The truth is, I'm not much of a liar

Published on Tuesday 12 February 2008 08:33

THE cheque that's in the post, the upset stomach that means a day off work and the promise that yes, the job will be done on time and within budget.

Little white lies or big fat porkies, author Catriona McPherson – aka McCloud – has them sussed.

"I know the clues now that people give off when they are lying," she confesses. "When they scratch their ear or touch their nose, and I think 'Aye, right, that's not true'.

"Now I think I'm pretty good at spotting a little white lie."

So she might be. The South Queensferry-born writer has just spent almost a year immersed in a world where the lead character in her book is as uneconomical with the truth as any bare-faced politician might be, for whom Sir Walter Scott's famous words "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive" could have been written.

Straight Up – Catriona's fifth book – tells the story of a Portobello florist stung by her husband's decision to divorce her, who vents her anger by writing a work of fiction featuring "his" very unpleasant death, only for Hollywood movie giants to latch on to the work believing it to be true. Confronted by the chance of fortune and fame on the back of her deception, she doesn't go out of her way to correct them . . .

Writing the book involved a complicated process of trying to remember what lie was said to which character – and it's all been quite an education.

"I realised that I wouldn't make a particularly good liar," Catriona laughs. "All that organising and trying to remember what you've said and who to . . . it was hard work. In real life, I'd never be able to keep track of it."

Yet she does have something of a split personality. Today she's wearing her Catriona McCloud author's hat, the name she uses for her modern-day novels, lighthearted capers which twist and turn to an often surprising end. Later this month, she'll be back to being Catriona McPherson for the paperback launch of her third Dandy Gilver novel based on the escapades of a 1920s lady detective.

Despite her protestations, she is probably the first to confess that for a long time she lived something of a white lie too, harbouring a dream of becoming an author but stuck in a string of jobs which did little to feed her creative soul. She'd got the message loud and clear as a teenager at Queensferry High School, when her careers teacher burst out laughing at her suggestion that she might quite like to write fiction for a living. The reaction shocked her into putting ambition on hold for 20 years in favour of going to university and a gap year at a bank that she later described as leaving her feeling "like a square peg in a round hole, totally useless".

She ploughed through an MA in English Language and Linguistics at Edinburgh University, worked at the local studies department of Edinburgh City Libraries and then tackled a PhD in semantics. It was only when she hit rock bottom, languishing in a job in lecturing at a university in Leeds that she didn't enjoy, that she realised there had to be more to life.

Catriona quit, moved back to a cottage in rural Galloway with husband Neil and their two cats, and gave herself five years to get published. She didn't have to wait that long. Soon, her first Dandy Gilver novel, After the Armistice Ball, was on bookshelves, followed by a second based around the 1920s amateur sleuth – this time exploring one of her home town's strangest rituals, The Burry Man, a character who tours the area adorned in the spiky seed-cases of the burdock plant to ward off evil spirits. In The Burry Man's Day, he comes to a sticky end after a day trapped in a prickly costume and his murder requires none other than Dandy's detective skills.

She has recently finished the next one in the series, this time featuring her Roaring Twenties' sleuth, undercover as a ladies' maid at a grand Edinburgh home during the General Strike.

While the Dandy novels were her breakthrough, but writing under the name McCloud, Catriona has captured another area of the bookstore shelves with a duo of modern novels that have secured her position as an author, Growing Up Again, and now, Straight Up.

They will be followed soon by a third, this time exploring the curious themes of a retired jazz trumpeter, Italian food and antiques, all set in Leeds. "I know it's an odd mix but it's been a lot of fun to research," she smiles.

Today, however, she is in London, enjoying a breakfast meeting with her publishers followed by a lavish, glitzy party, rubbing shoulders with the city's literati and relaxing in a grand hotel opposite Hyde Park. She's living the dream she put on hold for two decades, but, she insists, it's not all glamour, air kisses and champagne parties.

"Oh I could tell you that every day is like this," she says with a giggle. "But I can't," she confesses, "because that would be a lie..."

&#149 Catriona McCloud will be at Borders Bookshop on Thursday, February 28 to discuss her new novel, Straight Up, published by Orion. Bury Her Deep, a Dandy Gilver mystery, written under the name Catriona McPherson, is published by Hodder & Stoughton and will be released in paperback next month.