Val McDermid: living the tartan noir in Edinburgh

The Scottish capital has a long tradition of crime fiction. Now one of the genre’s modern proponents comes home.

(Photo By Life of crime: Val McDermid, pictured in 2004, has recently returned to Scotland)

Two weeks ago, I took possession of a flat in Edinburgh. From the room where I will write, I can look across the Firth of Forth to Fife, where I spent the first 17 years of my life. I don’t need Alex Salmond to tell me this is the year of homecoming. In my heart, I know I have come home.

I have lived in England for twice as many years as I have in Scotland but I have never felt anything other than a Scot. That’s not just some jingoistic tartan-and-shortbread sentimentality speaking. It’s a bred-in-the-bone understanding that we have a different sensibility from our English neighbours. Our history is different. Our culture is different. Our class system is different. Our bread and our beer, those dietary staples, are different. As are the words we use to speak of them. A pint of eighty shilling. A pan loaf.

And I believe that’s why our crime fiction is different. The phenomenon of tartan noir that has sprung from the single seed of William McIlvanney’s 1977 novel, Laidlaw, encompasses a wide range of work, from apparent rural douceness to raw urban savagery. But it seems to me that all of us who write from that Scottish sensibility have common underpinnings that draw us together and distinguish us from our English, Welsh and Irish colleagues.