Books: Clues to author's success lie in stately home visits

Published on Saturday 19 December 2009 10:55

Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains by Catriona McPherson is published by Hodder, price £19.99

In Catriona McPherson's latest novel, well-bred sleuth Dandy Gilver finds herself in the servants' quarters, well below her rightful social standing, as part of her mission to protect her client, Mrs Balfour, from her murderous husband.

But unlike her fictional amateur detective, 44-year-old McPherson reckons she'd have much preferred life under the stairs to the more privileged life above it.

"I would have been a scullery maid, not a lady," she laughs. "I always like to see the attics and kitchens and greenhouses and all the working bits of a stately home. I think that's where I would have been."

And it's those wanderings around historic houses which have helped give her novels such accurate historical detail.

This precision betrays McPherson's love of the 1920s and the colourful characters it offers, from flappers to female detectives. She describes the circus setting of the first novel, The Winter Ground, as "complete self-indulgence" – the second was set in an emporium fully equipped with mahogany glove counters.

The latest, Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains, is the fifth and is set in 1926, during the General Strike in a New Town house. But there's no dwelling in the past for this South Queensferry-born writer. "I've just finished the draft of the next one," she says cheerfully.

It's a dream come true for the former academic, who now lives in Galloway with her husband Neil Roberts, and who threw in her "boring" job as a university lecturer to become a full-time writer. She says: "It's just playing at houses and playing at shops. It's great!"