Welcome to CatrionaLand (All are welcome!)

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Hurray and hurray—we love Catriona day! She is incredibly talented, and incredibly wonderful, and we are always so delighted when she visits—especially with a new book. The brand new one is intriguingly titled The Dead Room. Can you guess why? I bet it is not what you think.) (And I have devoured it, and it is terrific.)

Anyway. Today, delightfully, she takes us on a very special journey. To CatrionaLand!

(And some very special info for you at the end!)

Blurred Lines

By Catriona McPherson

I quite often, when I’m writing a book, start with an interesting bit of reality and run. When I was beginning The Child Garden, finding out about rocking sones and devil’s bridges was utter catnip.

Rocking stones are neolithic, egg-shaped stones – some enormous – that sit in stone cups and, if shoved, rock. Now, as you can imagine if you consider how long ago neolithis (?) was, hardly any of them survive to . . . I tried hard not to say “rock on” here. I failed . . . because people get too enthusiastic and shove too hard. Then the stones tumble off down hills and break in riverbeds.

That much is true.

Devil’s bridges have nothing to do with rocking stones. They’re just bridges that happen to be in Scotland or Ireland and so, through no fault of their own, have gathered stories about how the devil and his minions can’t cross them, like a sheep gather burrs. The stories go on that the devil then lurks on one side or the other asking for soul swaps. 

Two thoughts occur: one – these old bridges are not that big and the rivers underneath are usually no more than rocky streams so why doesn’t he just get his cloven hooves wet and paddle across?; two – wouldn’t it help to know which side?

That much is also “true”. That is, I didn’t make these tales up. “Tam O’Shanter” is related and the devil has become an ordinary goat in some retellings.

But, at some point downstream, I put the stories of the stones and bridges together and I think I came up with a piece of folklore that rocking stones are found near devil’s bridges, and have devils trapped inside them. They have to be rocked every day – thirteen times, naturally – to keep him addled so he can’t escape. This now feels as real to me as leprechauns’ gold and Santa’s love of a chimney. And I’m not that great a note-keeper so I’m not entirely clear on where exactly I started making stuff up and what might be rooted in Celtic lore.

The same thing happened with the lowping stane (leaping stone) in The Witching Hour. It’s real. See pic. It’s outside the old school in the village of Dirleton. And I know for a fact that schoolchildren used to leap over it on the last day of school in the summertime, because it says so on the tourist information board in the old phone box with the wee free library.

In my book, what happens is the children are the only ones who still leap over it – with stinging nettles strewn on the top for extra peril – but it used to be the case that everyone in the village did so, right before harvest-time. The pure of heart would clear it. Witches and other evil-doers, though, would fail, stumble and hurt themselves. Thus the village could be sure that, when they all went out to bring in the crops, there would be no one whose wickedness would cause blight and famine.

Jungle Red Readers, I have no clue where the join is between the truth and Catrionaland in the middle of that. (And I’m writing this on a plane, en route to Malice, where I didn’t download the app before take-off so I can’t check.)

All of that is by way of excusing what’s just happened in The Dead Room. I used a real town, in a real county, in a real country, as the setting for the story. When I was done, I scrupulously (Ha!) laid out in the author’s note that Menstrie, Clackmannanshire, Scotland was real but that the property centre, the nursing home, the pub, the garden centre and the Lord family’s scrapyard business (Lord’s Will Provide!) were imaginary. I claimed that Sir Andy Murray’s gold postbox in Dunblane was the only actual location in the entire novel.

Then I sent out ARCs. And one early reader (with a story of his own (which I told for Kristopher Zgorski at BOLO Books on account of the musical theatre angle)) came back with an “Ummmmmm, Catriona? The scrapyard? Ehhhhhh, have you ever been to Sam Burns’ Yard in East Lothian? Because the similarity is uncanny.”

Yeek! I never miss a trip to Sam Burns’ Yard when I’m in Scotland. Of course it was there that I saw faded glass and china out in the elements filling with leaves and dust as the seasons passed. It was there I found out that hotel overstock mattresses are wrapped in plastic with the prices Sharpied on, and that the further back you go the more likely you are to find the skeletons of bikes and barrows poking up through long grass.

Of course Sam Burns’ Yard is better organised and doesn’t degenerate into the kind of outsize trail mix of dolls’ heads and door hinges you’ll find in Lord’s, no matter how far towards the back fence you meander. Still though. It’s the place I found the trove of mid-century bookclub hardbacks from the collection of one “T. Jolly”, as per the flyleafs, that wound up being central to the plot in Quiet Neighbors. It’s been very good to me and it deserved a mention.

Next time, I am going to keep scrupulous notes as I go along.

(Narrator from the future: she didn’t.)

HANK: Reds and readers, I cannot tell you what The Dead Room means. You will just have to read the book and find out. But let’s ask: which of the places Catriona mentions would you like to visit? And why? 

(And—pssst. THE DEAD ROOM (now the NUMBER ONE new release in psychological fiction on Amazon) is now a Kindle Unlimited! Which means, whoo hoo, if you are a Prime member, you can get it FREE!)

Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. A former linguistics professor, she is now a full-time fiction writer and has published: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories (The Edinburgh Murders is latest); and contemporary psychothriller standalones (The Dead Room is the brand-new one). These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comic crime capers about a Scot-out-of-water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California sneezedavissneeze. Scot’s Eggs, No. 8 just won for best humorous novel at Left Coast Crime in San Francisco. Her other novels have won Agathas, Anthonys, Leftys and Macavitys and been finalists for an Edgar, a CWA Dagger and three Mary Higgins Clark awards.

Catriona is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.

In this atmospheric thriller from Catriona McPherson, a young widow seeking refuge from her grief wades into the mists at the far end of memory lane—where something even darker awaits.

 

Reeling from the death of her husband, thirtysomething audiobook narrator Lindsay Hale retreats to her Scottish hometown and the comforts of old times. Her family rallies, her old friends offer support, but something is wrong . . . something beyond grief. Something she can only glimpse from the corner of her eye.

A new house should help, but why is she recognising strangers, forgetting familiar faces?

Every night, as Lindsay’s dream house fills with nightmares, she wonders whether she’s truly unravelling—or if something more sinister is at play. Buried secrets surface and reality bends, forcing Lindsay to face the terrifying truth that her hard-won haven isn’t so safe after all.