Clash of the Scottish Titans

Controversy fanned by eager journalists at the Edinburgh International Book Festival is burning brightly. In it, we see Ian Rankin defending his position, following an interview with Danuta Kean for The Independent last year. Kean wrote:

His willingness to write graphically about places like Dungavel does not extend to the violence at the heart of his books. Unlike rivals such as Patricia Cornwell, Karin Slaughter and Mo Hayder, he does not salivate over every drop of blood. “The people writing the most graphic violence today are women,” he says when I ask what he thinks of them. “If you turn that off,” he looks nervously at my tape recorder, but continues regardless, going public about one of the great unsaids among crime writers, “I will tell you that they are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.” He refuses to go into more detail.

Newspapers have been awash since with Val McDermid attacking homophobia and Rankin’s statement, and the London Times issuing a full-page article in its print edition, which recently landed on my holiday breakfast table in Dublin under the headline “Case of the Bloodthirsty Lesbians,” though the same piece appearing online is called “Revenge of the Bloodthirsty Lesbians.” In both cases, the text reads, in part:

There is no mystery to solve: Ian Rankin did it, in an interview, with the word “lesbian”.

Britain’s bestselling crime writer found himself condemned as “offensive” by a leading female rival yesterday after suggesting that women authors, and gay ones in particular, are more bloodthirsty than men. The acclaimed writer of the Inspector Rebus novels said in an interview last year: “The people writing the most graphic novels today are women. They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.”

Speaking to an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Val McDermid quoted the remark almost word for word, attributing it to “a very prominent Scottish male writer”. She then dismissed it as “arrant rubbish”.

The author, who is a lesbian, added: “I find that statement so offensive, I can’t even begin to start--apart from the fact that a lot of what is being written by the very talented young Scottish male writers is not shying away from depicting violence very directly. But there are certain kinds of books in which the only way in which you can be honest is to write about violence in a very direct way, to say, ‘This is what it is’.”

It takes Dublin, Ireland-based Tana French, the author of 2007’s Into the Woods, to close the Times piece:

Women understand, in a way, that danger lurks every time you walk home alone at night, every time a stranger asks you for directions on a deserted street, every time you’re home on your own and there’s a strange breeze moving through the curtains.

Meanwhile other journalists are having a field day with this literary spat. David Robinson of The Scotsman quotes McDermid from the Edinburgh festival as saying:

“I'll tell you what pisses me off more than almost anything. When people say, ‘As a woman, how do you feel about writing on violence?’ Have you ever heard a male crime writer being asked, ‘As a man, how do you feel about writing about violence?’

“There’s a profound disassociation, it seems to me, as if somehow it’s wrong for us to be writing about violence against women, as though somehow we need permission to write about violence against women.”

McDermid also claimed that there was a bias against books by women writers being reviewed in newspapers.

“Blinkered” male buyers for book chains also came in for attack.

McDermid said she was sitting next to the thriller-buyer for a major chain at a trade dinner: “He was ... talking about his new job, and he said, ‘I had no idea of how much reading was going to be involved in this’.

“Then he said, ‘Of course, I don’t read books by women’. And this is one of the most powerful purchasers in the country. And he doesn't read books by women.

“What I wanted to do was to grab him by the throat, smack him against the wall and say, ‘You stupid a***hole!’ But what I actually said was, ‘Perhaps you might like to try one of mine?’”

The BBC also managed to squeeze in its two bits on this subject.