Abstract
Val McDermid places The Mermaids Singing (1995) and its characters both within and against a prior conception and tradition of crime fiction. The Mermaids Singing purposefully contests the classic detective story, which Porter (1981:220) defines as ‘a literature of reassurance and conformism’. As McDermid herself comments with reference to this award-winning novel:
[w]hen I wrote my first serial killer novel […] it was partly as a reaction against a slew of novels coming out of the US in which hideous violence was meted out to female victims whose only role in the books was to be raped, mutilated, dismembered and strewn across the landscape. Those books were all written by men. I wanted to do things differently, so I chose to write about victims who had a hinterland, who had personalities and who were men. And yes, I wrote clearly about the violence done to them because I believed it was necessary in the context of this book. (McDermid 2009)
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© 2012 Kate Watson
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Watson, K. (2012). Engendering Violence: Textual and Sexual Torture in Val McDermid’s The Mermaids Singing . In: Gregoriou, C. (eds) Constructing Crime. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392083_17
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