Special Guest – Catriona McPherson

by Sparkle Abbey

Today we welcome a very special guest back to the blog and she’s chatting about the latest in her Dandy Gilver series – The Witching Hour. Plus let’s talk about in-laws…

Catriona take it away!

“Two houses both alike in dignity” says Shakespeare of the Montagues and the Capulets at the start of Romeo and Juliet. (Off topic, but “Juliet Capulet” has always bugged me; I’d have swapped their names in the edit.)

And I suppose two houses can easily be alike in dignity but not in much else. When you’re wee, you think your family is normal and quite possibly all families are similar to it. But when you grow up and especially when you join families in a marriage . . . Well, I can’t be the only one who reads Carolyn Hax in the Washington Post. Second only to destination weddings – a pox on all of them, right? – her column is full of in-laws as far as the eye can see.

As THE WITCHING HOUR (Dandy Gilver No.16)  opens, Dandy and Hugh are gearing up to meet a prospective daughter-in-law. They’ve weathered one dynastic alliance (and survived the awkwardness of a corpse at the engagement-do) but now in the spring of 1939 their younger son is bringing a girl home and his track record is  . . . not unblemished.

I love this jacket!

‘Cartaright?’ Hugh said. ‘Not Cartwright?’

‘Nor Carter-Wright,’ I assured him. ‘Teddy wrote it down for me to address the envelope.’

‘What address?’

‘London,’ I told him. ‘A 3F, I’m afraid. A flat. But north of the river. It’s so hard to tell these days. She could be anyone.’

‘Dolly Cartaright,’ said Hugh. ‘She sounds like a barmaid.’

‘I don’t care if she is a barmaid,’ I said. ‘Or a chorus girl, or even a . . .’ My imagination ran out.

‘An artist’s model,’ said Hugh. ‘Like What’s-her-name.’

‘I think she was a muse,’ I reminded him. ‘Although that might be the same thing, now I consider it at a distance. She was very . . . limber.’

Hugh rewarded me with a snort of laugher.

‘And I mean it. I don’t care. If she marries our son-’

‘If marriage isn’t too old-fashioned for her,’ Hugh chipped in.

‘And the call goes up for single men first-’

‘It won’t or only very briefly.’

‘-then she could pull pints of beer in the Atholl Arms for all our friends and I’d drive down to pick her up at closing time and offer a lift home.’

‘What friends of yours drink pints of beer in the Atholl Arms?’ Hugh asked me.

I rewarded him with a little snort of my own.

I remember meeting my in-laws. I was dressed all in black with a crew-cut and an attitude. They can’t have been thrilled, but Neil and I were only nineteen so they no doubt thought I’d soon be gone. Ha! How’d that work out?

We were infants!

I do remember a formal meeting of in-laws in advance of one of my sisters’ weddings. My mum prepared an elegant meal then my dad came home with a punctured tyre, brought his bike into the kitchen and turned it upside down in the middle of the floor. A lively debate ensued.

I also remember sitting awkwardly in the living room at home with a set of in-laws-to-be in advance of a different wedding when a knocking noise came out of nowhere and all four of us girls stood up and left the room. There used to be a door there, see, and the wall is hollow so, when dinner was ready, my dad would knock on the hollow bit instead of shouting through the house. Seemed perfectly normal to us; looked like The Village of the Damned to strangers.

Then there was the fact that my dad didn’t drink either coffee (normal for Brits born in the 1930s) or tea (outlandish for Brits born anytime) so when visitors, including prospective in-laws, came and orders for hot drinks were taken, he was missed out and passed over. It wasn’t until someone said “Your mum looks so innocent but she rules with a rod of iron, doesn’t she?” that any of us realised the impression being given of a downtrodden and thirsty husband.

This was offered to me at a library once.

But that’s nothing, when it comes to food and drink and new alliances. I’ve got an American pal, Jewish, from Boston (these details are because I have no idea where her norms come from!), who married a Turkish bloke and, upon meeting her prospective family-in-law, politely cleaned her plate making yummy noises. Her mother-in-law-to-be replenished her plate. She cleared it. It was replenished. It was cleared. It was replenished. It was cleared. Only when the bloke started paying attention, which was thankfully before his mother had to send out for more food or his fiancée burst, did he say, “Oh yeah, babe? She’s gonna keep filling your plate till you leave something on it. And, anne, she’s trying to show she likes the food by eating it up.” Relief all round.

My sister’s mother-in-law is no longer with us so I can tell tales of her legendary and misguided culinary confidence without causing upset. You’ve heard the expression “a plain cook”? Well, this lady took it to soaring heights. She once opened a storage jar in my sister’s kitchen, saw muesli, pondered a while, recognised the rolled oats in the mix and made porridge with it. (I realise that this story is very British. The US equivalent would be making grits with granola.) Another time, she looked in my sister’s crisper drawer and found a head of broccoli. She thought Well that can’t be right and put it straight in the bin.

It wasn’t even Romanescu!

All the weird and even annoying clashes of family norms become funny stories in the end, eh? I’d love to hear yours, Stiletto Gang. Can you remember meeting your in-laws? When did you realise you were in-laws? What’s the equivalent for single people? I know there’ll be one.

Here’s a little bit about 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?

Thanks so much, Catriona, for stopping by. We love stories set in Scotland and we love Catriona! So needless to say, we already have our copy of The Witching Hour. How about the rest of you?

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