THE EDINBURGH MURDERS by Catriona

 Has being a writer changed the way you read? What are you reading now? 

Today it has! Reviews!

Just kidding. I never read reviews. But what I'm trying to say is that my new book is out today. In the UK only, mind you. But keep reading if you're in the US and you're interested. 

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Isn't it lovely? I'm very verbal but even I've got enough visual literacy to know that that is a great jacket. Edinburgh purists will wince, because it doesn't depict an actual street in the city; it's three building from different bits of the Fountainbridge ward smooshed together - Smiths from the main road at one end, a tenement from a side street at the other, and in the middle the building that was still an abattoir when Helen Crowther was crossing the cobbles in such a pensive mood. By the time I was living nearby, the abattoir was a nightclub - Fat Sam's - and the joke was that there had been less carnage back when ...

Why am I so sure I'll get letters about these three buildings appearing together? Usually, as long as you do it with confidence, you can make up quite a lot of stuff without anyone minding, maybe without anyone noticing. There are three exceptions to this, mind you: guns, trains and birds. 

I stay away from guns, in every possible sense.

Trains, I try to get right. But once when I had Dandy Gilver get on a train at a real station, at the right time - I checked the timetable for August 1923, and see out of the window what she would have seen out of the window, I got a complaint anyway. I'd made her enter the train, walk along the corridor and choose a carriage. And the trains on that line at that date had carriages you entered directly from the platform. My correspondent wondered why I didn't let her drive if I wasn't going to bother to get the train right.

Bird experts are different from train experts. They want to help, rather than scold, so I've got warm feelings towards them. I hope no serious birders are watching The Residence on Netflix. They'll be curled up in foetal position if Cordelia Cupp keeps looking into the pitch black night and claiming to see Eastern Meadow Larks. Unless that's a clue . . .

So you might be wondering how many architectural historians of Edinburgh are going to read The Edinburgh Murders and be upset enough to get in touch. We all survived Trainspotting, where Renton would disappear round a corner in Edinburgh and emerge on a street in Glasgow. We knew it wasn't a documentary.

But the thing is, you don't need to be an architecture buff to know about Edinburgh's built history. It's the flip side of how come it's so easy to do the research about 1948. Simply, everything's made of stone so it's all still there.

The novel opens at the public baths on Caledonian Crescent, where Helen (a medical social worker) is helping the quite large Mrs Hogg have a good scrub. Here it is:

Helen doesn't think much of the tiles in the baths. They're clean but the colour choice doesn't say "hygiene" to her. Or to me. What do you think?

Anyway, by the time she gets home that night, she's seen the dead body of a boiled man, caught her own parents out in a lie and is all set for another adventure. Even her couthy wee upstairs cottage can't quite soothe her:

But she know that the next morning, when she goes to work at the surgery on Gardener's Crescent, both Doctor Strassers will be able and willing to help:

I've loved sending her all over the city again: to a chop house at Tollcross; to the private room of a sex-worker at the foot of Gorgie Road; to the Saturday night frolics at the Haymarket pub; to an attic bolthole above the King's Theatre; and more than once to the mortuary, by the back door. Only the mortuary is different now from how it would have been in Helen's day and I'm glad. I'm far too chicken to request a research visit, more than happy to make up everything from the ironing-boardy legs on the pull-out body shelves, to the smell of stewed tea, stale buns, milk on the turn and that subtle hint of formaldehyde, in the mortuary assistants' staffroom.

If any of that sounds like your cup of stewed tea and blue milk, with or without sugar from a crusty spoon left in the bag . . . I'm doing a giveaway.

Comment here, on my Facebook page, or on Bluesky - whichever's easiest - to be entered into the draw. I'm offering one signed hardback for the US, and one for the UK. Canada will go in with the UK. I don't think they'll mind that. I'll draw names tomorrow. And this is the pic you're looking for if you find yourself scrolling

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