From the Booking Desk:

When Catriona McPherson goes into promotional mode for her latest releases, she always manages to give readers something special. She makes multiple blog stops, but each location gets a unique and insightful post – never anything generic or simply thrown together. For the tour celebrating the release of Strangers at the Gate (out tomorrow), I asked for a post about the union of architecture and crime. A lofty idea, perhaps, but one that I knew fit with the novel’s aesthetic. However, I had no clue just how insightful this guest post would turn out to be. And let’s not even talk about how delighted I am that I somehow managed to get Catriona McPherson to start a post with a sentence containing the words “property porn.” I just know you all are going to love this guest post from Catriona and please do visit the other blogs she has scheduled around the release of Strangers at the Gate – you just never know what you will learn.

Strangers at the gate, up in the big house, over among the ruins
and back at the flat.

It’s not that my new book is property porn exactly. There’s plenty plot, characterisation and suspense in it too. Why, if it weren’t unseemly to bring it up, I might mention that Daphne Du Maurier’s name appeared in the Publisher’s Weekly review. There’s a fair whack of landscape as well: mostly pine trees, closely planted on steep hillsides and cutting out all sunlight from the town of Simmerton.

But there is a lot of architecture, it must be said. I do love a house. The story opens with Finnie and Paddy Lamb moving into the gate lodge at Widdershins, in the Scottish borders. Finnie, a city girl, has immediate misgivings – not least because of the gate itself, two hulking stone posts with rusted ironwork, clearly visible from the windows. That was the point: gate lodge cottages were positioned with a bay window looking both up the drive to the big house and along the approach road, so the gatekeeper, his wife, or any of the children could scamper out at the first sight of a carriage and open up for their employers to sweep through. I like to imagine a coin tossed out of the carriage window but I expect a gout of muddy water from a puddle was often the only return for the scampering.

These days, gate lodges are sought after real estate. Off-loaded by toffs strapped for cash, they’re snapped up by eager new country-dwellers. For one thing, they’re always pretty; usually they were made of the same stone as the big house and designed to reflect well on its owner. However, they can be titchy in the extreme. Small cottages look so much cuter and fairytale-like than decent houses with enough bedrooms, don’t you know. So most of them have been extended. Finnie’s house is unusual: it’s still just three rooms big and it’s still part of the estate too.

A typical gate lodge in southern Scotland

The big house, at the other end of the drive, is based on a real place that happened to be for sale when I was trawling around the property websites, looking for a setting. (By the way, US friends, did you know that UK house-selling websites include floorplans? Makes for much more detailed day-dreaming . . .)  It’s what Neil and I call “an Agatha Christie house”: Arts and Crafts in style, half-timbered, lots of fireplaces inside, generally the sort of place a colonel would come to play bridge after dinner and end up with a knife in his neck.

The inspiration for Widdershins

I had forgotten how much I drew on this real house when I was writing the first draft of Strangers at the Gate. The long corridor to the kitchen, the smart new kitchen itself, the terrace outside and the creepers up the walls . . . turns out I have no imagination whatsoever; all of that is lifted from the brochure. I wonder if whoever bought the house will feel a shiver if they also buy the book. I would, if I was sitting at home and the grisly murder in the novel I had started reading took place somewhere identical to my own home. Wouldn’t you?

Kenmure Castle

There’s another setting in the book drawn from life. But this time it’s a place I know well and there’s no chance of anyone living there. Kenmure Castle, near my old house in Galloway, was a convenient destination for a walk, whenever the rain stopped for a bit, and I must have spent hours circling it, looking at the few surviving signs of habitation and the creeping decay. Its fictional counterpart – Jerusalem House – was destroyed by fire. Kenmure Castle, in contrast, fell victim to a bizarre bit of UK tax law, which required the roof to be removed from a building to prove that it wasn’t being lived in or producing income for its owner. The roof came off Kenmure in 1958 and it would take a billionaire to get it habitable again now. 

I don’t think anything as dire as what I made happen at fictional Jerusalem House ever really happened at Kenmure Castle, thankfully.

Martello Court, Edinburgh.

But finally to a happier home: the flat where Finnie grew up – a high-rise, in what the US calls the projects – contrasts in every way with the squat cottages, closed-off houses and burnt-out shells in the deep, dark Simmerton valley. Finnie’s mum and dad still live there and her dad, Eric, loves it with a passion. He’s my favourite character in the book and it made me happy to let him be happy, despite his many struggles.  Here’s what he’s got to say about his flat, or rather its balcony:

‘Best kept secret in the city,’ he used to say, waving a lordly arm at the view spread out below us, whenever he was out there having the fag my mum knew about and sharing it with me, which she didn’t. ‘If them in their leafy suburbs knew what we’ve got up here, they’d have it off us.’ He leaned his elbows on the rail and feasted his eyes. I loved the view too, but it was my dad I was watching. He traced the arterial routes down to the city centre, to where church spires and grand bank buildings began and then the castle on its rock and the sleeping giant of Arthur’s Seat and beyond even that, the glinting ribbon of the forth and the green hills of Fife. ‘We’re rich, Finn,’ he always said to me.

If you’d like to find out why Finnie and Paddy are in the gate lodge, meet the owners of the big house, discover what happened at Jerusalem and hang out with Eric on his balcony – and I hope you would –Strangers at the Gate is out tomorrow!


Please visit Catriona McPherson’s website for more information on Strangers at the Gate and all of her other novels.

Catriona McPherson 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.

Catriona McPherson 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.