Fans of best-selling Scottish crime writer Val McDermid—whose books about criminal psychologist Tony Hill and detective Carol Jordan have been turned into the U.K. TV series Wire in the Blood—may not be aware that McDermid’s first mystery series was about a lesbian reporter, Lindsay Gordon.

Those books, published by women’s presses in the U.K. and the U.S., have often been hard to find, but American lesbian press Bywater Books has recently reissued all of the Lindsay Gordon backlist in paperback, including the most recent, Hostage to Murder (2003), which has never before been published in the U.S.

Amateur sleuth Lindsay Gordon has come a long way since her debut in 1987’s Report for Murder, which was also McDermid’s first novel. Back then, she was an intrepid freelance journalist assigned to cover a fundraising event-turned-murder at an elite girls’ school. The novel, which was essentially a classic closed-room British murder mystery, had a unique twist: Gordon was an out lesbian, and in the midst of all the mayhem she still managed to fit in a love affair with one of the school’s celebrity alumnae, author Cordelia Brown.

Five books and 16 years later, Gordon has taught journalism in Santa Cruz, California; found a life partner in Sophie, a doctor; and moved back to Glasgow, where she is once again looking for work as a freelancer—but this time as a seasoned professional. This is where we find Gordon in Hostage to Murder, the long-awaited sixth Lindsay Gordon mystery.

Since 1987, Val McDermid’s life has also changed significantly. When Report for Murder was published, McDermid was still a full-time journalist in Scotland; now, she has published 21 books, and her next, The Grave Tattoo, is due out in early 2006. She writes three series—the Lindsay Gordon series, the serial-killer thrillers featuring Tony Hill and Carol Jordon, and a series about Manchester private eye Kate Brannigan—as well as standalone crime novels that have garnered her nearly every award given in crime fiction.

Though her mainstream series don’t feature lesbian protagonists, they almost always include an LGBT character, and McDermid herself has also always been openly gay.

Her standalone novels A Place of Execution (1999), about a murder with no body, and Killing the Shadows (2000), about a serial killer who kills crime novelists, were both New York Times Notable books. The Mermaids Singing (1995), the first in the Carol Jordon and Tony Hill series, won the British Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award and was adapted into a successful UK television series, Wire in the Blood.

The Mermaids Singing was also recently short listed for the Golden Jubilee Dagger of Daggers Award, which will be given to the best award-winning crime novel from the past 50 years. Other nominees include classics such as John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park.

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