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
Rating: 3 Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
HOLLYWOOD, CA (Gosh!TV) 8/10/2011 – “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. 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 impoverished aristocratic detective. Dandy receives a letter from a Mrs. Balfour, who suspects her husband plans to kill her. The note 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 style, reminiscent of Barbara Pym, is comfortable and familiar and embodies the 1920s.
“Dandy came to me while I was sitting on a beach in southwest Scotland recovering from having just put my first overwritten novel in a drawer where it belonged,” 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. And a light bulb went on in my head. 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.”
“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. 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.”
Between getting her 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….It doesn’t sit well with them having to open sub-sub-sub-basements and lug papers into the light instead of just 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’s next Dandy story, already finished, 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.
Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains by Catriona McPherson. Hardcover, 304 pages, Publisher: Minotaur Books (August 16, 2011). Language: English, ISBN: 9780312654184
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