Interview Janet Christie with Val McDermid on her new book Queen Macbeth
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00:00 What attracted you to this story? Because there are four already in the series.
00:05 This is the fifth in the Dark Tales series.
00:07 They asked me to do it.
00:09 Yeah.
00:10 Simple as that. Jamie Crawford, who is the editor of this whole series, approached me
00:14 and said, "Would you like to do Lady Macbeth?"
00:17 You can do it any way you want. You can do the Shakespearean Lady Macbeth, you can do
00:21 a modern day setting, or you can do the historical Lady Macbeth.
00:25 And I thought that would be fascinating because she's such a strong mythological figure in
00:33 the language of what people think of as Scottish history.
00:36 And that's part of the purpose of the Darkland Tales, is to strip away the mythology and
00:43 the romantic telling of stories to get back to the heart of what actually is the story
00:49 of our history.
00:52 And so often that involves women being scrubbed out of the picture or transformed into creatures
00:57 of evil power, malign intent.
01:01 So Jenny Fagan did Hex about the witch trials. Denise Miners Rizzio very much takes the view
01:06 of Mary, Queen of Scots being put in a very difficult and historically insulting place,
01:13 if you like.
01:14 And certainly Lady Macbeth has been, I think, produced by Shakespeare. And there's reasons
01:19 for that as well, and they're mostly political.
01:21 Yeah.
01:22 Because at the time James I and VI was on the throne, and his line of succession was
01:26 not through the Macbeths, it was through Banquo's line. So Shakespeare had good reason for suking
01:33 up to the king because the king was one of the patrons of theatre companies at the time.
01:39 And so hence Lady Macbeth.
01:42 Yeah. And he was the one that really went to town on the divine right of kings, for
01:47 obviously, well maybe not obviously political reasons, but clearly. But it's so nice to
01:54 read a different Queen Macbeth to Lady Macbeth. She's a great character, but this one is also.
02:00 Yeah. Thank you, thank you. I mean, it's quite clear they weren't murderous tyrants. They
02:06 ruled for 17 years. The kingdom was so secure that they were able to leave the kingdom to
02:12 go on a pilgrimage to Rome.
02:13 Yeah, that's a great bit, when they go to Rome.
02:15 You don't just walk away from your kingdom if it's shukly. Certainly not in the Middle
02:20 Ages where people were always waiting in the wings to swoop in and steal your kingdom from
02:24 you because it was force majeure that the succession was generally about. It didn't
02:31 automatically go to, it wasn't primogeniture in the same way. It was like, do you have
02:36 an army? Do you have support? Do you have the means to rule this country? Or this part
02:42 of the country? So there was no given that going away was going to mean that they were
02:47 going to come back to the same thing.
02:49 Yeah, and it's great that when they meet their Viking friends in Rome, it's like, fancy
02:55 me New Year.
02:56 Fancy me New Year. What are you doing here?
02:57 Are you not back at home? Yeah. No, that was good. That was good. Okay, well thank you
03:02 very much for telling us about it today.