Thirteen stories. St. Petersburg nights. A bingo hall under siege. The publishing world’s underbelly. Cybersex weaponized. McDermid uses the short form to move territory constantly—different voices, different continents, different tones. Crime is either the center or orbiting just outside it, depending on the story.
Her PI Kate Brannigan appears but doesn’t anchor the collection. The stories don’t need her presence to function. Some work the crime genre straight, delivering exactly what the form promises. Others push against the boundaries until they rupture, until something different emerges on the other side.
McDermid’s range is the point. She moves between registers without losing control. The male voices sound like male voices. The female voices don’t harmonize with them. The geography shifts. The stakes recalibrate. What stays constant is the specificity—the attention to how crime actually functions in specific places, how it disrupts specific lives, how ordinary people navigate its presence.
Sara Paretsky contributes a foreword comparing McDermid to Chandler. The comparison is meant as high praise. The stories themselves make the argument without needing the endorsement. McDermot writes with the precision and the moral clarity that separates crime fiction that matters from crime fiction that just moves plot. The collection proves the point repeatedly across thirteen different iterations.
Details
| ISBN: 9781932859119 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Mystery |
| Subject(s): Other Mystery Categories; Short Story Collections |
| Publication Date: 2005-10-01 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Amble Press |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 192 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: Val McDermid is one of the most significant figures in contemporary crime fiction and one of the most prominent openly lesbian authors working in any genre. She has a Wikipedia entry and a career spanning more than thirty books, including the Wire in the Blood series featuring psychological profiler Carol Jordan and Tony Hill. Stranded is a short story collection rather than a novel, and the content is not explicitly lesbian — it is included here because McDermid’s stature in lesbian literary culture makes her presence in this bibliography essential regardless of individual book content. She grew up in a Scottish mining community, read English at Oxford, and turned to full-time writing in 1991 after sixteen years in journalism. |
| Book_ID: 106141 |