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Portrait image of Val McDermid Photo: Ola Erikson / Forflex

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McDermid, Val

Val McDermid is a Scottish crime writer born in Kirkcaldy, Fife. She attended Kirkcaldy High School where she was among a group of pupils that participated in a controversial project for especially talented students based on IQ tests.
When she was seventeen, she was the first student from a Scottish state school to be admitted to St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she graduated with a Bachelor o...

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Literary figures

Penny (Pennington) Wise

Gender: Male

The young and rather self-assured Pennington ‘Penny’ Wise is an artist, as well as a famous – at any rate in the books by Carolyn Wells – ‘psychic’ detective. It means that he solves cases that seem to be inexplicable, and often have supposedly ‘supernatural’ elements. Which do, of course, in the end transpire to have completely natural explanations. His assistant is the teenage film actress Zizi.

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