HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Catriona McPherson is so insanely perfect that I don’t even wanna take
time away from letting you get to her post (but I will ) to tell you how endlessly brilliant and fabulously
wonderful and ridiculously talented she is and yes, I am totally gushing, punctuation
be damned, because truly, she is a force of nature. Maybe she IS nature. Who knows.
But she’s incredible, and her new book (more below) is thrilling and here’s how
it all happened.
Part of it, at least.
Strangers at the Gate
Q: What’s in a name?
A: Everything. Literally everything.
There are three big naming tasks associated with any book. In ascending
order of significance and capacity to
drive me crazy these are: naming the places (if I’ve made them up); naming the
characters; naming the book.
Naming the book should be the easiest, because it’s the one I get help
with – my agent, her staff, my UK editor, her staff, my US editor, her
staff, the sales teams, the publicity departments, my friends, family, random
strangers, and unsuspecting readers of blog posts (this is fair warning of
what’s coming, okay?) – all get roped in. Also, it’s the one that’s not even up
to me in the end. The book title isn’t a bit of the book; it’s a marketing tool
for the book, and the thoughts of publishing professionals weigh heavier
than the thoughts of a frazzled author who’s far too close and has never worked
in marketing.
But that’s for later. The first and easiest (for me) task is naming places.
There’s abundant help here, in the form of the Ordnance Survey Land Ranger maps
of the real bit of Scotland I’m writing about (even if I’m putting a fictitious
setting there). Because every hamlet, farm, hill, valley, trickle of water and
bump in the grass throughout the UK has a name. And every one of these names is
dutifully printed at one and a quarter inches to the mile.
Also, in the land of Drumnadrochit, Auchtermuchty, and Ecclefechan, no
made-up name is implausible. That takes the pressure off marvelously.
So, in Strangers at the Gate, I’ve got: Simmerton – a town in a
deep, dark valley that only gets sunshine in the height of summer (or “simmer”
as it’s pronounced in Scots); Jerusalem – a house with its face turned (giro)
to the sun (solem); Widdershins – a house not as unlucky as it sounds, because
its name is nothing to do with walking anti-clockwise round a church but is rather
a corruption of “widow’s portion”. In other words, it’s a dower house. And that
gave me an idea for a cottage called Bairnspairt – literally ‘the child’s part’
– a house given to an heir under Scots Law.
So far, so low-stakes. Because it doesn’t even matter if the place names
don’t resonate with readers. At least I don’t think so. After all, if I had set
the book in a real place, as I sometimes do, I’d be stuck with whatever names I
found there.
It’s a different matter with characters. I think the names of the people
matter a great deal. They have to bring to mind the right era, the right social
class, the right ethnicity, and beyond all that they have to “fit”. But why do
they have to fit? Why should they? In real life, we get our names as tiny
babies and don’t often change them no matter whether they suit us or not. I
don’t know the answer to this, but I’m a slave to the truth of it, with
multiple discarded character names and a finely-honed “global search and
replace” habit.
(By the way, when changing a character’s name from Olive to Nora, watch
out for scenes with pizza.)
So, in Strangers at the Gate, I’ve got: a young couple, Finnie
and Paddy Lamb; Paddy’s mum, Elayne Lamb; Finnie’s parents, Eric and Mary
Doyle; an elderly couple, Lovatt and Tuft Dudgeon; a single woman in her
thirties, Shannon Mack; and a pair of retired church volunteers, Sonsie and
Adam Webb.
What I don’t have are any Mcs and Macs. I always try to keep them down
lower than they would be in real Scotland, because a novel populated by an
authentic serving of MacToggles and McToories would be hard on the eye and the
memory. (I might have gone too far this time, in cutting them out completely.)
As for the rest, Lovatt and Tuft are posh; Shannon isn’t. The Doyles are
Roman Catholics of Irish descent; the Lambs could be, but not necessarily.
Elayne, with her Y, has social pretensions. And Sonsie – it’s short for Sonia –
is exactly the sort of woman who wouldn’t mind a pet-name drawn from a poem
about a haggis.
I got very fond of them all. Which is just as well, because it stopped
me paying back the advance, deleting the drafts and forgetting about them,
instead of slogging my way to a title for the finished book.
While I wrote it, it was called The Cuts, after the very deep,
very narrow, side valleys around Simmerton (and after some of the details of the
murder). I loved that title. My propensity for typos was a worry – Can you
imagine??? – but otherwise I loved it.
I was alone.
So the process started, trying to find the book a new name. A squad of
us brainstormed and brainstormed and came up with:
The Cuts – still no
A Walk in Darkness – too generic
Take One Step – sounds like a recipe
Every Step You Take – Great! Oh wait. Wasn’t that
a song?
A Step in Darkness – Didn’t we already-? Oh,
that was “walk”. Well, no.
At The Edge of the Wood – sounds too
similar to other books
In The Dark Of The Wood – sounds
even more similar to other books
A Walk in Shadow – worse than a step in
darkness
A Walk in The Shadow of The Valley of Death, Through a
Wood – let’s take a break, eh?
Until finally, April, my US editor, came up – apparently out of nowhere
– with Strangers at the Gate, and we all went “Oooooooh!”.
I hope the inside of the book makes everyone go “Ooooooooh!” too.
And if anyone reading this blog has a brainwave about a good title for a
murder mystery set in Dundee, in Scotland, in 1937, concerning a Punch and Judy
Show and a women’s magazine publisher, I’d be enormously grateful. Because it’s that time again already and I
got nothing.
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Ooooooooooh.
This is so fascinating--and I so agree. I made up a town for Trust Me, a suburb of Boston called Linsdale. Because it seemed like linden trees, which are beautiful but don't they whisper mysteriously? And they are thin, and elegant, but vulnerable. (Don't tell me if I'm wrong, this is how I felt about it.) And dale because is sounds like a pretty place. (Cypressdale sounded made up.)
And when a main character in The Murder List was Gianna Delaney, she was a total lump. When she became Rachel North--well, watch out, sister. Attitude. Why does that happen?
Tell us a terrific name, title, or place--and one lucky commenter will win a Catriona book!
CatrionaMcPherson is the national best-selling and multi-award-winning author of the
Dandy Gilver series of preposterous detective stories, set in her native Scotland
in the 1930s. She also writes darker contemporary suspense novels, of which
STRANGERS AT THE GATE is the latest. Also, eight years after immigrating to the
US and settling in California, Catriona began the Last Ditch series, written
about a completely fictional Scottish woman who moves to a completely
fictional west-coast college town.
Catriona is
a member of MWA, CWA and SoA, and a proud lifetime member and former national
president of Sisters in Crime, committed to advancing equity and
inclusion for women, writers of colour, LGBTQ+ writers and writers with
disability in the mystery community.
