DANDY GILVER OUT TODAY!

Happy bookday to me (and Dandy)!

Happy bookday to me (and Dandy)!

Happy US publication day

To Dandy Gilver and me!

 (Can you tell I’m baking, and that I’ve already been eating butter icing off the mixer whisks? )

Anyway, I’m thrilled to announce that today sees the US publication of DANDY GILVER AND A BOTHERSOME NUMBER OF CORPSES.  In celebration, I’ll be giving away a signed hardback copy.  Just leave a comment to have your name put in the hat.

 

I loved writing this book, fell in love with the new characters even more than usual and had a harder than ever time leaving them behind when I was done.  It feels like a proper treat to get to visit them all again in readings and Q&As for the launch.  And it fells like sheer indulgence to revisit the world I made-up.  It’s a very particular little world - St Columba’s College for Young Ladies, Portpatrick, Scotland - where Dandy goes undercover as an English mistress and causes havoc in the classroom.

I did a fair bit of stealing as well as inventing because although St C.’s is an imaginary school, Portpatrick is a real place and the school building is actually the Portpatrick Hotel.

Here are Dandy and Alec rolling up there for the first time.

“Do you know where St Columba’s is?’ I asked the coachman.  This innocent question set him off worse than ever, a torrent delivered at top speed and high volume of which I understood not a word.  He shook his fists and jabbed the air and, as our gaze followed the way he was so emphatically pointing, up above the roofs of the cottages, up the face of the cliff, all the way up to the headland, we saw a squat grey building, hunched above the village glaring down. I could not believe – once it was noticed – that it had gone unnoticed before.  Almost it seemed to be looming as though with a gust of wind it might topple from its perch and flatten us.

‘I take it they don’t start with a kindergarten,’ Alec said.  ‘I shouldn’t want my precious tot running around up there.’

‘Twelve and up,’ I said.  ‘What a supremely unwelcoming facade.’

Poor hotel!  It’s nothing like as gothic and gloomy in real life as in the story.  And believe me when I say that no school in any century in any country would stay in business if a fraction of the St Columba’s shenanigans was really going on there.  Mistresses are vanishing (five so far) and corpses are piling up (four and counting) but the numbers don’t tally.  Most bothersome

I don’t want to go into any more detail about the plot.  For one thing - S-P-O-I-L-E-R  - and for another the memory of the trouble it gave me is still too fresh and painful.  But writing the setting?  Writing a 1920s girls boarding school?  That was almost too easy to be fun.

To  dream up St Columba's, I drew deeply on my own childhood.  “Wait a minute!”  I hear you cry.  “You’ve always made out you were a working-class kid.”  Well, yes, I was and I went to a  comprehensive school (= US public school (= UK private school (argh!))) of no poshness whatsoever, in a building that says all there is to say about the municipal architecture of the 1970s.

That was by day.  But by night, oh by night, I entertained myself as did many of us (including JK Rowling, I’m willing to bet) with the school stories of Enid Blyton.  

 

In which fearless (ie nutjob) Darrell Rivers and her loyal (ie boring) friend Sally Hope triumphed over disasters, bullies and passive-aggressive mistresses for six years at Mallory Towers.  

These books were so successful that - I don’t think I’m being cynical here – Enid Blyton followed them up with another, unrelated series concerning Pat and Isobel, the O’Sullivan twins (Irish! Diversity!) who triumphed over disasters, bullies and passive-aggressive mistresses for six years at the entirely different St Clare’s.

 

How I loved that world.  The girls had a stately old school on a clifftop, with a swimming pool carved into the rock that was filled with saltwater at high tide.  They had an airy dorm with billowing white curtains and gaily-coloured eiderdowns.  They had midnight feasts out of the tuck boxes their doting parents and jolly cooks sent from home.

Ah yes, the food.   It was the descriptions of boarding-school meals in the vast, echoing dining-room  where the girls sat at four long tables (JK Rowling definitely read these books!) that made me most envious of all.  The steaming, creamy porridge, the vats of stew and mountains of mash, the tall jugs of cocoa at suppertime.

Meanwhile, I lived one fifth of a mile from my high school and one fifth of a mile from my primary school and ate a home-cooked lunch every schoolday for twelve years.  Poor me, I thought then.  Mum: you’re a marvel, I think now.  Home-made soup from home-made stock, home-made bread, home-made cakes . . . I can’t believe I was pining for institutional (not to mention fictional) stew.

So with hindsight, I’m very glad that I went home to my family every night (and lunchtime too) and that those boarding schools were all in my mind.  What bit of your schooldays have you changed your view of with a bit of distance? 

 

 

 

Comments

[Hank Phillippi Ryan]

SO wonderful Catriona! And you know I am SUCH a huge fan.

Are those books yours? YOu still have them?

(And I laughed out loud at "loyal, i.e. boring.")

HURRAY!
xoxo

[krisneri]

Congrats on your publication, Catriona! I'm looking forward to reading it. Weren't you lucky to have a series of books as a kid that absolutely transported you. And for a writer, nothing is wasted. It all works its way into your writing someday.

[catriona]

I still have them, Hank. When I pared my belongings down to the essentials to go into the container and be shipped to America, they made the cut!

[Elaine Viets]

Happy book day indeed, Catriona. May you soar up the bestseller lists.
Enid's adventures sound much more fun than Nancy Drew's here in the US.

[Debbie LaFleiche]

Congratulations on the book. It must be thrilling. It's great you still have some of your books from childhood. Over the years, I've tried to repurchase a few of my favorites, but it isn't the same as having the ones your 12-year-old fingers flipped through.

[catriona]

Debbie - what I've lost and would love to find in a charity shop somewhere is my piggybank. My parents didn't go in for Faberge egg level trinkets so it must have been mass-produced but I've never seen one. It was a doe-eyed little peachy-pink pig with a ribbon round her neck and a row of piglets tucked under her side, suckling. I haunt eBay but so far without success.

[Dana Cameron]

Congratulations, Catriona! Huzzah!

[Debi Murray]

Happy Birthday to you and your book!
My hubby has been lucky enough to keep a dozen or so first edition Hardy Boys mysteries from his youth. Not so I, my mother was the opposite of a hoarder...she was always throwing things out.

[Lori]

Congrats, Catriona! I love this series and this book so much! The book I have leftover from my own childhood is my copy of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler---my all-time favorite!

(No need to include me in the drawing.)

[Karen in Ohio]

Send up the flag! Can't wait to read Dandy's latest adventure, Catriona. Best of luck with the US launch.

My mother was careless with my things, as well, so I lost nearly everything from my childhood, except for two small boxes of dolls and doll tea things. However, I recently found--and eagerly reread--my favorite book from eighth grade, Mrs. Mike, by Benedict and Nancy Friedman.

Mrs. Mike was a young woman who married a Canadian Mountie and left her comfortable city home for the Canadian wilderness with him. I thought it was all terribly romantic. Then. Now I would run and hide from anyone who remotely suggested such rash behavior.

[Ardath Weaver]

I'm excited for another Dandy adventure - what an intrepid heroine! I wish all your Dandy books were available in the US! I still have my entire original editions Nancy Drew mysteries and have now come to think of her as the original strong independent woman!

[catriona]

Ardath (What a lovely name, by the way) we are working on it. Can't say more yet.

[Louise Kelly]

Congrats Catriona! It's a corker this one. hope the US readers love it as much as I did!

[catriona]

Ardath - you have won! I'm adding a late extra condition: you have to tell me about your beautiful name. Also, please send me your address - catrionamcpherson@gmail.com. Thank you, Cx

[Ardath Weaver]

Thanks so much - I'm excited to get the book. My name means 'flowering field' in Hebrew and comes from the Book of Esdras where he lies down in a field of flowers - and my mother stopped reading there. If she had turned the page she would have learned that he saw a vision of the destruction of Babylon! The 19th century novelist Marie Corelli wrote Ardath, a mystical romance. This adventure may have inspired the eponymous Ardath Tobacco Company Ltd - an association that delighted me as a child!