Val McDermid: 'Even on a romantic holiday my thoughts turn to murrrder' | Books | The Guardian

What convinced McDermid to begin writing was the new wave of feminist private eye novels coming out of the US in the 80s. A friend who lived there had sent her a copy of Indemnity Only (1982), the first VI Warshawski novel by Sara Paretsky, "and that for me was a really exciting moment. It was a novel that had an urban setting, which right away fitted much more closely to my contemporary experience of the world. It had a female protagonist who had agency, a brain and a sense of humour. The other thing that struck me about those books was that there was a politics and an organic nature to them. The crimes that happened in those books happened because it was that kind of city, it was that kind of politics that ran the city, because these industries operated there, because that kind of corruption happened there. There's a lot of cosy crime that feels like a murder's been randomly bolted on. And Paretsky and Sue Grafton and Marcia Muller didn't feel like that. And that excited me."