Work
McDermid's notable characters are a lesbian journalist, Lindsay Gordon; a private investigator, Kate Brannigan; and a psychologist, Tony Hill, who suffers from sexual dysfunction. Her books mainly fall into three series: Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan, and, beginning in 1995, the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series, the first entry in which, The Mermaids Singing, won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year. The Hill/Jordan series has been adapted for television under the name Wire in the Blood, starring Robson Green. Val McDermid has stated that Vance, a TV celebrity with a secret lust for torture, murder and under-age girls who featured in The Wire in the Blood and two later books, is based on her direct personal experience of interviewing Jimmy Savile .McDermid states that Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird is her favourite novel.
McDermid considers her work to be part of the "Tartan Noir" Scottish crime fiction genre. As well as her novels, McDermid contributes to several British newspapers and often broadcasts on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland.
Her novels, in particular the Tony Hill series, are known for their graphic depictions of violence and torture.
Read more about this topic: Val McDermid
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Your children and grandchildren will have their share of happiness; there’s no need to work a like a horse for them.”
—Chinese proverb.
“How marvellous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men’s hands; cemented with men’s honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human—for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.”
—Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl Rosebery (1847–1929)
“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)