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St. Andrew's Cathedral in Glasgow, historical photograph from 1979
Photo: Ross Anthony Willis/Fairfax Media/Getty Images
When the present is confusing and unreliable, the safer choice for writers is to turn to the past.
And so it's not surprising that many crime novels conceived and written during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic took a look in the rearview mirror.
Val McDermid, the Scottish best-selling author, also chose the throwback option and underlined this decision with the title of her current novel, which is simply called »1979«.
The book is the beginning of a new series, her series heroes, the police officer Karen Pirie and the investigative team Tony Hill/Carol Jordan, are taking a break for the time being.
It is McDermid's most personal and ambitious project to date.
Four more novels are set to appear in the coming years, set ten years apart and showing how society has changed over the past four decades.
The focus of all five books: the Glasgow reporter Allie Burns, still a very young beginner in 1979, whose ideal of journalism is based on reading Joan Didion or Truman Capote, but who, instead of becoming an icon of a British variety of New Journalism, initially once ended up as a reporter for a tabloid on topics derogatorily referred to as "women's affairs."
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Val McDermid
1979 - The huntress and the hunted: A case for journalist Allie Burns
Translation: dr
Kirsten Reimers
Publisher: Knaur TB
Translation: dr
Kirsten Reimers
Publisher: Knaur TB
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McDermid emphasized in an interview that Allie was not a reflection of herself, but many of the anecdotes came from her time as a journalist.
This applies above all to the descriptions of homophobia, misogyny and other forms of sexism that defined everyday editorial work at the time.
For Allie, the editorial office is not only a place of almost unbearable daily humiliation, but also a constant source of fascination: "an inferno of clattering keys, cigarette smoke and the desperate efforts of the editorial board to get the articles on the table in good time".
In this sometimes toxic climate, Burns wants to assert herself against all prejudices and hostilities, and she finds an ally in her colleague Danny Sullivan, who is not openly gay (homosexuality was a criminal offense in Scotland until 1980).
Danny, on the other hand, can urgently use help himself, he is currently researching his first scoop, it is about tax fraud on a very large scale.
In the retrospective, the year 1979 is already overshadowed by the coming decade with its social upheavals.
»Greed is good« wasn't just the motto of the 1980s movie »Wall Street«.
A greed fueled, among other things, by the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 1979.
Of course, the socialist McDermid did not choose the year in which her novel takes place by chance.
Definitely uncharacteristically for a crime novel, 1979 begins with a birth, and most of the story will already have been told before the first and only murder occurs.
So anyone who expects a detective story to fulfill the pattern "murder, investigation, clarification" will not be happy here.
Even if the novel is more of an emancipation story than a crime thriller in parts, it is extremely exciting and sometimes very funny to accompany Allie and Dannie as they, as would-be revenants of "Watergate" journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, with more Committed as a talent, working on their first big stories that could either kickstart their careers or put their lives in jeopardy.
Because after their story about the imaginative tax-saving models of Scotland's super-rich has dominated the front pages for days, Danny and Allie are on to their next, even more dangerous scoop: By chance, they get on the trail of a newly founded terrorist cell, which, with the logistical help of the IRA, is carrying out attacks planning in Scotland.
The aim: to influence the referendum on whether Scotland should have an independent parliament.
Danny decides to infiltrate the cell as an alleged potential financier and soon finds himself in the crosshairs of terrorists and the Secret Service.
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Despite all the social realism and all the criticism of the conditions at the time, Val McDermid does not look back in anger; in »1979« she strikes a much more forgiving tone than other Scottish writers, such as Douglas Stuart, who also wrote for his during the early Thatcher years Glasgow-set dark memoir »Shuggie Bain« won the Booker Prize in 2020, or Alan Parks, whose heroin-fuelled crime novels depict 1970s Glasgow as a fucked up cesspool.
McDermid, on the other hand, brings a touch of retro flair and nostalgia to her narrative, showing Allie and Danny researching using phone books and street maps in these pre-digital times while sitting on "a high-fashion three-piece brown corduroy sofa";
the sound of old-fashioned typewriters shrills in the ears of the journalists, who all too often have a hangover.
The new wave of the Tom Robinson Band or Elvis Costello rattles out of car radios and compact systems, and McDermid repeatedly intersperses references to Glasgow's legendary artists and writers, including a deep nod to William McIlvanney and his 1977 novel »Laidlaw«, which marked the founded modern Scottish crime fiction.
Most notable, however, is the amount of bacon buns that McDermid allows her protagonists to devour.
They might have been the number one cause of death back then.
Far from murder anyway.
