Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

Exclusive interview with author Catriona McPherson and a review of her new novel about female detective Dandy Gilver *** 3 Stars

By Gabrielle Pantera

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 10/24/2011 – “I went on day trips to Georgian houses in Edinburgh and called it a day’s work,” says Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains author Catriona McPherson. “I visited Victorian mansions and Renaissance castles all over Scotland, dedicated researcher me, and everywhere I went the same thing happened. I’d ask a question of the guide.  And another. And some more and then they’d ask me why I wanted to know.  And when I told them I was writing a book, they’d say ‘Ohhhh!’ and go and get a big bunch of keys and take me round all the bits of the mansion or castle that the public don’t usually get to see.  For a nosey person who loves old houses, it was heaven.”

Dandy Gilver is a detective who is also an aristocrat. Dandy receives a letter from Mrs. Balfour, who suspects her husband is planning on killing her. The note Dandy receives says, “My husband is going to kill me, and I would rather he didn’t.” Dandy goes undercover as a lady’s maid to deduce what is going on. Is Mrs. Balfour right or is she going crazy?

Dandy can be shrewd, kind, and funny. As a lady’s maid she needs lots of help. McPherson knows how to make you laugh and also shudder with her descriptive prose. Her writing is comfortable and familiar. It embodies the 1920s and her writing style is similar to Barbara Pym.

“Dandy came to me while I was sitting on a beach in south-west Scotland recovering from having just put my first overwritten novel in a drawer where it belongs,” says McPherson. “My husband Neil told me I should write whatever I wanted, whatever I loved to read. I said I loved to read Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham and PG Wodehouse and Nancy Mitford, but they’re all dead and gone. At this point, Neil looked at me as if I was some kind of harmless imbecile.”

“And a light bulb went on in my head,” says McPherson. “I got out my clipboard…yes, even at the beach…and started to make notes. A woman, an amateur, English but living in Scotland, a mother but not maternal, posh but broke. I’ve still got the sheet of paper. It’s got a shopping list on one corner…lemons, bread, garlic, lettuce…which seems kind of stagey. More typical would have been cat food, bread, onions, loo roll but we were having salad for dinner so there it is.”

“As for the setting, where Dandy Gilver is undercover as a lady’s maid, I really wanted to send Dandy below stairs to a servants’ hall and have her see a different kind of life,” says McPherson. “Whenever I go around historic houses, I’m always most interested in the kitchens and attics.  For one thing, if I’d been alive when these places were in their pomp, that’s where I’d have been, down in the dark, scrubbing. The state rooms and fine furnishings are all very well, but it’s the laundry copper and the ice house that really show you what life was like back then.”

McPherson says she never reads what she’s written until it’s completely done. “I write very organically, as they say, chaotically would be more honest, just pounding out the first draft without stopping, making up everything I don’t know. Then, of course, the second draft, after the research to find out what I’ve got wrong, is like clearing up after a terrific party.”

McPherson says her writing method is not without its drawbacks. “You have to name a pile of new characters all at once and you can’t stop to think. In PT Bloodstains I suddenly had to name a butler, a cook, two lady’s maids, a parlour maid, a housemaid, a kitchen maid, a scullery maid, a footman, a chauffeur, a valet and a boot boy.  That could have stymied me for days so I used the names of my three sisters and their ten children, with one left over.  Then later, during the second draft, I changed some of them a bit.  But I’ve still got a Clara, an Eldry as a contraction of Etheldreda, an Amelia, a Harry, a Mattie, and Miss Rossiter herself the Dandy’s maidly pseudonym. My family members Claire, Audrey the contraction of Etheldreda, Amy, Harris, Mathew and Ross never noticed, making me wonder if any of my beloved family actually reads my books after all.”

Between getting her first degree and Ph.D, McPherson worked in the Edinburgh Room of the City Library, a spot dedicated to local history of all kinds. “I know exactly what they’ve got hidden away in the archives there. So I go back and bug my ex-colleagues to unearth all kinds of unlikely stuff for me. It doesn’t sit well with them having to open sub-sub-sub-basements and lug papers into the light for me instead of giving me the keys and telling me to go and get dusty myself. One time I asked Jim Hogg, one of the librarians, to fetch…oh, I think it was a plan of the backstage area of a theatre, long-burned down, or something. And, he uttered the immortal words, ‘For God’s sake, Catriona, just make it up!’ It’s not every day a professional archivist says that, you know.”

McPherson says she started with no connections in publishing, no background in the literary world, and no experience of writing anything. “Sometimes it can seem as if any new author who gets a break is either married to an editor or has worked in journalism for ten years and knows everyone. Or is a celebrity in some other field. It is possible to just write a book that someone likes and start from there.”

McPherson’s editor is Marcia Markland at St. Martin’s Press in the U.S. At the London sister company Hodder and Stoughton, her editor is Suzie Doore. “The time difference is a doozy,” says McPherson. “I’m three hours behind New York and a brutal eight hours behind London.  Apart from that, and it’s not so bad with Skype and email, it’s been wonderful.”

McPherson met Markland in San Francisco during Bouchercon 2010 at a St Martin’s party at the Embarcadero.  “Because P.T. Bloodstains was knocked into shape for the UK already, there hasn’t been much in the way of an edit for the launch here.  The UK editor had some work to do, clearing up bits that only made sense to me because I’d read all the other drafts where the deleted stuff had existed.” and it’s a pretty good deal, really, having someone sort out all your mess and then being able to say “Oh yes, I wrote this.”

McPherson says she’s comfortable conducting her life over the phone being from a big family of sisters.  However, she must pay special attention when talking with her New York editor. “Marcia has the best New York accent I’ve ever heard. I have to try hard to listen to what she’s saying and not just to the music of her voice. With Suzie we both have to try hard to talk about my books and not about our shared love of reality ballroom dancing shows.”

McPherson’s agent is Lisa Moylett of Coombs Moylett, London. “I got my agent from trawling through the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook and sending her a submission. Her reader liked my first three chapters and then Lisa and she both enjoyed the whole book. We met for lunch, liked one another, and off we went, hand-in-hand.”

“When I first met Catriona I was so impressed by both her perceptiveness and obvious intellect,” says McPherson’s agent Lisa Moylett. “There is always a small worry when you meet an author for the first time, particularly if you have read and enjoyed their work, that they don’t quite measure up to the picture you have envisaged. This wasn’t the case with Catriona. She has such an energy and vivacity about her. I just knew both publishers and readers alike would enjoy her.”

“Her first novel, not Dandy actually, entitled Save Elvis, then published by Orion as Growing Up Again, landed on our slush pile and it shone,” says Moylett. “It was such a funny, clever and original book. We had no hesitation. And then when she mentioned Dandy, I couldn’t believe my luck.”

“She’s opinionated, clever, she trusts me and I her…and that is one of the most important aspects of an author/agent relationship,” says Moylett. “Dandy Gilver is such an enduring creation and has always had her fans amongst the publishing community, firstly with Constable & Robinson and then with Hodder & Stoughton, who have published the majority of her books.”

At this time Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains is not being made for film or television. “I’ve always had my hopes set on radio,” says McPherson. “I adore radio drama.”

After this book about a 1920s house, McPherson’s next Dandy story, already done, is set in two warring department stores in 1927. In the following book, that McPherson is finishing now, Dandy goes undercover once more this time as an English mistress in a girls’ boarding school in 1928.

McPherson lives in a beautiful valley in northern California, just outside Davis. She was born in South Queensferry, just outside Edinburgh, in the house where her parents still live. Her website is www.dandygilver.com. Her blog, “Sitting typing alone in a room”, is at  catrionamcpherson.blogspot.com. “I have a Facebook page as well, but I find that Twitter is where I naturally go to post moment-by-moment things,” says McPherson. She’s @CatrionaMcP on Twitter.

Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains by Catriona McPherson
Hardcover, 304 pages, Publisher: Minotaur Books (August 16, 2011)
Language: English, ISBN: 9780312654184