The Edinburgh Murders--Catriona McPherson

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Here at JRW we all adore Catriona McPherson for her wonderful Scottish historical mysteries and her clever contempory California mysteries, not to mention her wit, kindness, and charm. But I'll add something else to the list--I think Catriona is a secret time traveler and that she's really lived in post-war Edinburgh, because when I read her new series featuring welfare officer Helen Crowther, I would swear Catriona has a direct line to the past. If you missed the first book, In Place of Fear, rectify that immediately! And now Helen Crowther is back with a new adventure, (and more wonderful Edinburgh dialect that I wish Catriona could demonstrate for us.)

Catriona says:

My working title for The Edinburgh Murders was Next to Godliness. I’m really bad at titles, I know, but it did make some kind of sense because it opens with Helen Crowther, a welfare officer attached to a doctor’s surgery in one of the poorest bits of Edinburgh, squashed into a cubicle at the public baths, helping Mrs Hogg – a lady of some stature – to wash.

“I like a guid hard scrub, Nelly,” Mrs Hogg says. “Dinnae be tickling me.”

(I should say here that there’s a glossary in the book, although guid and dinnae aren’t too hard to interpret, right? Also, the glossary is at the front this time. In Book 1 – In Place of Fear – the glossary was tucked away at the back and a lot of people did a lot of googling before they found it. Oops.)

PIC 1 - jacket

The building where this scene takes place is still there, as are lots of the public baths in Edinburgh, but only the swimming pool is now in use. Even by the time I was getting on the bus with my rolled-up towel, the private bathing cubicles on the gallery level of these establishments had been swept away or repurposed as changing rooms.

PIC 2 – ceiling of baths.

This explains me always wondering why swimming pools were even called “baths” in the first place. But I was a wee girl. Improvements in domestic plumbing don’t explain why one book group I talked to last year were enchanted to  “discover” that Scotland, like Japan, has communal ablutions. “No,” I explained. “It’s just that poor people didn’t have bathrooms at home in the late 40s.”  Stunned silence from them. Stunned silence from me. I mean, it was in a very swanky Sacramento neighbourhood this book club, but surely some of the women had grandparents who boiled kettles and filled tin baths in front of the fire? I clearly remember Oprah Winfrey recounting how horrified she was the first time she was shown an indoor loo. “I can’t do that inside someone’s house!” tiny Oprah whispered. D’awww.

I didn’t wondered why the public baths had such soaring ceilings, though, or if I did I probably thought it was for the acoustics – there’s nothing like the earsplitting sound of fifty children shrieking repeatedly in a glass cathedral. If I hadn’t come across this next photograph, I would never have worked it out:

PIC 3 – acrobats

Yep, it was an aerial gym, with water landing laid on for the over-confident. Water or shrieking wee kid landing, I suppose. They were very different times. In any case, it was a feature of all Victorian baths to be over the top; the Turkish baths in Harrogate are like something from the Arabian Nights. I haven’t got any photos of the inside because the steam would wreck my phone, but check it out here.

I spent the happiest hours of my otherwise miserable academic career in those Turkish baths, stark naked, with my head of dept, Prof. Katie Wales (renowned James Joyce expert who also wrote a Mickey Mouse joke book), and our other women colleagues, a long way from the stuffy School of English where tweedier co-scholars sipped sherry during classes (I’m not kidding) and never wrote any joke books at all. Coincidentally, Harrogate is the setting for England’s best known crime-writing jamboree – Theakston’s Old Peculier Festival – and Val McDermid once overheard something in the steam room that would make your eyebrows curl. (I couldn’t possibly repeat it here. (But DM me.))

PIC 4 – At Harrogate with Ali Karim

This is my favourite of many Theakston’s Festival pictures, because I can never decide if I’m looking at Ali Karim thinking “Come live with me and be my love” or “I’m going to kill you with my shoe”. 

All of which is to say, if you like the sound of a boiled man in a bathtub and a return trip to the scene of the crime with three grubby wee kids and a nit comb, then The Edinburgh Murders might be for you, and please comment to be entered into a giveaway for a signed hardback. If you can’t think of anything you’d like to read about less . . . I get it. I started life in a family of six with one bathroom, shared bathwater and no shower. Now, after fifteen years in America with a master bath off my bedroom, and two basins in it so I don’t even see the toothpaste spills of my own husband . . . I’m ruined forever. 

Cx

Edinburgh, 1948: Welfare Officer Helen Crowther has enough on her plate between her hectic job, her complicated love life, and her growing reputation as a troublemaker. Last year’s  scandal did nothing to help with the disapproval she already gets as a woman in her line of work.

All she wants now is to focus on doing what she loves: helping the poor of the Fountainbridge ward in the city of Edinburgh. The last thing she needs is another string of murders to distract her . . .

But when a gentleman dressed in working-man’s clothing winds up dead right under Helen’s nose, and she catches her own father in a very risky lie, Helen is propelled back into the dark world where class rules, justice is hard to come by and gruesome death is everywhere.

Helen has already learned some hard truths about her city, but this investigation is about to reveal just how deep corruption can go . . .

Serial awards-botherer, Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. She writes: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories about a toff; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories about an oik; and contemporary psychothriller standalones. These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comedies about a Scot-out-of-water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California. Catriona is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.  www.catrionamcpherson.com

DEBS:  Can I just say that I loved "Next to Godliness?" :-)

And that somehow when I lived in Edinburgh my ex neglected to introduce me to the public baths, which I now think was a grave ommision.

Stop in to say "hi" to Catriona and comment to be eligible for a signed copy of  THE EDINBURGH MURDERS!

  

Kim Hays--Life in a Tower

DEBORAH CROMBIE: There is nothing I love more than a good police procedural, especially one with an appealing detective duo. Add a fascinating place--in this case the city of Bern, Switzerland-- and I am way over in the fan camp! I've read Kim Hays' Linder and Donatelli books from the very first and I await each new installment eagerly. I think you'll be as intrigued as I was by this newest addition to the series--and by Bern's Munster!

Life in a Tower

Kim Hays

 

When Peter and I arrived in Bern one week after our wedding in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, we moved into a recently renovated attic apartment. We were in our early thirties, so we didn’t mind climbing the stairs to our place on the fourth floor. Eventually, when I was 38 and carrying our six-month-old son and his baby paraphernalia up and down those stairs (and his laundry to and from the washing machine in the basement), we moved to a second-floor apartment not far away, and we’re still there. Today, we only have 28 steps to climb from the street to the door of our apartment. Those stairs keep us fit.

Now, imagine living in an apartment that requires a climb of 254 steps from street level to your apartment door.

Not one family, but many, did this for almost two hundred years, which is how long there were couples and their children living in the 330-foot tower of Bern’s largest Gothic church, the Münster. The first family moved there in 1826, when the tower apartment had no running water. The last family, a couple without children, moved out in 2007. By then, the apartment had a living room, bedroom, tiny kitchen, even tinier office, and a full bathroom with a washing machine. A corridor ran down the middle of the living space, and its ceiling was open to the room above, which was the size of the whole apartment and had a sixteenth-century vaulted ceiling. A spiral staircase in one corner of the apartment led to the beautiful room upstairs, where generations of apartment families hung their laundry to dry.

Who lived there all those years? Watchers—who had nothing to do with Swiss watches.

I’ll explain.

Bern was founded in 1191 by the Duke of Zähringen, who built a castle on a hill above the Aare River that encircles the city. The duke’s guards were Bern’s security force. When the Duke's family line died out in 1218, his castle was destroyed, and a church was built in its place. I don’t know that guards were set in the church’s bell tower to keep watch over the city and the boats on the river, but I feel sure they were.

Bern’s tradition of watchers from on high assumed special importance after 1405, the year of the Great Fire, when most of the city’s buildings, almost all made of wood, burned to the ground. Bern was slowly rebuilt of stone in the traditional half-timbered, medieval style, but fire remained a tremendous danger. The building of the Münster began in 1421, and by 1519, there is a record of Hochwächter or “high watchmen” working in shifts in the church’s tower, looking out over the town for any sign of trouble. There was a fire bell they could ring if they saw flames, and other Münster bells sent out different messages, warning the city of floods or attacks or calling the people to assemble.

In the nineteenth century, the men paid to watch the city day and night were allowed to move their families into the tower. By the twentieth century, women could also be guards; the most famous was Frau Kormann. As wife, mother, and widow from 1909 to 1966, she sold tickets to tourists who wanted to see the view from the tower and kept an eye on the city.

The high place from which the earliest watchmen observed was not the 330-foot tower of today, with its elegant stone filagree tip. Bern built its Münster slowly, with numerous pauses after 1421 to raise building funds or deal with crises like the Reformation and the Plague. It wasn’t until the late fifteen hundreds that the city finally hired someone to finish the tower. The builder and his workers were preparing the blocks of stone that would become the rest of the late Gothic church when the builder died, and the additional 178 feet of tower, which included a second, much smaller viewing balcony 90 stairs above the first, were not added until 1893, following the old plans.

Pursuing a plot for my fourth Linder and Donatelli mystery, I started researching the Berner Münster. I didn’t know then what I would write about; I just followed my interest in the church, which had been undergoing renovations during the three decades I’d lived in Bern (and back to the 1950s, I later learned). I read about the history of the tower apartment and talked to the last woman to live there. I spoke with current and former tower ticket sellers, volunteers in the church shop, the sexton, and a former pastor. I learned more about what had been done to replace or preserve the building’s 600-year-old vaulted ceilings and sandstone walls, and I spent time with the glass artist responsible for repairing the fifteenth-century stained glass windows.

Out of this research came Splintered Justice, which features not only Linder and Donatelli, my two police detectives, and many new people but also Bern’s magnificent Münster. I hope what I’ve told you about the church has made you eager to read more about it.

Or maybe you'll come and see it someday!

Do any of you have a favorite church, castle, park, town square, or other landmark in your hometown or elsewhere else?

DEBS: Isn't that all just fascinating? I had to look up photos of the Munster as I was reading. Golly, those tower dwellers must have been fit!!

Here's more about SPLINTERED JUSTICE:

How does a victim get justice when there’s no obvious crime?

Swiss homicide detective Giuliana Linder of the Bern Police and her junior colleague Renzo Donatelli are facing cases that may not be what they appear. Renzo is near the Bern cathedral when a young man repairing a medieval window is hurt falling from a scaffold—a fall deliberately caused by a teenage boy.

 

Finding evidence that the boy’s attack is linked to his mother’s suicide fifteen years earlier, Renzo decides to reexamine the woman’s death, hoping the investigation will help him get promoted.

 

Although she’s busy researching a woman who has poisoned her elderly husband, Giuliana can’t help getting involved in Renzo’s case. Their investigations prove more disruptive than they expected—and so do their feelings for each other.

   

Kim Hays, a citizen of both Switzerland and the United States, has written four books in the Polizei Bern series featuring Swiss homicide detectives Linder and Donatelli. Hays grew up in San Juan and Vancouver and studied at Harvard and UC Berkeley. Thirty-six years ago, she moved to Bern, her Swiss husband’s hometown, where she worked as a cross-cultural coach for expats at multinational companies before becoming a mystery writer. The first Linder and Donatelli book, Pesticide (2022), was a finalist for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger Award and the Silver Falchion Award for Best Mystery. Pesticide was followed by Sons and Brothers (2023), and A Fondness for Truth (2024), which was a BookLife Editor’s Pick. The fourth in the series, Splintered Justice, will be out in April 2025.

DEBS: Kim is on holiday in Romania so will be 7 hours later than EST. She will reply to comments but begs your patience!

Desk Tour(s)

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I think we've talked about our desks before, but recently I ran across somewhere (a Substack suggestion? Ah, Substack, another post…) Olivia Muenter's Desk Tour substack, She regularly interviews creative people about their desks, real and ideal, and it's such fun to see how people's personalities are expressed in their work spaces. I especially like the ones that show both the tidied version and the regular working day version.

I actually have two desks, one upstairs in my "proper" office, and one downstairs in our sunporch, which is where I prefer to write if it's not too hot or too cold. The porch desk does not get points for practicality. It's an old library table I picked up at a yard sale, and because our porch floor slopes, we had to cut the front legs down to make it level. But! I love looking out into the garden, being able to let the dog and the indoor/outdoor cat out, and being close to the kitchen for easy cups of tea. The upstairs desk faces the wall (only configuration the room allows) so I tend to feel a bit claustrophobic there. It's very cozy, however, for things like our JRW LIVE events, and that's where all the video set up lives. Here's what I'm looking at when we're zooming. There are lots of reference books and London photos!

Viewers only see the little bookcase next to the stained glass bathroom door.

Here's my porch desk, with the Boston ferns that shed all over it. You can see that every surface is pretty much covered. That's a big art supply box under the scanner, and my vintage portable Smith-Corona beneath the stack of manuscript pages. (Yes, I print my chapters, as much for the feeling of accomplishment it gives me as for the ease in editing.)

And a close up of some of my favorite things: the leather journals, my sparkly pens in the glasses I found at an art fair, and my mug warmer. Oh, and my sheep coaster, a souvenir from Lower Slaughter in the Cotswolds.

Tell us about your desks, fellow REDs, including the three favorite things on yours!

RHYS BOWEN: My desk in Arizona which I have just left for the summer is a simple glass and steel structure with a couple of shelves at one end, a white board with my notes and reminders on it, and Eliot, my wooden elephant who gives me advice when I am stuck with my plots (he usually suggests the body is in the trunk)  

The best thing about my office in Arizona is the view. I can gaze and feel content as I work. Also it’s upstairs and far away from the rest of the house. A big benefit.

In California I work in a small room with all my research materials around me–shelves of books on New York history, European history, drawers of maps and tourist brochures, all within easy reach. I have various things like Edgar nominations and other achievements on the walls to encourage me. I also have a bigger room that is my media room since Covid, set up like a proper studio. However I choose to work upstairs on the sofa from time to time, which I know is bad for my neck, but it’s also comforting.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I’m showing you all the raw, unfiltered work space, complete with dust on top of my printer and dead leaves I need to pinch off my plant!

I’ve had this desk forever - it started out as a smaller surface, but Celia’s dear Victor cut me a new top that goes exactly from one side of the rectangular bay window to the other. Plenty of room for me and for my cat Neko, whose lashing tail is covering up my keyboard as I’m typing this! I tend to keep stacks on either end; the left is for Adj. Professor Hugo-Vidal and the right for novelist Julia Spencer-Fleming. 

My favorite thing about my workspace is the view - I look out through a lush rhododendron to my front yard. Lots of greenery and daffodils this time of year, but it’s also beautiful in winter, with snow blowing across the road. And of course, so much natural light! I also Zoom from here, so if you come to the next Reds and Readers event, you can see the rest of my office!

HALLIE EPHRON: I love my tiny office. It’s maybe 12’x6’, with windows on 3 sides. 

View?? My desk looks out over my neighbors’ driveway, within spitting distance of their living room windows. Squirrels dart across the top of the fence that separates the properties, and forsythia is blooming under the sill. 

Inside it is, of course, jam packed with books. On the shelves is a stuffed WILD THING, a “Newswriting” award that I won writing for my high school newspaper, and the horseback riding trophy I won when I was 14 at Camp Tocaloma. 

JENN McKINLAY: I have an office with a window that looks out on my birdfeeders–so fun, especially when the wild lovebirds show up–but I work everywhere, which is a habit I developed when I was chauffeuring Hooligans hither and yon. 

The backseat of the minivan was my office when they were at karate, rock band, or whatever. I’m very good at working in busy places like coffee shops or airports. I work standing up at the kitchen counter a lot so I can plot and pace. Speaking of which, a friend recently gave me a treadmill that fits under a standing desk so I can walk and write at the same time. I haven’t tried it yet but I’ll report back! I think ultimately I’m a nomadic writer, if that’s a thing. LOL.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: My office is cluttered, yikes.  This is about as cleaned up as it gets. 🙂 The desk itself is  semi-circular, what they call a “hunt table.” It’s very old, and is  supposed to face the other way, and has a cut out for the person using it so the desk wraps around them. But that configuration does work with a computer. 

The bay window looks out over sugar maples, with birds and squirrels constantly at play.

On the desk is a bottle of congratulatory wine from Sue Grafton, and the back of the chair has name tags from all my events for the past 20 years. 

The easel used to have a photograph, but now it has signing posters. And underneath are lots of notes.

You can see some of my Emmys on the shelves, and my Agatha teapots. This is very reassuring on bad writing days, seriously. The parts of the room you can't see--are stacks of books. The wall color is called "rhino tusk," which I know is bizarre, but I call it "lion."

LUCY BURDETTE: I'm showing you two desk shots, the first what it really looks like when I'm in the middle of a project, and the second, when straightened up for Zoom:). Tbone will pose on either version. 

DEBS: Rhys, we are all envious of your view.

Hank, I find it very interesting that you are probably the most organized and efficient person I know and yet you manage that from a work space that would make me pull my hair out. Hallie's work space, on the other hand, is remarkably clutter free.

Also, Julia and Lucy, I love my cats and I love having them in the room with me when I'm working, but they are absolutely NOT allowed on either desk!

Readers, does your work space reflect your personality? 

And do you think our work spaces reflect our personalities--or our books?