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'How to use the crime novel differently'

10 June 2013

'It was a bit unimaginable when I began that I'd ever get to 25 books. But it was also unimaginable how much crime-writing would have changed. In hindsight, I can see that several things happened at the same time. Literary fiction in the UK became very interested in critical theory and lost its relationship with narrative and, to some extent, with the reader. It stopped taking them on a journey from a beginning to a middle to an end. But there were still a lot of young writers who wanted to tell those stories and a lot of us turned to genre where the narrative arc still held true. And these writers also wanted to keep themselves interested, so there were lots of ideas about how to use the crime novel differently.'

Val McDermid in the Guardian