Crime writer Val McDermid was only 17 when she left home to read English at Oxford. She was the first student from a Scottish state school to do so and one of their youngest undergraduates. It was there she met Dr Kathy Wilkes, a philosophy don, who was involved in the secret university movement behind the Iron Curtain during the 1980s and early '90s.
"Kathy was running seminars, inspiring people to think, in Prague, in the former Yugoslavia. She was teaching in Dubrovnik when the siege happened in 1991 and she was trapped behind enemy lines," says McDermid.
"Afterwards she did extraordinary things, driving medical supplies across Europe, she became a great fund-raiser for the city, became a great hero of the Croatian republic.
"She told me many stories of her time there and as a writer you can't help but prick your ears up and tuck things away for a story somewhere."
McDermid also knew forensic anthropologist Professor Sue Black, head of the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee, who investigated crimes as part of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. She too had "a very powerful set of stories to tell" about the aftermath of the Baltic conflict.
Some reviewers have called McDermid's latest book The Skeleton Road a tribute to these two women, and while there is some reverence, her 28th book is nonetheless a gripping crime read that's being touted as one of her best.
A skeleton is discovered in the turrets of a gothic Edinburgh building and the investigation reveals links to the Balkan conflict. Detective Karen Pirie, who first appeared in A Darker Domain (2009), returns, unearthing secrets and false identities.
McDermid enjoys writing the standalone novels in between her best-selling Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series.
"Every book is an exploration of trying something different but when you write one of the series novels there's a sheet that those books have because of the nature of the investigation that Tony and Carol conduct," she says.
"When it comes to the standalone novels … I have the freedom there to write about anything that excites me as a story.
"In the end that's what it's all about, about being excited by what you do. Twenty-eight books into my career, I'm always looking for ways to do that."
Which is why she decided to become part of The Austen Project, rewriting Jane Austen classics alongside authors such as Joanna Trollope and Alexander McCall Smith.
"That was an irresistible offer really," she says.
"When The Austen Project came to me and said we'd like you to write one, I looked over my shoulder to see if they were talking to someone behind me.
"I didn't think I was an obvious fit to rework Jane Austen. I knew I wouldn't get one of the straight romances, can you imagine a lesbian Emma?
"But the more I thought about Northanger Abbey, it was too good to resist. There's that element of the supernatural, the gothic. I thought I could have fun with that."
Some of McDermid's favourite crime authors are women - Sara Paretsky, Denise Mina, Belinda Bauer, Anne Holt - and she believes that women bring a certain perspective to the genre.
"Women understand the mechanics of fear a lot better than men," she says. "We grow up with the message that society gives you as a girl, that the world is a dangerous place, be careful, don't go down that lonely street alone after dark.
"Women imaginatively go through all these experiences of fear that men don't.
"There's not a woman alive who's walked down a street late at night and not heard footsteps behind her, imagined all the terrible things that could happen in the next 10 minutes. It's a very different experience of the world to what men have.
"In that respect, our books can be scarier because when we write about bad things we're writing about them as something we've imagined happening in a very real way. We grow up with a different perspective on the world and that plugs in very well to the writing of crime fiction."
The Skeleton Road, by Val McDermid. (Hachette, $32.99. She will be touring Australia from September 22-26.
