Report for Murder by Val McDermid (All Editions)

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Report for Murder was Val McDermid's first novel and the beginning of a career that made her one of Britain's best-known crime writers. The Women's Press, the London feminist publisher, issued it in 1987, introducing Lindsay Gordon, a Glasgow freelance journalist who describes herself as a cynical socialist lesbian feminist. Her publishers have long billed her as Britain's first lesbian detective, and scholars of Scottish crime fiction treat the book as an early challenge to a genre that had been overwhelmingly heterosexual and male.

The novel puts a lesbian protagonist inside the most traditional of mystery frames: a girls' boarding school in Derbyshire, a fund-raising concert, a cellist garrotted with a string from her own instrument, and a locked room. Lindsay's romance with Cordelia Brown runs alongside the investigation, and Publishers Weekly, reviewing the American edition, praised the way the developing relationship and the detective plot are woven together. McDermid has said that the timing mattered, since the book reached Britain just as American women crime writers such as Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton were arriving there.

The Lindsay Gordon series ran to six novels, and the fifth, Booked for Murder, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Report for Murder has stayed in print on both sides of the Atlantic, with American editions from St. Martin's Press, Spinsters Ink and later Grove Atlantic, and a HarperCollins edition in Britain with a new introduction by the author. McDermid received the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award in 2011, and this is the book where that pioneering began.