The Burry Man’s Day by Catriona McPherson

8 April 2013 00:45

This is the second book in the Dandy Gilver series and so far I think it’s my favourite, I don’t know how much I’ve been influenced by knowing the setting fairly well, it’s always a plus as far as I’m concerned when I can easily imagine exactly where I am location-wise in a book. Apart from that I do like Catriona McPherson’s writing, she’s particularly good with different dialects which can be really difficult to get right.

It’s August 1923 and the setting is in and around South Queensferry. The small town has an annual Ferry Fair and the Burry Man plays a big part in it. He’s a bit of a hangover from pagan days I suppose but it’s all a bit of a mystery, you can read about the 2012 Burryman here. And here is a photo of him with his two helpers. This all takes place on the second Friday of August, I’ve marked it down on my calendar – see you at South Queensferry – and on the Saturday too.
Burry man in South Queensferry

If you want to see what South Queensferry looks like have a look at a previous post here.

Back to the book. Not everyone in Queensferry is enamoured of the Burry Man, the various religious ministers/priest aren’t keen on him and the Turnbulls – who are the local temperance, all alcohol is evil, tee-total fanatics are dead against him, because part of the Burry Man’s duties is to go around the town being treated to whisky from everyone.

Robert Dudgeon has been the Burry Man for 25 years but for some reason he doesn’t want to play the part again, although he won’t say why. At the last minute he changes his mind but the day ends in trgedy as the Burry Man drops down dead. Is it natural causes or has he been poisoned?

When all this occurs, Dandy happens to be staying at Cassilis Castle which is actually a fictional place, supposedly somewhere over Dalmeny way, and is owned by her old schoolfriend Buttercup and her American husband Cadwallader. Cad asks Dandy to investigate, which of course she does, with the help of Alec.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable murder mystery which had me puzzled to the end, a good comfort read. It occurred to me that McPherson deals with Dandy’s husband and family in exactly the same way that children’s authors always have done with parents – that is, she gets rid of them very early on in the story. Just thought I’d mention it. I’m looking forward to reading more of this series.

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Miss Buncle Married by D.E. Stevenson

5 March 2013 22:15

This is the sequel to Miss Buncle’s Book, which I really enjoyed reading so when I saw this at a library in the next town I snapped it off the shelf, even although it’s a large print book. I suspect that the powers that be in Fife libraries think that D.E. Stevenson’s books are only read by very elderly ladies in care homes, but I’m not quite of that generation.

Anyway, in this book Barbara Abbott nee Buncle is enjoying married life with her Arthur, she’s partial to large men you know, and he fits the bill perfectly. The only blot in their happiness is the fact that they have got into a social circle which means never ending dinner invitations and bridge parties. When they eventually realise that neither of them are keen on all the socialising, they plan their getaway.

So that they don’t upset their neighbours Barbara looks far afield for her dream home, and when she finds it it’s a wreck. She sets to work refurbishing the place and in time they make friends with all the neighbours, who are more to her liking, no bridge this time!

When I was about a third of the way through this book I thought to myself that I wasn’t enjoying it as much as Miss Buncle’s Book but by the time I got to the half way mark it had pepped up and I was happy eavesdropping on the inhabitants of the English village of Wandlebury. As you would expect from D.E.Stevenson, this is a cosy light read, which is sometimes just what I need.

D.E.Stevenson was Scottish and was related to R.L.Stevenson of Kidnapped/Treasure Island fame. You can read some more about her here.

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Country of the Blind by Christopher Brookmyre

20 December 2012 14:36

Christopher Brookmyre is a Scottish author who deserves to be as well known amongst readers as Ian Rankin, but for some reason he isn’t. I was thinking that it might be because his books are definitely not ones which you would recommend to a maiden aunt but I think maiden aunts have probably changed a lot over the years. Anyway, there’s quite a lot of swearing in this book but it wouldn’t be realistic without it.

Nicole Carrow is a young English lawyer who has just moved to take up a post in a firm of Glasgow solicitors. It has all been a bit of a culture shock for her but worse is to follow when she is given the job of defending the alleged murderers of Roland Voss, a conservative tabloid media mogul, with fingers in many pies. Voss’s wife and two bodyguards have also been murdered and it looks like an open and shut case but all is not as it seems and it isn’t long before an attempt is made on Nicole’s life.

The journalist, Jack Parlabane becomes involved in the investigation and the book becomes quite a page turner with the action moving around Scotland from Glasgow to Edinburgh and Perthshire with brief forays into the wilds.

It’s Brookmyre’s second novel, first published in 1997, it doesn’t have an awful lot in the way of humour compared with some of his others but I did enjoy it. Just remember that his books are authentically nitty gritty!

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Ann And Her Mother by O. Douglas

6 November 2012 00:20

This book was first published in 1922, it was the fourth book to be written by O.Douglas and it comes in between Penny Plain and Pink Sugar. It is exactly as the title says, all about Ann and her mother, the Ann being O.Douglas (Anna Buchan)herself. The mother was of course also mother of John Buchan.

I really enjoyed this one, apart from anything else it gave me so much information on the Buchan family and answered a lot of questions I had had. By this time Mrs Douglas is a widow who misses her husband a lot and is becoming quite depressed and ready for her own appointment at the pearly gates. Ann has decided to write her mother’s ‘life’, it’s a way of getting her mother to talk about happier times and her three children who have already been ‘taken’.

The family originally came from Peebles (Priorsford) of course but they moved to Kirkcaldy (Kirkcaple) when Mr Buchan (Douglas) became the minister of the Free Church of Scotland in the town.

I had often wondered how they managed to survive such a change of scene from the soft hills and river scenery of the borders to the icy North Sea blast of Kirkcaldy, and this book has the answer. The family seems to have been full of wild children, not what you would expect from the children of the manse at all.

They did move away after staying in Kirkcaldy for about 13 years but I can imagine that when this book was first published the townsfolk must have been quite thrilled as there are so many local streets mentioned and even the names are local ones, I wonder if they were the real people or the names had been changed.

Glasgow was their next destination and that must have been an even bigger shock to them as they found themselves in a very poor and deprived neighbourhood with not much of a congregation. There is an inevitable churchiness and biblical quotations abound in these books but they are very readable and I think that O.Douglas would have made a good agony aunt for a magazine because she is full of good common sense and helpful observation. Given the time this was published I imagine that it was read by many a woman who had lost sons in the Great War, and it might have given them some solace to read about another woman in their position.

The Buchans were members of the Free Church of Scotland which is the very strictest form of Presbyterianism, so I was surprised to see that a Christmas tree was mentioned. They must have been a fairly lax set of ‘Wee Frees’ – as they’re nicknamed. It was only a few years ago that a minister was on the news because he had banned a Christmas tree from outside a primary school. They’re seen as pagan symbols and so I suppose the work of the devil. It was also mentioned that they sang hymns, something else which I thought was unheard of as they don’t allow music – it’s also the work of the devil.

The only thing the Wee Frees really seem to enjoy is fighting amongst themselves and every ten years or so they have a big fight and break into yet another schism, then they have a big argument about who owns the church and manse.

Anyway, none of that nonsense goes on in this book and I think this is my favourite of her books so far.

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The new Sonia Wayward by Michael Innes

21 August 2012 22:59

The new Sonia Wayward

I’ve been meaning to participate in the Crime Fiction Alphabet hosted by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise, for weeks now, but somehow I was always just too late. Anyway, here I go now, this week’s letter is N and I’ve read a Michael Innes book which was first published in 1960.

The new Sonia Wayward is an unusual book because there are no really likeable characters in it, which for me anyway is usually a real turn off in a book but this one manages to overcome that huge disadvantage.

It begins with the very sudden death of Colonel Ffolliot Petticate’s wife, Sonia Wayward, whilst they are out sailing in their small yacht. It’s a financial disaster for her husband as Sonia was earning the money as a writer of very popular fiction. The colonel is retired from the army and only has a small pension to live on.

After imbibing a large quantity of whisky to settle his nerves, he decides to dispose of Sonia overboard, with the intention of telling everyone that she is travelling, it’s important to pretend that she’s still alive, so that he can continue to live his very comfortable life. He takes on the task of finishing Sonia’s latest novel and fends off all inquiries as to Sonia’s whereabouts.

At the beginning the Colonel decides to keep the lies and deceit to the minimum, but they multiply like crazy and he finds himself in a very sticky situation when his live-in servants become suspicious as to the fate of their employer.

That’s really just the bare bones of the book as I don’t like to say too much about crime fiction, but this book is absolutely full of twists and turns from the very beginning and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Michael Innes was born in Edinburgh in 1906, was educated at Edinburgh University and Oriel College, Oxford and went on to become a Professor of English at various universities. He had a very long writing career which you can read about here. He also wrote under his real name, J.I.M. Stewart, and those books are also well worth reading.

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The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin

10 August 2012 00:20

This is the second Malcolm Fox book and he’s still a detective in The Complaints department which is based in Fettes Avenue in Edinburgh, they investigate any police officers who are suspected of being up to no good. Along with his colleagues Naysmith and Kaye, Fox travels to the police station at Kirkcaldy in Fife so that they can interview police officers who have been implicated in a recent court case which has resulted in the conviction of a detective at the Kirkcaldy police station.

That happens to be my local ‘cop shop’ and most of the action in this book takes place within a short distance of where I live, and of course as Ian Rankin is almost a local lad, being brought up in another nearby Fife town, it’s an area which he knows very well. It was quite strange but at the same time a wee bit thrilling to recognise all the shops, tea shops and housing estates which they frequented, if you know the area you’ll even recognise particular lay bys! I must say that Rankin portrayed the town exactly as it is.

I think I enjoyed this one even more than the first one in this series, (The Complaints) although how much that is because of the local interest I can’t say.

In this one Fox has to dig back in newspaper archives to discover why a retired policeman had been investigating the death of a prominent Scottish politician in 1985. Was it suicide or did MI5 have something to do with it?

There certainly were some things going on in the 1980s, a few Scottish so called terrorists did rear their ugly heads. The rest of us were quite mystified why anyone should want to be extreme and violent. It didn’t amount to much anyway and I recall that the biggest incident was when a ‘bomb’ had been left on the railway track close to my then local railway station. People were not chuffed at the trains to Glasgow being delayed, me included. It turned out that the perpetrators were a couple of local numpties that I knew, from a distance. They were jailed for several years for their efforts.

Of course, Ian Rankin’s book is a work of fiction but it does sort of imply that there was a problem with terrorism in Scotland in the past – and really there never was such a problem. The thing in Scotland, particularly the west, has always been the religious bigotry. Thankfully that doesn’t seem to be nearly as bad as it used to be as fewer parents send their children to faith schools, where they used to be taught that they were different (superior) to the children at ordinary state schools. Tony Blair was keen on allowing more faith schools and unfortunately the Conservative Party is now all for religious schools too. In fact they really want schools which are staffed by low paid ‘teachers’ with no qualifications. Fools!

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The Complaints by Ian Rankin

20 June 2012 23:46

It seems like absolutely no time since I was in the kitchen listening to an interview with Ian Rankin on the radio. So it was a wee bit of a shock to me to realise that it must have been a 2009 interview, as the book he was plugging at the time was The Complaints, the first in a new series. The next thing I heard was that he was bringing back Rebus in his most recently published book and that it’s also his third Malcolm Fox book. I thought I’d better start reading the Malcolm Fox series before it gets out of hand and he has written 20 of them.

I managed to borrow the Complaints from the library. It’s set mainly in Edinburgh, as you would expect and Malcolm Fox is the main character. He’s a detective working in the Complaints section of the Lothian Police, they investigate other policemen and are deeply despised by all of their so-called colleagues. Fox is described as a bear of a man, although he has lost weight recently and he is also a recovering alcoholic. He’s not exactly popular, even amongst the other Complaints and Conduct detectives.

I really didn’t feel that I was enjoying this book until I was almost half way into it, I think that was mainly because I was missing Rebus and I kept imagining Fox as the Rebus character but eventually I got over that and I ended up enjoying The Complaints more than the Rebus books, mind you, I think I’ve only read about four of those.

The action takes place over just 17 days in 2009. Malcolm Fox has been told to investigate Jamie Breck, a young detective who has been ear-marked for fast-tracking to the top. There’s plenty going on in and around Edinburgh, murders and disappearances, dodgy business dealings and corrupt council officials and nobody knows who they can trust. It’s difficult to figure out who are the good guys and there are plenty of twists and turns in this book, I’m looking forward to reading the second book in the Fox series.

It’s easy to see that the nefarious goings-on of Edinburgh Council give Ian Rankin loads of copy!

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Morning Tide by Neil M. Gunn

18 June 2012 00:20

Neil Gunn was born in the far north of mainland Scotland, in Caithness. Morning Tide was published in 1930, and he stuck firmly to what he had experienced himself. It’s the story of a small fishing and crofting community near Caithness, at the end of the 19th century, where life is harsh and the women don’t know if their husbands and sons will come back after their day’s work is done. All too often the sea claims them before they can get back to shore with their catch.

The story begins on the beach where the thirteen year old Hugh Mac Beth is searching for mussels for his father to use as bait on his fishing line. It feels like a sort of rite of passage as Hugh has reached the age when he can be a help to his father instead of just being another mouth to feed.

Neil Gunn writes a good storm and if you’re languishing in horrendous heat wherever you are at the moment, I’m fairly sure that reading this book would cool you down by the way Gunn describes the cold of the sea and the shore.

This is an autobiographical story and it’s really as much about the women of the community as the men. Young and old are having a hard and sometimes cruel life and the community is dying as the young men go off to seek their fortune elsewhere. Waving off their sons to places like Australia was something that the parents just had to do, knowing that they would never see them again, but at least they would be alive and hopefully living a better life.

Hugh grows up in lots of ways, like being allowed to take part in a poaching party but he can’t neglect his schoolwork and he has to learn poetry by heart, failure to do so will result in the schoolmaster doling out the usual punishment – getting the strap/belt/tawse – up to six strokes of it on the hand.

If you’re interested in what Scottish life was like back then then I think that Morning Tide will give you a clear idea. It wasn’t all doom, there were occasional joys for the folks too.

This book is written in plain English and Neil M. Gunn is thought to have been one of the most influential Scottish writers of the first half of the 20th century.

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Foreign Parts by Janice Galloway

3 June 2012 22:40

I saw this book in the library and although I hadn’t read anything by Janice Galloway before, I did remember that sometime commenter John Wright did recommend one of her books, so I borrowed it. Then I looked back at the comments where I discovered that it was Clara which he had said was very good, so I’ll read that one whenever I can get it but I have to say that I was less than impressed with this one.

It’s the story of Rona and Cassie who work in the same office and have taken to going on holiday together since the days of having men in their lives are long gone. This time they’re going to France, partly because Rona wants to take a photograph of her grandfather’s headstone which is in one of the military cemeteries there.

Rona is doing the driving and they’ve taken a ferry to Normandy and the road trip is interspersed with Cassie’s reminisences of past holidays she has had with various boyfriends. The Cassie/Rona relationship is a strange one. You can’t really work out if they are really close friends or they just stick to each other because there are no better options.

In fact, that seems to be the main theme of the book as Rona and Cassie briefly ponder over Rona’s grandparent’s relationship through his last letter home to his wife.

The best thing that I can say is that Janice Galloway is good at writing Scots dialogue, not really the dialect, more the rythym of it – and that is quite a difficult thing to get right.

However, considering the book is supposed to be set in France, it reads like it has been written by someone who has never been to France. In fact it seems to have been written by someone who couldnae be arsed tae dae any research at a’.

There are quite a lot of things which are just plain wrong but the thing which annoys me the most is the description of a British war cemetery – which apparently had crosses as far as you could see!

No it didn’t. American war cemeteries have crosses and stars of David, the French ones have crosses or Islamic arched stones but British cemeteries have what is called the Commonwealth headstone which is a rectangular stone, slightly curved at the top.

Galloway doesn’t mention the name of either the ferryport which they left from or indeed the French one which they arrived at but it was an overnight ferry which obviously took all night to get there. It should take about two hours altogether unless you’re going a very weird way.

The ferry was described in detail – oil smells and the like, however when they visited French supermarkets there are no descriptions at all really. Now I defy anyone to visit a French supermarket and not have that smell which assails you before you even step through the door stuck in your memory, not to say olfactory senses forever. If you are lucky enough never to have visited a French supermarket, just imagine a building full of food which isn’t well stored, chilled or covered and where nothing seems to have been washed for a few generations and you’ll get close to the experience. It seems strange for an author to leave details like that out.

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The Dog Who Came In From The Cold by Alexander McCall Smith

17 May 2012 23:12

This is the second book in the Corduroy Mansions series. Of course it’s the same idea as his 44 Scotland series except most of the action takes place in London instead of Edinburgh.

This one was more enjoyable than the first one I think, or maybe it’s just that I know the various characters better now, it’s another cozy read. A few more of the Pimlico inhabitants are paired up. The whole thing is quite daft really with Freddie de la Haye, the Pimlico terrier belonging to William French being recruited by MI6 as a spy. But then when you think about it, stranger things have happened in that weird world of espionage.

William French, the main character is a man of a certain age. Jack usually asks me exactly what that means and I reply – older than me – but in this case William is actually a bit younger than me. He muses on such things as Latin phrases which are unknown to younger people nowadays and the fact that the younger generation has no idea of the use of the subjunctive. It felt like he had dropped in to my world! I imagine that there’s quite a lot of McCall Smith in William French. For me, this series isn’t as entertaining as the Scotland Street books but that’s probably because I prefer the Edinburgh setting.

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