Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon: A Revolutionary Portrait in Tartan-Noir

Abstract

Considered as one of the most influential crime fiction writers of our time, Val McDermid combines her works with Scotland’s city and town culture. Having the opportunity to closely observe the problems faced by the working class in the town of Fife, where she spent her childhood, McDermid enriches her fiction with these narratives. These experiences led her to be the voice of the forgotten, oppressed, and marginalised segments of society in her later writing life. Also challenging the male-dominated structure of traditional crime fiction, McDermid brings a new atmosphere to crime fiction by creating fictional characters such as Lindsay Gordon. Classic crime fiction, which spent its golden age under the hegemony of British writers in the 1930s, presents the reader with stories in which typical male detectives are the protagonists. By the 1970s, Scottish crime fiction, or Tartan-Noir writers, produced essential works in this field. McDermid, who took the title of the Queen of crime fiction, puts women at the centre of her narrative, and in this way, she differs from male Tartan-Noir writers. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of ‘performative gender’, this study examines McDermid’s challenge to the male-dominated structure of traditional detective fiction and her use of female solid detectives such as Lindsay Gordon. Additionally, McDermid’s criticisms of the Margaret Thatcher era will be presented to the reader, supported by references from her novels.