From the Booking Desk:
It’s a tradition now, so I am thrilled to have Catriona McPherson here for a guest post as she continues her blog tour for the latest Dandy Gilver novel, The Witching Hour.
Midsummer, St Mary Mead and now Dirleton
The Witching Hour (Dandy Gilver No.16) is set in the real village of Dirleton in East Lothian, near Edinburgh, in Scotland.
Many Scottish villages – in the Lowlands anyway – are single straggling streets of little stone houses built as long terraces (US: rows) but Dirleton is different. It’s set around an expansive village green, with pretty cottages and pretty cottage gardens, except that one side of the green is taken up with a castle. As Dandy says “It’s so quaint, it’s almost English.”
In 1939, when the book is set, Dirleton had a church, a school, two pubs, shops, a café, a laundry, a bank, a post office and a joiner. These days, it’s still got the pubs (It’s Scotland, remember), a café, the church, an old red phone-box doing duty as a wee free library, and that castle, now open to the public.
A brisk twenty-minute stroll along a footpath is Archerfield Garden Centre. It does sell plants, but it also sells gourmet groceries, gourmet clothes, gourmet tchotchkes and those dead expensive candles that smell like a small fire broke out in a Lush and someone doused it with Pine Sol.
Dirleton has also got a bus stop. That item of information is not as random as it seems. At least to watchers of Escape to the Country, on BBC1 and BritBox. It means Dirleton scores 3 out of 5 on the P-test for thriving villages. I think they’re onto something. See what you make of it:
- Pub
The first thing to make really clear is that the English village pub – and even the Scottish village pub these days – is not a bar. They serve alcohol, yes, but they also serve coffee, lunch, dinner, possibly afternoon tea and they host quiz nights, game nights and private parties if they’ve got a back room. A village without a pub is a bit of a cheeseless pizza all round.
- Post Office
Now, I make no apology for saying that USPS knocks Royal Mail into a cocked hat, but still a post office counter, ideally inside a wee grocer’s shop, is not to be sniffed at. People can get cash as well as stamps; old people can get their state pension (social security) over the counter; you can drop off and pick up dry-cleaning, which isn’t as much a part of life over there as it is this side of the water, but it does happen.
- Primary school
With a primary school in the village, families want to live there (not having to drive kids to school as the rain whips straight across the land for six months of the year is not nothing). And the harried mums keep the wee shop open, date nights fill the pub, there’s work for childminders, maybe even a nursery, there will definitely be some swings and a roundabout on a bit of grass somewhere, so the teenagers have somewhere to hang about wishing they didn’t live in a village where everyone knows them so there’s no chance of buying any booze in the one and only shop UK kids don’t start to learn to drive until they are seventeen and even after they pass their tests, it’s much more unusual for them to own a car. In fact it’s much more unusual for people in general to own a car which brings me to . . .
- Public transport
A railway station, or a bus stop, is a must if a village is going to thrive and have a good mix of people choosing to live there. Kids can get into town to hang about at better swings, elderly people who don’t drive any more or never did can get to the big Tesco to check out the two for seven quid paperbacks (although see below); people who can’t afford a car can have all the freedom a car would bring; rich people who nevertheless can’t afford the extortionate town-parking can ditto . . . And there’s nothing like meeting people you kind of half-know at a bus stop in the morning as you set off and then again in the evening as you trail home . . . it’s the kind of low-key semi-communication that binds people. We’re monkeys.
- Parish Church
So that would be the Church of England in England, and the Church of Scotland in Scotland. I’m not sure about Wales and Northern Ireland is its own story. But hear me out. I’m not even a Christian, but a village with a church is a village with a church hall, and therefore bingo, yoga, a badminton ladder, somewhere to lay out the entrants in a flower show, and more than likely a succession of jumble sales and baking sales throughout the year. Also, there will be a carol service in December, open to allcomers, light on the doctrine, heavy on the tots dressed up as shepherds. You’d need a heart of stone.
And that’s the perfect village according to Escape to Country. When I sat down to think about my personal perfect village, I expected it to be somewhat different. Ahem. My perfect village would have these five attributes:
- A wee shop with a post offce counter
- A pub with a pub quiz and a Scrabble night
- A hall with a yoga class, so basically a parish church
- A horticultural society, so basically a hall, so basically a parish church
- A bookshop. But not if it means my neighbours are stranded, and actually not if it means I can’t sit dreaming on a bus on dusty summer mornings and steamy winter evenings, so I’ll settle for public transport. To a slightly bigger village with a bookshop, obviously.
- And since I said “parish church” twice, I’ve got one left. I’d like a library van to visit every week. Or a fishmonger’s van, stopping on the green, tooting a musical horn and waiting for people to come out and buy fresh seafood, landed that day at the nearest working harbour. I know that sounds like something from Miss Marple, but this still happens in the village where I was born, every Thursday.
- And since I already cheated, I’ll use the seventh of my five choices to plump for a primary school. Never say I’m not a pillar of my imaginary community.
Jacket Copy for The Witching Hour:
It’s the spring of 1939 and Dandy Gilver, the mother of two grown-up sons, can’t think of anything except the deteriorating state of Europe and the threat of war. Detective work is the furthest thing from her mind. It takes a desperate cri de coeur from an old friend to persuade her to take on a case.
Daisy Esslemont’s husband Silas has vanished. It’s not the first time, but he has never embarrassed her with his absences before. It doesn’t take Dandy and her side-kick, Alec Osborne, long to find the wandering Silas, but when they track him down to the quaint East Lothian village of Dirleton, he is dead, lying on the village green with his head bashed in, in full view of a row of alms houses, two pubs, a manse, a school and even the watchtowers of Dirleton Castle. And yet not a single one of the villagers admits to seeing a thing.
As Dandy and Alec begin to chip away at the determined silence of the Dirletonites, they cannot imagine what unites such a motley crew: schoolmistress, minister, landlord, postmaster, park-keeper, farmworkers, schoolchildren . . . Only one person – Mither Golane, the oldest resident of the village – is loose-lipped enough to let something slip, but her quiet aside must surely be the rambling of a woman in her second childhood. Dandy and Alec know that Silas was no angel but “He’s the devil” is too outlandish a claim to help them find his killer. The detecting pair despair of ever finding answers, but are they asking the right questions?
Bio:
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, including September 2024’s THE WITCHING HOUR; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories about a medical social worker; and contemporary psychological 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. She is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime. www.catrionamcpherson.com
