Top Scots crime writer Val McDermid has revealed she wants to match Agatha Christie’s tally of novels – but admitted each book she writes gets harder.
McDermid, 70, has written 40 novels since her 1987 debut Report for Murder, and sold more than 19 million books across the world.
But she told the Quick Book Reviews podcast she was only just over half way to matching the prolific Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot author who inspired her to read as a child.
Asked what she would still like to achieve in her career, she said: “Agatha Christie published 72 novels or something so that’s a target.”
McDermid’s task is made harder, she said, as she has learned that writing does not become easier with experience.
She said another famous crime novelist, the late Ruth Rendell, had warned her of this many years ago, but insisted the challenge of getting better keeps her going.
She said: “I hope that people don’t think it’s easy because it’s really not.
“I remember very early in my career meeting Ruth Rendell for the first time. I was a huge fan and I was sort of fan-girling, but once you’ve said ‘I love your books, I think you’re a wonderful writer’ where do you go from there?
“So I stupidly said, ‘when you’ve written as many books as you have it must get easier’ and she looked at me as if I was very slow and said ‘no dear, it gets harder’.
“I didn’t understand it at the time but I understand it now.
“For me the challenge of sitting down at the keyboard at the start of a new book is every bit as big as the new writer starting out on their second or third book, struggling to find something to say that hasn’t been said before.”
She added: “Every book, as soon as it’s finished and gone off to the printers, I think ‘oh, that’s a terrible sentence’ or ‘I could have done that better’ or ‘I should have done this’.
“I learn from every book’s mistakes and I hope the next book will be better or at least different and something I’ve not done before.
“For me, that’s part of the fun of it, the challenge of doing it differently and doing it better.
“If I got to the point where I started to feel it was just a walk in the park and ‘I can do this standing on my head’ I think I’d stop. There would be no fun in that.
“That challenge is what keeps me going.”
McDermid’s latest novel Silent Bones is the eighth in her Karen Pirie series, but she revealed the title alone presented a challenge.
She said: “I struggled with this one. Normally I start off with a working title and kind of write to the title, but with Silent Bones I couldn’t come up with anything that really worked for me.
“There was a lot of discussion between me and my editor before we got there. This is my fortieth novel so the obvious titles I’ve already done.”
McDermid has previously told how she was inspired by Agatha Christie after discovering her novels aged nine in her local library in Kirkcaldy, Fife.
But she admitted she had to adapt a nickname she had been given by readers in order to appease the late author’s estate.
She said: “I’ve been referred to several times as the ‘Queen of Crime’ and the Agatha Christie estate took umbrage at this. They said I couldn’t call myself ‘Queen of Crime’ because it’s trademarked.
“I pointed out that it wasn’t me or my publishers making this claim, it was reviewers and readers, but I decided I would use a Scots word, ‘quine’, which means a woman, so I call myself the ‘Quine of Crime’.”
