Catriona mcpherson biography examples

I don’t remember exactly when I first met Catriona McPherson — maybe at Left Coast Crime in Monterey in 2014. But I’ve never forgotten how she came to the debut authors panel when very famous authors (including Sue Grafton!) were speaking at the same time. That tells you a lot about who Catriona is, but she’s also smart, witty, and oh, how I wish she could read this post aloud to us so we could all enjoy her charming Scottish accent. I will also never forget that she bought a copy of Tagged for Death at Malice Domestic and had me sign it — back when I was terrified that no one would buy my books or ask me to sign them. So Catriona has been a shining example to me of how to be generous in the writing community.

Catriona is here to celebrate the release of The Turning Tide the fourteenth book in her fabulous Dandy Gilver mystery series!

Catriona: I love writing about food almost as much as I love buying it, cooking it, eating it, and cleaning the kitchen up afterwards. I really mean that last bit: much as I enjoy parties there’s something so satisfying about being in your jammies at getting on for midnight, washing a million dishes, accompanied by the night’s playlist looping for the fourth time, and guzzling any leftovers not worth putting in Tupperware.

This time, in The Turning Tide, Dandy Gilver and Alec Osborne almost get to stay in a comfy pub with a generous landlord but, at the last minute, they’re diverted to a cold and cheerless private house, with a housekeeper who doesn’t take her catering duties seriously at all. They’re either hungry or suffering from indigestion the whole book through.

It got me thinking about  other books where food as a whole or one meal in particular play a crucial part. Here’s my top five:

Food as clue: Dorothy L Sayers, Strong Poison

This novel, in which Peter Wimsey meets Harriet Vane when she’s on remand awaiting trial for murder, is a great example of an im

Long time followers of this blog will recall me reviewing Dandy Gilver And The Case Of Red Herrings, which, to my surprise, I totally adored. This book’s by the same author, but is a very different beast – for starters, it’s set in the present day, and rather than being a “cosy”, like the Dandy Gilver series, it’s a psychological novel-cum-thriller (the word thriller to me suggests guns; car chases; stuff like that, and that’s not what this book’s about – it’s a thriller about the dark recesses of the mind…so just my cup of tea! )

Jessie is our main character and heroine, telling the story from a distinctive and amusing first person narrative. She works in Dumfries, a large town in the south of Scotland, in a church-run charity which gives clothing to those in need. It’s not a charity shop; items are free, but you have to be referred by Social Work, a church, a homeless charity, etc. Jessie’s the only paid staff member, and the boss. The other two are volunteers: Dot, who’s a wee bit older, gets paperwork – and a lot of other things – mixed up easily, but is kind, and easy company. And Steve (“who’s taken every Social Science course the Open University ever invented”) and tells the women off for being inappropriate or unprofessional at any opportunity – while he “nicks the stock if he sees anything he fancies.” Meanwhile, Jessie has a closely guarded secret – she suffers from chronic pterenophobia (brownie points if you know what it is without Googling it, although the story does get to it!) It’s fear of feathers, which, on first consideration, doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Just stay away from birds, hens, etc. Simple. But they also pop up in mattresses, and of course in quilts and pillows…Or on beaches. And in lots of films…

Jessie’s a sympathetic character. She’s lonely, and

Q: How do you deal with backstory? How much do you need, and where do you put it? How do you know what to leave in, and what to take out?

I just finished reading Heather Levy’s debut novel, Walking Through Needles, it takes place in 1994 and 2009 from the point of view of two teenagers and later, adults. It is a hard book handled brilliantly. By jumping time frames she makes backstory feel immediate. It made me think, backstory must drive the story or be dropped. 

I’m editing my newest book and I hear in my head, “Dude, your research is showing.” You know those paragraphs you put in because you spent hours to discover the exact military vehicles bought by the LAPD in 1984? It’s the Vietnam era Cadillac Gage Commando V-100, or M706, if you’re wondering.I could give engine specs, but this info dump has slowed the essay down enough as it is. How about I go with  “LAPD was the first American police force to use tanks against its citizenry.” Readers don’t care about the rabbit hole I fell down to research the novel. 

Backstory is often things I discovered about characters in early drafts. My job in editing is only keep backstory where it is absolutely necessary. Tricky is the story of a detective trying to discover what happened the day of a shooting and more importantly who the suspect is. In many ways the book hinges on discovering Cisco’s backstory. What keeps the mystery going is how the backstory is doled out, and the fact that most witnesses that tell about Cisco’s backstory could be lying. I wrote entire chapters set in the past, used them as research and then tossed them out. I needed to write them, readers didn’t need to read them.

Tangent alert: Some research facts are needed, as proven brilliantly in Throw Mamma From The Train. A woman from Billy Crystal’s writing class reads from her MS, “"Dive... DIVE" yelled the captain through the thing.

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

 By Catriona McPherson

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 pri