The Edinburgh Murders by Catriona McPherson review: 'entertaining but unconvincing'

Catriona McPherson beautifully evokes post-war Fountainbridge and has a great lead character in Edinburgh welfare officer Helen Crawther, but there is one big problem, writes Allan Massie​

Catriona McPherson’s novel begins splendidly with a death in the public baths in the Fountainbridge area of Edinburgh in the years after the Second World War. The district then, as she says in an author's note, was a working-class district with a slaughterhouse, tannery, brewery, sweet factory and the Co-op dairy stables. The atmosphere is splendidly and, for older readers, nostalgically recalled.

The novel opens with its young heroine Helen Crawther, a public health welfare officer, vigorously scrubbing an old woman’s back. Then there is an alarm. A man is found dead in his bath. It’s a horrible death; he seems to have been boiled. The local policeman thinks little of it. Helen knows better. What she also knows, besides the crime – for she is sure no one could commit suicide in that way – is that her father, a slaughterman, seems to have been in another of the bathrooms, but he makes off and later denies he was there.

That’s the beginning and it’s excellent, inviting and perplexing. Moreover, Helen (or Nelly) is a fine, well-drawn character, a determined young woman; an unusual one too, for while she is married to her childhood sweetheart, he lives in the ground floor of her house in the Colonies, with his lover, a man who was a prisoner-of-war in a German camp. The husband, Sandy, is not a major character in the novel, but the arrangement marks Helen as an unusual young woman, very unusual for that time. McPherson is a good enough writer to make this arrangement, barely thinkable in 1948, credible.

Catriona McPherson

Another, still more bizarre, death follows, a disgusting one indeed, but the police – rather a nuisance in this sort of novel – seem uninterested and, unlike Helen, see no connection between the two deaths. They are perhaps more concerned with the whereabouts of a man who has escaped from what was then known as a lunatic asylum. It is Helen, who, by approaching a friend (and admirer) who works in the city morgue and examines the corpse, learns of the disgusting and – one has to say – improbable cause of death.

A third death follows, this time at the Murrayfield ice rink, equally improbable, equally grotesque. Can Helen and her friends – the husband and wife doctors with whom she works; Caroline, a rich girl who works as a gardener at the Botanics; and Billy from the morgue, solve the mystery which doesn’t seem greatly to interest the police? And meanwhile, can she get her father to account for his lies?

All this is interesting enough and well worked out. Yet it is disappointing because the early chapters promised something more interesting. The crime theme is imaginative and entertaining enough, but it is all playacting. The murders are so bizarre that it is hard to think even for a moment that anything of this matters. The best crime writers never forget and always make us realise and feel that murder is an offence; I think especially of Georges Simenon and William McIlvanney.

Here the murders, however grotesque, are insignificant and the bizarre development of the plot is unconvincing. It’s a shame because there is so much that is admirable and enjoyable. The framing story is excellent, the evocation of a now almost completely vanished part of Edinburgh life, enthralling.

This rings true, as indeed does Helen most of the time, but the murder plot is mere make-believe, tushery and therefore boring. It’s a shame because so much is so good.

The Edinburgh Murders, by Catriona McPherson, Hodder & Stoughton, £22