Like a basking shark, Val McDermid once remarked, a crime series needs to keep moving or die. The same could be said of crime writers themselves, who work in a genre that has an inbuilt tendency to encourage repetition, often with dreary results in the long term. McDermid herself, however, has a refreshing habit of rarely treading water for long. Over the past 34 years, she’s published four very different crime series, a clutch of standalones, two books for children, a modern reworking of Northanger Abbey, and several non-fiction titles.
And now comes 1979, the first in a planned five-book series set at ten-year intervals up to the present. It’s the story of Allie Burns, a young woman from a working-class Fife family who has a job as a reporter on a Glasgow tabloid. She has a degree from Cambridge, a clear moral compass and a boundless determination to succeed in a man’s world where none of those qualities is particularly welcome. She knows what she’s up against: ‘I’m a woman in a Neanderthal’s world.’
McDermid herself was a journalist and experienced this milieu at first hand. She draws a remarkably vivid picture of the tabloid newsprint culture of 40 years ago — a boozy, nicotine-saturated blend of cynical editors, cosily complicit cops, corrupt but highly skilled printers, and journalists with expense accounts, few illusions and the occasional streak of bloody-minded idealism. One breakthrough depends on Allie’s knowledge of Teeline, a simplified version of shorthand that was an essential tool for a reporter.
As a woman, Allie tends to be given stories involving mothers giving birth on trains and nude models cavorting on beaches in January. But this is a McDermid novel, and things soon change.
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