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!

  

Clothes Maketh the Woman

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: What to wear, what to wear? Never in my life--well maybe in high school, maybe in my 20s, well, never mind –– never in my life has any question been so fraught as right now: Deciding what to wear back in real life. I have no idea. I have spent the last two years in leggings and black T-shirts. I have now moved to black t-shirts and black floaty skirts. That’s it. I look at the clothes in my closet and think… What are those things?

Another tough decision is deciding what my characters wear. (Thinking back, a lot of them seem to wear all black. Oh well. Let’s move on.)

We welcome today our darling fabulous dear and beloved friend Catriona McPherson. Who has the perfect style of her own. And today, Reds and Readers, some thoughts about the fashion decisions her characters make ––and equally intriguingly, why.

Clothes Maketh the Woman
    by Catriona McPherson


I can’t remember who was once asked, “What did the sixties look like?” and answered, after a pause, “They looked like the fifties”, but I’ve never forgotten it. Of course! The sixties in real life looked like our idea of the fifties, since that idea came from Hollywood (or Pinewood). By the time ordinary people had saved up for their bubblegum-pink appliances and atomic-print curtains, it was the seventies, Hollywood was all brown and orange, and real life looked like the sixties.

I was determined to bear this in mind as I clothed the people – oh all right, the women! – in my new book. In 1948, Myrna Loy was helping Cary Grant build his dreamhouse, Judy Garland was wearing an Easter bonnet chosen by Fred Astaire, and James Stewart was at a very awkward Manhattan dinner party featuring a length of . . . Rope.

But my book is set in Edinburgh, more specifically the tenements of the Fountainbridge district, where the dairies, breweries, distilleries and abattoirs scent the air and employ the populace. My heroine Helen Crowther might go to the pictures twice a week with her mother and her wee sister but none of them can dash out to buy the clothes they see on screen. (Or the clothes they hear about on the news. Truly. On the day the book opens, the Royal family was in Edinburgh and the bulletins all mentioned that little Princess Margaret Rose wore a pink coat to church.)

Even the characters who do have a lavish wardrobe allowance are subject to their own kind of time-lag. It’s another truth about fashion that I remember switching on a like a lightbulb in my head when it hit me: people don’t age in to the style of the generation before them. When I’m old – no heckling, please! – I won’t be wearing what women in their eighties wear now (i.e. old-lady clothes). No, I’ll be wearing what I wear today and that will make my clothes old-lady clothes, because I’m wearing them. Like when the dowagers in Jane Austen adaptations are still wearing yards of satin and tight stays, while the girls float around in hankies. This point seems to be beyond all those irritating articles about what “No Woman Over __ Should Be Wearing”. Grrrrrrrrr.

Personal time-lag meant that forties’ fashion was completely irrelevant for one of my favorite characters in the book. Helen’s benefactor, Mrs Sinclair, is in her fifties, has found her style, and is sticking with it. She dresses to be impressive rather than attractive: a high neck, a cameo brooch, box pleats, a fox-fur even in the summer, and a system of undergarments that creak like ship’s rigging whenever she’s moved by high emotion. Usually umbrage. I was born in 1965, and I can just about remember elderly versions of Mrs Sinclair, buttoned and buttressed, undoubtedly impressive. I definitely remember the creaking.

Helen has no ambition to be grand, and she’s on a tight budget too. Besides, there’s yet another factor she needs to consider: she must dress the part for a new role that is nothing like her past life. She’s about to start work as an almoner at a doctor’s surgery – sort of a proto-type medical social worker, I suppose you’d say – and we meet her as she’s steeling herself to put on Sunday clothes on a Monday morning: nylon stockings with a seam instead of hard-wearing lisle, shoes with tipped heels instead of the clogs that keep her mother’s feet up off the bottling-hall floor; a serge skirt and a poplin shirt instead of wool and a pinny; and strangest of all . . . a hat. She has never worn a hat on a Monday.

Of course, then as now, the rules can be ignored. You might pay a price for the decision (and be turned away from a swanky club, for instance) or, if you’ve got clout, you might get away with it. One character in the book whom I dressed just about from living memory – although my God it makes me feel old to consult my childhood for historical material! – is the free-thinking, devil-may-care lady doctor (doctor = clout), who wears a cotton dress and sandals with – gasp – bare brown legs. It wasn’t a doctor who rocked the village where I was born, mind you. It was the minister’s wife. She attended Sunday service in this shocking ensemble: bare legs, brown leather sandals, toes on show to the entire parish. And, once, a love bite! (Actually, I think the parishioners who took the vapours might have had a bit of a point there.)

So, all in all, the clothes in the book are very little to do with the fashion of the day and a lot to do with power, expectations, and tribal loyalties. I could never understand why make-over shows don’t get that. Even Queer Eye, which I love, tends to dress a shape, not a life. Still, the Fab Five are nothing like the dreaded Trinny and Susannah from What Not To Wear, who blithely turned every woman they got their mitts on into what one critic called “a newly divorced travel agent on her way to the PTA”. Ouch.

So, Reds, I’m assuming there is nothing you’ll be scolded into not wearing by some random opinion piece that thinks it’s the boss of you. Let’s celebrate! I’ll start: I’m never giving up pictorial prints. I plan to die in a dress covered with . . . let’s say . . . beach huts, and might even rock a jean jacket in my coffin. How about you?


HANK: Good question, you all! (I also love watching Say Yes to the Dress, where half the time I’m yelling at the screen---no no no!) I cannot think about what I will wear in my coffin, yeesh, but I WILL say I will NEVER wear ruching, or cutouts, or those cold-shoulder things. Asymmetrical hems. Gaucho pants. (I know, but if they DO come back, just saying.) High platform sandals. Anything with tricky lacings or fluttery sleeves. I’ll stop now. 

But I love what you said, Catriona, about power, expectation, and loyalties. That is a key lesson!

Reds and readers—how about you? What items will you NEVER give up? Or...wear?


Catriona McPherson (she/her) writes preposterous 1930s detective stories about an aristocratic sleuth, darker (not difficult) contemporary psychological thrillers, and comedies set in the Last Ditch Motel in fictional (yeah, sure) California, She has just introduced a fresh character in June’s 1948-set IN PLACE OF FEAR, which finally marries her love of historicals with her own working-class roots.

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


IN PLACE OF FEAR

Edinburgh, 1948. Helen Crowther leaves a crowded tenement home for her very own office in a doctor's surgery. Upstart, ungrateful, out of your depth - the words of disapproval come at her from everywhere but she's determined to take her chance and play her part.

She’s barely begun when she stumbles over a murder and learns that, in this most respectable of cities, no one will fight for justice at the risk of scandal. As Helen resolves to find a killer, she’s propelled into a darker world than she knew existed, hardscrabble as her own can be. Disapproval is the least of her worries now.