I'm sorry I'm giving this message from
my own living room in Oxford, not from
the Sheldonian Theatre. How ever hard I've tried with the background to this shot
I'm acutely aware it ain't Christopher Wren. I'm sorry too that I haven't had the
chance to consolidate my claims, my
wannabe claims, to be part of St
Hilda's College, Oxford, who were
organizing the event and I'm sorry on a
personal level that this late March 2020 springtime emergence, which was going to be
for me a bit of a landmark coming back
after a period of ill health, might have
even flashed a little bit of my new hair,
that's not going to happen but it will
wait . Lots of people are in this, similar,
or worse situations. But most of all I'm
disappointed that now hasn't been the
time to have a conversation with Val
McDermid. Val's a writer I've admired
since I first read her Lindsay Gordon
books in the late 1980s and I've watched
this meteoric and kind of wonderful
literary and cultural career since then. It would have been fantastic to chat
about that and about how all her
experience has brought her to something
a little bit closer to my expertise,
writing a play about the death of the
playwright, Christopher Marlowe. I've read
a draft of Val's play and it's brilliant.
It's so interesting to see how she
has brought her narrative and
investigative intelligence to that story
and it's going be a brilliant play when
when the theatres light up and we're able to see it. One of the things I
wanted to ask Val was which of her
detectives she would want to give the
task of reinvestigating, reopening the
case of Christopher Marlowe, who did she
think would be most able to get to the
truth as thinking, you know one of things
I like about Karen Pirie is right from
the beginning of her
career with Val, she has shown herself
to be completely indifferent to and
strong against any kind of pressure. The
establishment can't shut Karen up, they
can't make her tell the story that they
want and that might be a useful skill in
the Marlowe case. There are some interesting vested
interests which perhaps haven't been
completely excavated hanging around that
case. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, well
they're the king and queen aren't they
of the cold case? They're brilliant at going
back over little details in the evidence
things that could reopen or, you know,
reignite the questions about what really
happened so they'd be good. Kate
Brannigan, oh I think she's probably my
favourite. She would be good particularly,
I think, because since she's not
institutionally aligned, she's a
Private Detective, she can skim along
along the lore of legality, of long legal
lines let's say. She's good at jemmying a lock
or you know doing a bit of work
in the kind of underworld in
Manchester. I think she'd be pretty good
in Deptford. I think I would give
it to Brannigan but I'd love to know
what Val would say to that and I
also wanted to bring our conversation
slightly wider in a way. One of the
things I've long been interested in is
the way that detective stories from the
earliest from Poe or from Conan Doyle or
something, how those stories are really
almost exemplary literary texts and
that's because they give out the
information to the reader in bits, they
need the reader to keep coming to their
own conclusions, to keep filling in the
gaps. They're like all stories in
that sense but they make it much more,
much clearer that the author knows
everything about the story presumably
from the start but is giving it to us in
very particular, in a very particular
order and with a particular aim in
helping us to think through or to make
sense of the evidence ourselves that's
what we do and we read anything and it's
one of the aspects I wanted to bring out
in my book about Shakespeare. The book's called 'This is Shakespeare', which I think
is a bit hubristic but what I mean by 'is'
that's
the most academic line in the world
isn't it? What I mean by 'is' is, no, what
what I mean by the title is that what
what Shakespeare is to me is is an act
of engagement or interrogation. It's what
happens when we and Shakespeare meet.
It's not a monolith, it's not something
far away from us, it's something that we
need to engage with just as we need to
engage with detective stories. We need to
be there filling in some of the gaps,
making our own assessments of the
evidence, thinking through, being active,
being Shakespearean and I wanted to get
away from an idea of Shakespeare as an
exam text or as a kind of dutiful thing
that we have to do and bring back some
of the excitement that I think there is
when we think about a Shakespeare who
has really got lots of space for us and
for us in our different ways. I've never
really understood why people dismiss
their own views about literature by
saying you know that's just a modern
perspective.
I mean modern perspectives is it's
exactly what we need that's why these
texts are worth our reading now because
they have something to say to us, they
haven't finished telling us what they
have to say and they haven't finished
hearing what we have to say in response.
So I was really keen to think about
those kinds of larger questions about
detective fictions as the ultimate kind
of literature, the ultimate example of
how writers and readers interact and
create meaning together and to think
about how that material might help us
think again about Shakespeare. So Val, I'm
looking forward to that conversation.
Everyone else keep safe. All this stuff
will be back and, wow, won't we
appreciate it when it is. Thanks.
