Catriona McPherson: Capital crimes

Published on Saturday 12 December 2009 18:34

I WAS planning to talk to Catriona McPherson about period crime fiction, leaving a promising career as an academic to write your first novel, and the pros and cons of living in deepest Galloway. In fact, we do talk about all these things, but not until we've dealt with the altogether more pressing topic of Strictly Come Dancing.

"Jade! How could Jade go out?" McPherson says, sounding genuinely distraught. (Olympic athlete Jade Johnson was a promising contender on the current season of Strictly, until she quit in November following a leg injury in rehearsals.) "(Hollyoaks actor] Ricky Whittle is going to win, but he was brilliant to begin with – where's the improvement in that?"

McPherson, in fact, knows her samba from her foxtrot. She and husband Neil McRoberts, a biologist, go to ballroom and Latin dance classes. "Though sometimes I think it's an excuse to get together with other people and talk about Strictly," she says, grinning. They danced a cha-cha at the Wigtown's Got Talent night at this year's Wigtown Book Festival. "We didn't win, but we weren't disgraced."

We're sitting in the cosy sitting room of her Galloway farmhouse, a fire blazing and a plate of home-made cookies between us. Outside, a squally shower is obscuring the view across the rolling hills. McPherson's black cat, Dennis, is sensibly curled up on the sofa. It is with some effort that I haul the conversation round to books.

McPherson, 44, is the author of five crime novels set in the 1920s featuring Perthshire lady detective Dandy Gilver (she has also written two stand-alone books she describes as "capers" under the name Catriona McCloud). In the busy world of Scottish crime fiction, she has found a niche for gentle mysteries in the Dorothy L Sayers mode, with a playful sense of humour.

In her latest novel, Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains, she is clearly enjoying sending her well-heeled sleuth undercover as a ladies' maid in an Edinburgh townhouse. Dandy – an inveterate snob, though likeable with it – exchanges her finery for practical grey serge to lift the lid on an upstairs-downstairs world of intrigue and secrets. "I loved the idea of her trying to be a servant," says McPherson, smiling. "She'd be absolutely hopeless. I knew she'd have to be a ladies' maid whose mistress was in on it. If she was anywhere that meant she really had to know what she was doing she'd be busted in the first half hour."

Dandy's inept attempts at servitude are set against the much more serious backdrop of the 1926 General Strike. The ten-day strike called by the TUC in support of miners' pay and conditions was ultimately unsuccessful in forcing the government's hand, yet it all but brought the nation to a halt. After long stretches at the National Library of Scotland reading strike bulletins, McPherson found herself siding with the miners. "I got so angry that I put in tons of history lessons. I knew they would have to come out, which they did. I just wanted it to be said."

As she was writing, imminent financial collapse in the modern world added an extra dimension. "Coal was nationalised, then after the war immediately denationalised. When things started to fall apart there was a lot of whistling and looking in the other direction. When something happened in the financial industries, it was an emergency. There was action. I did a rousing chorus of the Red Flag marching round my office."

McPherson grew up in South Queensferry and went to Edinburgh University to study English literature, but "swerved into linguistics" when she feared that an excess of analysis would destroy her love of reading. After a PhD, she appeared to be destined for a career as an academic after accepting a teaching post in Leeds, but her heart wasn't in it. "Within months, I knew I was in the wrong job. I really hated it, real lock-the-office-door-and-cry level of hating your job."

In fact, what she longed to do was write, though she had barely written since her dreams were trampled on by a careers adviser in South Queensferry 20 years earlier: "'Dinnae be daft! Who do you think you are?' That Scottish thing."

The tipping point came in a conversation with a friend in a cinema car park. "I was moaning, as usual, about my job and she said: 'Do something you want to do.' I said: 'The only thing I ever wanted to do was write stories,' expecting her to say, 'That's not very practical.' She said: 'For goodness sake, do it then.' That moment – in a parked car drinking gin and tonic out of Perrier bottles – I thought: 'I can do this.' It was like taking the blinkers away."

In 2000, after five years in academia, she resigned, moved to Galloway with Neil and "started page one, chapter one". Ten months later she had completed "my I've-just-spent-five-years-in-a-School-of-English novel. Everyone rejected it. It's in a drawer." But she also now had a new sense of certainty: she was in the right job.

Dandy Gilver came into being on Sandgreen Beach the following summer. "I was thinking about what I love to read, which is the detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s: Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey – but nobody writes that now. It was another lightbulb moment, like the one in the cinema car park: 'I can do what I want'."

She started to sketch out her ideas for a sleuth, referred to in her notes as "Not Daisy", an upper-class woman with a measure of freedom, inquisitive and opinionated, with a dalmatian called Bunty.

"I still have that piece of paper; it has a shopping list on the corner," she says. Soon there was a case (After the Armistice Ball) involving some missing jewels in which Dandy meets her sidekick, the clever, somewhat dashing Alec Osborne. Then came a publishing deal, first with Constable & Robinson, then two books later with Hodder.

McPherson, who is as easily bored as Dandy with shooting parties and upper-class chit-chat, makes sure her heroine covers a broad sweep of society in her adventures, from a series of deaths at the Scottish Women's Rural Institute (Bury Her Deep) to the travelling circus world (The Winter Ground). "Self-indulgent," she grins. "Especially the circus."

Shunning "long descriptions of Dandy's house, her food, her clothes", she evokes the world of the 1920s through her characters and their attitudes, and plunders old books and almanacs for photographs of her characters, which she keeps on her desk while she writes. And, yes, there is one of Dandy Gilver, taken at a party on a cruise ship in 1927. "I was writing the third book by the time I found it. Those difficult cheekbones and unruly hair – it's definitely her. I don't know who she's hanging out with or what she's wearing; I think she must be undercover."

She says her aim is to write about the period without the knowing hindsight of the modern eye. "One of the publishers who turned it down said that it seemed like the kind of novel you'd find in a damp holiday cottage in Norfolk, and I thought 'Yeah! I did it!' It seemed like an old book."

Dandy – as befits a woman of her class – deals with the less fortunate with a kind of patronising benevolence and entertains the most distant of relationships with her husband, Hugh, and their two sons (away at boarding school). Her cheerful frustration with the restrictions of her life is one of the things we most like about her.

Yet for all their cheerfulness, her books – unlike the works of the Christies and Allinghams – are infused with the lingering sadness of the inter-war period: the aftermath of the Great War, the growing social unrest and economic depression. "I can't really ignore the fact that you wonder where people are getting their money from," she says.

Also, she says, "My books don't have any of the casual anti-semitism or racism they would have had then. It's not worth it to make a book sound authentic."

It is this underlying sadness that lifts McPherson's books out of the "cosy crime" sub-genre where they sit alongside Agatha Christie and Alexander McCall Smith. Certainly, they are genteel: violence is minimal, there is no sex or bad language, but they are far from prudish.

"Sometimes I think that because the crime that I write about is so un-butch, some more butch crime writers feel that a gently-born lady detective from Perthshire with a dalmatian is letting the side down. But I think it's a big world and there's room for everyone. I read the maggoty corpses and serial slasher fiction as well as period crime. I love Karin Slaughter."

No crime fiction, she contends, is realistic. Hers is just a little more obviously fictional than most. "Life is endlessly messy and the ends don't tie up like in fiction where there's a body in chapter one and a solution in the last chapter. I'm not Dandy, I don't associate myself with her. Equally, the writers of gritty crime fiction don't do it, they write about it, they sit in a room typing, the same as me.

"Personally, I find gritty violent fiction is escapism," she says, looking round at the fire and the green Galloway hills outside the window. "Where I live, it's much more like The Archers than Irvine Welsh."

&#149 Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced 19.99.