of murder and suspense. Their protagonists took on the male establishment when they had to, and they didn’t back down. They didn’t shy away from confronting difficult issues either.
I loved them.
I wanted to write my own version of those women. A Scottish version, a woman as firmly rooted as her American sisters, but one who would have to accommodate different laws, different customs, different politics and different histories. I didn’t have the nerve to make her a PI because I didn’t know any at the time. And I suspected women PIs in the UK would have very different professional lives to their US counterparts.
What I did know was journalism. I became a journalist after I graduated from Oxford, just to bridge the gap until I could support myself writing fiction. (I always had the absolute conviction that day would come, a conviction not shared by anyone else back then . . .) I thought if I made my character a journalist, I’d be on safe ground. I knew what journalists were capable of and how we went about circumventing the doors that were closed to us. I knew the rhythm of our working lives and what made a good newspaper story.
In other respects, Lindsay Gordon has congruences with my own background. She’s Scottish, she shares my politics, and she’s a lesbian. It would, however, be a mistake to conflate us. Our personalities are quite different. (Except that we both have a fondness for fast cars and good whisky . . .) She’s far more headstrong and stubborn than I am, for example, and much more willing to take risks.
I’m proud to say that Lindsay was the first out lesbian protagonist in UK crime fiction. It never crossed my mind that she wouldn’t be a lesbian, because those American novels had given me permission to put whoever I wanted centre stage. But the books were never ‘about’ being a lesbian. Lindsay doesn’t wrestle with her sexuality or her gender, nor does she ever apologise for it. It’s only one part of her identity and it’s not one she has a problem with. The gay characters in the books are part of a wider landscape, one that accommodates all sorts and conditions of people.
That was a very deliberate choice on my part. When I was growing up on the East Coast of Scotland, there were no lesbian templates for my life. No books, no films, no TV series, and certainly no lesbians living open lives. I decided that if I was going to write fiction, I was going to give the next generation of gay women a character they could celebrate. I never describe her physically and that’s deliberate too. I wanted her to be a chameleon, to take the form of whatever her readers needed. They could identify with her if they wanted. They could fantasise her as lover or friend or colleague.
Report for Murder was published in 1987 and the Lindsay Gordon books have never been out of print in the UK. I think those early choices I made go some way to explaining why the books have remained so popular. This series is all about character and story, not special pleading or righteous argument.
Each of the books is set in a different world – a trick I learned from reading P D James! My own experiences were the springboard for my imagination in the creation of those environ-ments. Report for Murder is set in a girls’ boarding school; Common Murder, at a women’s peace camp; Final Edition, in the world of newspapers; Union Jack, in the milieu of union politics; Booked for Murder in publishing; and Hostage to Murder moves between Glasgow and St Petersburg in the course of a tense kidnap and murder thriller.
I never intended to write so many Lindsay Gordon novels. Originally I planned a trilogy. (Mostly because the book I really wanted to write was the third one but I couldn’t figure out how to get there without writing the first two.) I even packed her off to live in Half Moon Bay with a view of the ocean so I wouldn’t be tempted to write about her any more.
But she wouldn’t let me go. As soon as I’d despatched her, I had a great idea for another book that gave her the starring role. And then another, and another . . .
Lindsay Gordon took a hold of me and for almost twenty years, she wouldn’t let me go. I hope she has the same effect on you.
Lindsay Gordon put murder to the back of her mind and settled down in the train compartment to enjoy the broken greys and greens of the Derbyshire scenery. Rather like home, she decided. Except that in Scotland, the greens were darker, the greys more forbidding. Although in Glasgow, where she now lived, there was hardly enough green to judge. She congratulated herself on finishing the detective novel just at the point where Manchester suburbia yielded place to this attractive landscape foreign to her. Watching it unfold gave her the first answer to the question that had been nagging her all day: what the hell was she doing here? How could a cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist (as she mockingly described herself) be on her way to spend a weekend in a girls’ public school?
Of course, there were the answers she’d been able to use to friends: she had never visited this part of England and wanted to see what it was like; she was a great believer in ‘knowing thine enemy', so it came under the heading of opportunities not to be missed; she wanted to see Paddy Callaghan, who had been responsible for the invitation. But she remained unconvinced that she was doing the right thing. What had made her mind up was the realisation that, given Lindsay’s current relationship with the Inland Revenue, anything that had a cheque as an end product couldn’t be ignored.
The fact that she cheerfully despised the job she was about to do was not a novel sensation. In the unreal world of popular journalism which she inhabited, she was continually faced with tasks that made her blood boil. But like other tabloid journalists who laid claim to a set of principles, she argued that, since popular newspapers were mass culture, if people with brains and compassion opted out the press would only sink further into the gutter. But in spite of having this missionary zeal to keep her warm, Lindsay often felt the chill wind of her friends’ disapproval. And she had to admit to herself that saying all this always made her feel a pompous hypocrite. However, since this assignment involved writing for a magazine with some credibility, she was doubly pleased that it would avoid censure in the pub as well as provide cash, and that was enough to stifle the stirrings of contempt for Derbyshire House Girls’ School.
Paddy, with the contacts of a life membership of the old girls’ network, had managed to persuade the features editor of Perspective to commission a piece from Lindsay about a fund-raising programme about to be launched by the school with a Gala Day. At that point, Lindsay was hungry for the cash and the prestige, so she couldn’t afford the luxury of stopping to consider if it was the sort of project she’d actually choose to take on. Three months ago she’d reluctantly accepted redundancy when the Daily Nation discovered it needed fewer journalists so that it could pay its print workers their ‘pound of flesh'. Since then, she had been applying for unlikely jobs and frenetically trying to make a living as a freelance. That made the call from Paddy all the more welcome because it meant a relatively quiet weekend away from the demands of the telephone— which would soon stop disrupting her life altogether if she didn’t earn enough to pay the last quarter’s bill.
At that unwelcome thought, Lindsay reflected with relief on the money she would receive from the Derbyshire House job. It seemed poetic justice that such a bastion of privilege should stake her. Good old Paddy, she mused. Ever since they’d met in Oxford six years before, Paddy had not only been a tower of strength in emotional crises but the first to offer help when life got Lindsay into one of its awkward corners. When Lindsay’s car staged a break-down on a remote Greek mountainside it was Paddy who organised the flying out of a spare part. When Lindsay was made redundant it was Paddy who found the cousin who told Lindsay the best thing to do with her less-than-golden handshake. And when Lindsay’s lover died, it was Paddy who drove through the night to be with her. The daughter of two doctors, with an education begun at the ‘best’ schools and polished off at Oxford, Paddy Callaghan had shaken her family by deciding to become an actress. After four years of only moderate success and limited employment, however, she had realised she would never make the first rank. Always a realist, and fundamentally