Brian Beacom

SHOCK news; Val McDermid has come up with a tale that doesn’t involve dismembered body parts, sexual abuse and acts of violence so heinous readers in bed are compelled to pull duvets over heads.

Val’s new story is in fact a play, set to be performed at Glasgow’s Oran Mor theatre next week where duvets are indeed thin on the ground.

It’s a huge departure in writing platform for the crime star who can claim to have had over 10m books published in some 30 languages.

So what has prompted the Fife-born writer to turn her imagination to a fairly small stage in a basement theatre in Glasgow’s West End - and try to capture an attention that’s engrossed in the pie and pint that comes with the ticket?

Fife-born Val has written Margaret Saves Scotland.

She explains it’s a story idea which has been fermenting in her head for the longest time.

“The jumping off point for the play was the death of my friend Margaret Myles a couple of years ago.

“Margaret (who grew up in the north of England) had told me when she was a little girl fell in love with Scotland.

“And she determined that if Scotland were to become a great nation again all it needed was a great leader.

“When she was nine she ran away from home to go and save Scotland.”

Margaret didn’t make it, perhaps not surprisingly.

“She said later her great mistake was in taking Brenda with her. It transpired that Brenda was a bit of a wimp and when she lost her shoe in the river that was it for her and they headed for home.”

McDermid, a former journalist, loved the anecdote, and knew she had to develop it.

“The ‘what if’ process then kicked off in my head. ‘What if Margaret had made it to Scotland.’ The play is a tribute to Margaret’s memory, but it’s also an exercise in possibility.”

The play feeds into the confusion Scotland suffers from at the moment; where are we going? What will happen to us post Brexit etc.

“I hope it does feed into the national conversation, either overtly or subconsciously,” says the writer.

“And like everyone in Scotland we’re wondering where we’re going and what’s going to happen. But this is not a tub-thumping political piece.”

She smiles as she hastens to all that is killed off in the play is a wild dream. “There are no murders in the play. Don’t think for a moment this nice story turns on a dime and this poor child is abducted and raped. It just doesn’t happen.”

The last play the writer had commissioned was by a touring company in Humberside and was called Beyond The Black Hole, which sounds rather more Val-like.

“ I tried to write plays after that. But the problem was I didn’t really know what I’d done right and didn’t know how to replicate that.

“I kept on trying to write more plays for so long the agent I’d had sacked me and said I was completely rubbish.

“I decided that writing for the theatre was possibly not where I was going to make my mark and that’s when I turned to crime.”

Is there anxiety comes with having her first play produced at Oran Mor?

“I’m not anxious about the performers,” she says of Tori Burgess, Simon Donaldson and Clare Waugh.

“But I’m just a little anxious about how the play will be received by the audience.”

She adds, grinning; “After all it is 35 years since I wrote for the stage so who knows what will happen?”

• Margaret Saves Scotland, Oran Mor, April 9-14.