers – more than 19 million copies of her books have sold worldwide.

She doesn’t reveal what inspires her often gruesome plots, but it’s easy to see why she’s so prolific: she keeps to a strict work schedule.

Once the Hogmanay celebrations are over, McDermid sharpens her pencils and digs out the notebooks where she scribbles down ideas for new books throughout the year.

Sometimes these are notes from research she’s done in the National Library of Scotland, other times they are random jottings, such as the names of characters or ideas for locations. Some leave her baffled when she rereads them, like a note which simply said, ‘French ­Foreign Legion?’

A few years ago, when Agatha Christie’s family found dozens of her notebooks in an attic, McDermid was delighted to learn that the Queen of Crime’s journals were equally scattergun, a mixture of plot outlines and character sketches along with shopping lists and suggestions for spring bulbs. McDermid suspects that, like her, Christie must have carried a notebook in every handbag.

By the end of January, McDermid aims to have ­written the first 50 pages of her new novel. Starting a book, she says, is a bit like being a mole, digging up through the cold, hard ground. Even after 40 novels she feels nervous with each new book: ‘I still need the reassurance that my skills ­haven’t melted away during the gap between the end of the previous book and now.’

She writes nostalgically of childhood winters in Fife, which kicked off with Halloween and ‘guising’, the forerunner of trick or treating.

One essential accessory was the turnip ­lantern, gouged out of the rock-hard flesh. ‘Even as I type this, my hands twinge with the memory of pain,’ McDermid says.

As you would expect, she is very good at conjuring up the feeling of ­winter. During the 1963 Big Freeze, she recalls ‘proper snow, just like a Hans Christian Andersen story’. The park pond froze over and the then eight-year-old McDermid, a strong skater, remembers ‘the thrill of whizzing over the ice with the wind singing in my ears, the cold bringing tears of joy to my eyes’.

Writing of a train journey one December from St Petersburg to Moscow, she describes ­looking out of the window and seeing that ‘an empty platform covered in fresh snow sat between us and our mirror image – another motionless train steaming in the wintry night’. As befits a crime writer, this scene reminded her of Murder On The Orient Express.

Winter may not have the excitement of spring or glamour of summer but, as McDermid shows, it still has its charms.