ashthomas//blog: Val McDermid's The Torment of Others

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Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Val McDermid's The Torment of Others

I just finished reading Val McDermid's The Torment of Others the other night. It is one of those books that for which only a cliché can describe it: a real page-turner.

I don't generally read thrillers or crime fiction, but I am a huge fan of the television series The Wire in the Blood. It is, essentially, a traditional police procedural, and I would probably have ignored it except for the fact that my buddy Dave highly recommended it. The local police force of Bradfield, a fiction northern England city of about a million people, and in particular Detective Inspector Carol Jordan, are assisted in their murder investigations by the clinical psychologist Tony Hill. Hill is the star, and his complex relationship with the criminal mind leads to the attraction of the show. It delves into the darkest corners of the human mind, into its sexual and homicidal urges.

It is a dark show in the sense that it is often unpleasant, graphic and disturbing; this also makes it compulsive viewing. The rapport, and requisite romantic tension, between Tony and Carol relieve much of the pressure, and it contains the sort of gallows humour that one would expect from a homicide detective and a forensic psychologist. Each episode is, in the tradition of British crime series, movie length. This allows the show to take its time, develop characters and explore the minds of the killers and those who chase them. The characters are so well acted that when reading the books, I cannot help but see the faces and hear the voices of Robson Green and Hermione Norris.

The Torment of Others is the fourth Tony Hill/Carol Jordan book. The television series, currently at three seasons, adapted the first two books as the first two episodes. After that, the episodes were original scripts. My wife and I decided to skip those first two books, since we were familiar with the stories, and jump to the third and the fourth books.

The third book, The Last Temptation, is set after the series, and involves Carol being seconded into an undercover sting in Germany as part of pan-European co-operation between national police forces. At the same time, a serial killer is bumping off European psychologists, which, when one of the victims turns out to be a acquaintance of Tony's, allows McDermid to bring Tony onto continental Europe as well. This book was good, but it was a departure from the Wire in the Blood that I was familiar with. The characters, beside Carol and Tony, were all new and not as thoroughly drawn, and at times it reminded me more of a spy thriller than a murder mystery.

I don't know if McDermid received criticism from fans for moving outside of Bradfield, but The Torment of Others returns Carol and Tony to their old beat. Carol is now a Detective Chief Inspector, and is given command of a major crime taskforce. The plot revolves around the grisly and disturbing rape and murder of a prostitute. This is usual fare for Carol and Tony, with one twist: the murder is identitical to a series of murders from a few years earlier... and Carol and Tony caught the killer back then. Is the killer somehow orchestrating murders from behind the bars of a psychiatric prison, or maybe he is innocent? Neither is the case, and Tony and Carol race against the clock as the killer on the street begins taking further victims.

The mystery element of the story is intriguing. I found myself switching suspects more than once. The relationship between Carol and Tony deepens, complicated by events that occurred at the end of the third book. Another twist is the death of a second-tier character whom I had grown quite fond of from the books and the television series.

McDermid is coming here for Writer's Week of the Adelaide Festival of Arts next year, so I will definitely attend her readings and book signings. There are some questions that I would like to ask her about how an author feels when her characters are used by other writers, and how she views the relationship between what happens on the show (i.e. in stories not written by her) and what happens in the books. Does she see them as distinct and separate, or part of the same continuity? It will be very interesting to hear her thoughts.

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