And one sink (kitchen)

What a great question!  I've never, in all my list-making, floor-plan-drawing, map-copying, outfit-sketching obsessiveness ever actually thought about what Dandy Gilver carries in her bag.

I know she has little notebooks, because Alec Osborne - her Watson - ribs her about them and lately she's taken up a propelling pencil too.  She has a cigarette case and a box of matches, a lipstick and powder compact, a handkerchief - white lawn, some embroidery, a purse (= US wallet) with bank notes, coins and postage stamps, and a nail-file.

I know she doesn't have any keys because her house is never empty.  If she wants to get in, she rolls up the drive and waits for someone to open the door.  I can't see her with locks of baby's hair or photographs of her husband either, somehow.  Maybe she'd have a scrap of leather from Bunty the Dalmatian's first collar, but even that is a bit mawkish for Dandy.

I imagine it would be quite a small plain thing and easily decanted into an evening bag without a lot of triage.

I, on the other hand . . . here's a run down as of  28th August 2013 in order of excavation: 

promotional postcards for Dandy Gilver
promotional postcards for AS SHE LEFT IT
sunglasses
reading sunglasses
reading glasses
another pair of reading glasses
ibuprofen (I've had a cough)
Strepsils (ditto)
paracetamol (ditto)
phone
camera
another phone
baby wipes
Tigi Bedhead
glasses case
three blue Bic Cristals
skeleton bunch of only three keys and three keyrings because away from home
lipstick
mascara
rouge
sunscreen
large pink hanky (was white and my dad's until a laundry incident)
five earrings
toothpaste I bought yesterday and forgot was in there
1UKP off The Guardian coupons from the Edinburgh Book Festival (expired)
wallet containing skeleton staff of only nine cards because away from home
stamps
lucky 2 dollar bill
earplugs
receipts (various (for tax))
receipts (various (for no reason whatsoever))
four business cards from the Crimewriters' Association lunch last Friday
money
seaglass
two dead batteries
twenty nine Christmas cards

And the thing is that I only bought this bag a month ago so it's still building up its foundation layer.  There are whole pockets in there I haven't even assigned yet.  There are no wedding favours with happy memories that I can't throw out, no orders of service from funerals that I can't throw out, no 3D specs from films I've enjoyed and can't throw out, my bike lock and front light aren't in there, not a single packet of seeds, no CDs, no unrelated CD cases, no charger cable for either of the phones . . . why it's practically empty.  I could almost be fictional with a bag as empty as that.

No Ballet for Catriona

Funnily enough, I'm answering this question in my childhood bedroom, in the house where I was born, where my three big sisters taught me to read, playing at schools every day (I can't remember not being able to read; certainly I was well away by the time I got into my first real classroom with a non-sister teacher).

And in the bedside cabinet is ... pause to look ... Five Go To Smuggler's Top by Enid Blyton (1945).

I must have read it a fair few times, along with the other stories in the Famous Five series.  In each one, a group of cousins (four of them) come home from boarding school for the summer, shake off the grown-ups (Uncle Quentin and Aunt Fanny) and disappear off with their dog (the fifth one) on a hike, in a caravan, after a circus, to a treasure island . . . there to be posh, solve crimes and eat picnics.  Hogwarts food was pretty much Famous Five food and Scooby-Doo will give you an idea of the plotting.

Much, much better than these though was Ballet for Drina by Jean Estoril (1957) and five of its ten sequels.  No, wait - hear me out.  Okay, Drina is an awkward little shrimp of a girl, orphaned, living with her grandparents, who blags her way - Billy Elliot style - into ballet classes and, predictably, becomes a ballerina.  But besides the clichés, there are friendships, passions, secrets, betrayals, concern for social justice, wrongs righted, triumphs, disappointments and some the best Mean Girls ever. 

As well as all that, once Drina knows her arabesques from her elbows, she starts to tour with the corps de ballet and, an intrepid Londoner, she takes Paris and New York in her plucky but dainty stride.  Then she goes to the Edinburgh Festival.  That story was my first experience of reading a book set in a place I knew - having resisted Walter Scott and being too young for Jekyll and Hyde - and the detail was enchanting.  I had been on those streets and looked at those views.  It made me want to see how accurately Estoril had depicted London, Paris and New York too. 

Luckily, it didn't make me want to be a ballerina.  I was five foot eight at the age of twelve and could trip over the pattern in the carpet.  But the reason I can't take a quick phone picture of Ballet For Drina is that it's not here; all six books are in my house in California in the glass-fronted bookcases where the treasures stay.  I've read them many times and I still reach for them when life gets the way life does.   If anyone else has read them - sssshhh! (There's a massive plot twist at the end of book 1) - but let me know if you too love them.

The Five Identical Red Herrings

I can't quite believe I'm doing this - because I do love her; honest I do - but my bad classic is by Dorothy L Sayers.  Not only that, it's the one set in Scotland - land of the purple liver, land of my heart forever.  And not just Scotland - Galloway!  Where I lived for fifteen happy years, swimming in the icy pools under waterfalls and swatting midges with fern fronds on the bonny banks and braes.

I've done the literary walk around the real places used in the book. I've had a picnic at the bit of the Mennock Burn where the body tumbled into the water.  Heck, I've probably been on the fateful Girvan train.

But still.  The Five Red Herrings by DLS is (IMHO) a stinker.

Some of it is the dialect representation.  I know a bit about this one way and another and much as it hurts to write that someone says: "The moon's none the worse for a dog's bark" when what you hear in your head is: "The meen's nane the waur fur a dug's howf" you really can't, can you?  I mean it makes little enough sense in English as it is.

So the apostrophe-tastic depiction o' Sco'ish people talkin' is one thing.  But the main difficulty with the Five Red Herrings is the five red herrings (and the guilty party).  I think it would be possible to find six actual herrings, in a fishmonger's, that were easier to tell apart than Strachan, Fachan, Gachan, Wachan, Grachan and Fergachan. 

I'm kidding.  They're called Strachan, Farren, Gowan, Waters, Graham and Ferguson.  But they're all artists and they're all exactly the same.  In fact, for once I don't have any worries about spoilers slipping out because, although I've read FRH a couple of times and listened to a BBC radio dramatisation too, I still have no idea which one of them did it.

I know what you're thinking, by the way.  Yes, I read it again even though it's bad.  And then I listened to it in the form of a radio play too.  (In fact, when I was looking for jacket photos for this blog I saw that the telly version is on youtube and I might well watch it later.) What can I say?  I told you I love her.

Logan MacRae, but on another topic . . . my book launch!

I'm reading Close to The Bone, Stuart MacBride's 90mph head-on multi-plot pile-up of a novel right now, since we're on a panel together at Harrogate and it's terrific stuff.  But poor (acting) DI MacRae could do with a break, so I nominate him to spend a couple of weeks in the California sunshine solving my murder.

Unless I'm knocked off in the next few months, in which case he'd only get down the road to Edinburgh.  I'm there for the summer and tonight I was in Waterstone's in George Street doing a launch event for DANDY GILVER AND A DEADLY MEASURE OF BRIMSTONE. 

And the strangest thing happened.  You know that bit in Harry Potter where they zap dormice into milkjugs but the jugs still have tails and fur?  Well, my book popped up again and again tonight.  Blue with touches of blood-red was everywhere.  In the lovely flowers from my oldest friend Catherine Lepreux:

In a hand-felted tea-cosy made by my dear friend Louise Kelly:

And of course in cake form, courtesy of my mum and dad:

Many, many thanks to Colin, the manager, who came in on his day off for the event:

And to Stuart Campbell, my beloved high-school English teacher, who took one look at my train-print dress and reminded me why he was such an inspiration all those years ago by saying "O. S. Nock" (he wrote the book that the illustrations appeared in, you know.) 

I'm feeling very lucky tonight: a wonderful family, fantastic teachers and friends I've known for decades.  Life is sweet and, on balance, I hope Logan MacRae doesn't get the chance to take that trip!







Trouble at the Front

How timely this question is!  I've just hit SEND on the edited draft of THE DAY SHE DIED, my second contemporary stand-alone for Midnight Ink.  It's notable for being the first book that's coming out under my title after a run of five that were changed. 

And you know what?  The editor was right and I was wrong every one of those five times.

The last modern one AS SHE LEFT IT started life as OPEN THE DOOR.  Well, actually it started life as FISHBO'S PUFFER.  Neither of my attempts were terrible but ASLI is best.

I thought I was going to have two keepers in a row, mind you, because DANDY GILVER AND A REGRETTABLE KETTLE OF HERRING (just submitted) struck me as pure genius, but Editrix Lestrange at my London publisher pointed out that nothing about that title says "crime".  Duh.

A BOTHERSOME NUMBER OF CORPSES began as TROUBLE WITH YOUNG LADIES

AN UNSUITABLE DAY FOR A MURDER was once TROUBLE IN STORE

And DANDY GILVER AND THE PROER TREATMENT OF BLOODSTAINS - a gem of a title - gave me endless gyp along the way.  I called it IN THE DARK.  It's about  a. a coalminer's strike b. buried secrets and c. servant life in the basement of a house.  In the dark x three!  But then Mark Billingham brought out his new book and it was called In The Dark (for no good reason that I could see or at least not for three of them).

So then we called it DEEPEST RED, as in blood and as in the people's flag of the left wingers who wanted the strike to succeed.  I liked it; others thought a quote from a Marxist anthem might not hit the right note.

So for a while, just among ourselves, we called it TROUBLE DOWN BELOW.  It started as a joke, but after a while it seemed quite, quite fine.  This is how people manage to be called things like Dr Sprinkle (he works at my local surgery) and Hampton Sublet (A colleague of my husband's) without giggling all day.

So, all in all, I'm very grateful to my editors for thinking up better titles than I do. 

My favourite title of recent years?  Hands-down, saw it in the bookshop and bought the book without even looking reading the back jacket copy . . . WITCHES ON THE ROAD TONIGHT.  That it was about depression-era Appalachia, a time and place that fascinate me, was a bonus.  It's still on the TBR pile but every time I see it (while dusting) it makes me happy.

Butlers and wise guys need not apply.

There's three categories of books I can't read while I'm writing.  (Writing meaning first-drafting; chipping the virgin story out of the ground.)

1. Books similar to mine that I want to be able to say I didn't read and haven't stolen from even if we've both got retired burlesque dancers who fly the first air ambulances in Worcestershire and killed their twin brothers with a grapefruit spoon.

So that's Jacqueline Winspear and Rhys Bowen - the other two blonde Brits who live in northen California and write amateur detective stories set in the UK in the 1920s.  And Carola Dunn (as above except it's Oregon) and Kerry Greenwood too.  Which is a lot of great books to not read.  Moof.

2. Books in the wider genre so breathtakingly, heartbreakingly fantabulous that I'd get a case of the why-bothers only Ben, Jerry and Sheldon Cooper could cure.  This sees off Dennis Lehane, Ruth Rendell and Ann Cleeves.  There are more but I need to stop now because even listing them is dispiriting. 

3.  Books by writers whose style is insidiously contagious (and who are too famous to hyperlink).

Raymond Chandler is just about the worst of these.  I was reading him once while writing and decided that Dandy Gilver's tea frock could fit her like a mermaid's scales.  Why not?  (I caught it in the edit.)

Ernest Heningway isn't worth the risk either.  Nick and the fish and the big two-hearted river?  Hugh Gilver sometimes poddles off with his rods hoping to catch a salmon but it's not the same.

But pipping them both at the post (or poking them both smartly in the second waistcoat button, as he would say) is PG Wodehouse.  Some of Wodehouse's lines make me laugh out loud no matter how many times I've heard them.  When Bertie Wooster had a hangover and "a cat stamped into the room".  Or when Mr Beach is displeased but says nothing and PW describes it thus -  "ice formed on the butler's upper slopes".  Genius.  Or when  . . . I think it's Bingo Little . . .  sends a telegram that begins - "I say Bertie old boy stop yes Bertie stop I wonder old chap if I might have a word stop"  The narrative goes on - "The telegram is not Bingo's natural form."

So part of the joy of getting that first draft done is to be able to read absolutely anything again.  Mystic River or Right Ho, Jeeves.  The world's my TBR pile.

Catriona McPherson: Private Eye

I'm the wrong person to ask about day jobs because I've so rarely had a day job I either a. liked or b. was any good at.  For sure, I've never had a day job that c. was going to make my fortune.

I tried banking.  Hah.  Fifty-pound-notes got bundled into hundreds.  Which was four notes, right?  After they searched my bag and and my pockets and recounted my stash and looked down the back of the couch, a very honest wages clerk came back to the bank and returned the extra.

I tried being a university lecturer.  Hah.  I was one of four lonely linguists in an English literature department, teaching phonetics and syntax to kids who wanted to learn Jack Kerouac.  When one of my colleagues asked me what I read for pleasure I said I only read the TV Guide to see what time Star Trek was on.  I forgot to wink; he believed me; I was the talk of the senior common room.

I worked in a pub serving food but my portion control was non-existent and just before the place went bankrupt I was demoted to cleaning.

I worked in the Fine Art and Local History departments of Edinburgh City Library.  That, I loved.  That, I could do.  That, was between university courses.

So giving up a full-time day job in 2000 to try this writing lark wasn't as difficult a decision as it might have been.  I did part-time tutoring to make some money and also had a number in my head: if I ever got an advance of *this* amount, I said to myself, I'd give up even the tutoring and write really full-time.  That took five years and it was scary when it came.

This is year thirteen of writing stories and I feel as if I'm just about to get a day-job again in a funny kind of way, because I'm about to start renting an office in town and going back to having a commute instead of working in my house.  It'll be a big change - no more jammies, no more leftovers for lunch, no more chats with Joe the UPS guy . . .

My one regret is that my office doesn't have a half-window of bumpy glass on which I can put my name in gold paint like Philip Marlowe.  That would have been something.  But learning to smoke those unfiltered cigarettes might have been tough and a raincoat and fedora in this climate would have killed me.

Oh and also:  AS SHE LEFT IT comes out on Saturday.  Yeay!

A tale of three mothers

That's Dandy Gilver's, Opal Jones's and mine.

Dandy Gilver's mother started her off with a good smack in the chops by naming her Dandelion.  Mr and Mr Leston were great devotees of the Arts and Crafts movement, so popular in the late Victorian age, and it seemed like a good idea, I suppose, to call their daughter after one of England's most neglected wildflowers.  I think, in contrast, that if you want someone in your family to have a funny name you should change your own.

After the christening, Dandy's mother receded and Nanny Palmer came to the fore, as was usual in the upper classes at the turn of the 19th century.  It's Nanny Palmer whose voice is still in Dandy's head and whose spirit hovers.

Dandy got a better deal than Opal Jones, the heroine of my new stand-alone AS SHE LEFT IT (8th June).  When the book opens Opal is coming back to her childhood home after her mother's death.  Here's what she finds:

The curtains were shut, like always, and the bed, like always, was heaped up

with pillows and cushions, piled high with quilts and blankets, a nest. 

Magazines and a toilet roll, some clothes, some bottles of course, an ashtray

and a big soup tin without its label for emptying the ashtray into and, where

the blankets were pushed back and the pillows and cushions were flattened,

a round hole, tiny.  Big enough to hold her mother?  Must have been.

She hadn’t died there; she’d gone to the hospital; admissions, acute medical

– or that bit of acute medical that’s basically the drying-out ward – then HD

then ICU and there she had died.  But it had started here.  One night, or one

morning more likely, she had climbed in and never climbed out again.

My two heroines have very different lives and grew up into very different women.  Dandy is brisk and capable and it would take a lot to sink her. Opal is tough on the outside but wary of going to places that will open her wounds. One the other hand, Opal can feel things; Dandy believes that feelings are not quite respectable and avoids them.  Hm, maybe they're more similar than I realised, after all.

I got a whole lot lucker than either Dandy or Opal when it came to mums. My mother, Jean McPherson, brought up four girls, knitted all their jerseys, cooked two hot meals a day from scratch and taught them a love of books.  What more could you ask for?  Okay, themed launch-party cakes:

cut with the McPherson family musical cake-slice. UK Mother's Day has been and gone but every day is a good day to say "Thanks, Mum."





"Hours of verbage (sic) and boredom" (says a review I could have lived without seeing)

Reece on Monday said it was unimaginable that anyone didn't.  Hilary on Tuesday said it was a big fat lie that anyone didn't. Chris on Wednesday was worst of all - he made it seem like a good idea to give it a go.

Readers, until this week, I was that unimaginable big fat liar who'd never given it a go.

Hand on heart, I did not read my reviews.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, hang on.  Let me add a few caveats.  If my publicist emails me and the subject line is "nice/good/great/fab/amazing review from _____" I open the link.  I read, I download, I email to my dad to print and give to my mum for her scrapbook.  Thanks, Mum.  (She spent her working life in libraries and is a better archivist than I could ever be.)

Also, on the Saturday after the UK publication date of a new Dandy Gilver I will buy the Scottish broadsheets (if I'm there) and look through the book reviews.  It's a small country with a lot of newspapers so the strike rate is high and I'm not a big enough name for anyone to want to take me down.

And that - that last point - is why I don't look at reader reviews on Amazon etc.  All you have to do is write a book to make someone on Amazon want to take you down and leave you bleeding.  And while I enjoy a good one-star review of Pride & Prejudice as much as anyone (click here for a favourite) I don't see how any writer could want to read sneers, swipes and cynicism about their own stuff?  How could it not make you want to curl up in a ball and only uncurl to put a DVD of Pillow Talk in the machine and open the Pringles?

That was my position until earlier this week, as I say.  Since then I've had the highest of the high and the lowest of the low: a Goodreads review (click here) of the ARC of AS SHE LEFT IT that made me go and stare at myself in the mirror just to see what that big a genius looked like.  (Not really.)

And this (click by all means).  One of the two-star reviews of my first published novel, AFTER THE ARMISTICE BALL, is a doozy.  It's an anonymous review by someone who's never reviewed anything else (not even the banana slicer) and it's got everything: mistaken beliefs hotly defended, unfounded accusations, personal attacks - I'm crass and discourteous, don't you know? - and then there's the bit that really got me.

My "bad writing" is illustrated by writing that's nothing like mine. God, that's annoying! The reviewer gives "over-vivid, lengthy, painful and agonizingly contrived descriptive phrases" as a taster of my kind of prose as well as an evaluation of it. Tricksy. But if you can find a noun in AFTER THE ARMISTICE BALL pre-modified by four adjectives, one of which is pre-modified by an adverb, I will give you a thousand dollars.

So, all in all, I'd rather not read reviews.  Except Chris made a good point about saying thank you for kind ones, Hilary was a shining example of psychological health and Reece was convincing about using them as tools for improvement.  I'm going to wait and see what Sue Ann says tomorrow.

To bump off or not to bump off.

Q: Having come up with a perfect murder, isn't it annoying not to use it get rid of some numpty?' (I translated, being unequipped to say what makes someone a jerk, and therefore un-entitled to murder them.)
A: No.

I don't think I've ever come up with a brilliant murder method.  In eight and a first draft mysteries my murders have been:

1. baroque to the point of insanity (first novels: never knowingly underwritten)
2. only available to murder one specific person in a small town (my home town) on one Friday every August (which isn't that handy really)
3. [the concept album]
4. preposterous (hey, why set a book in a circus and then just shoot someone?)
5. even more preposterous (with less of an excuse, mind you)
6. preposterous's mad uncle who lives in the attic (why did I start this?)
7. possible. Woo-hoo! (But not these days with mobile phones and CCTV)
8. preposterous (and disgusting - my darker period begins)
9. ask me later

But even if I did come up with something . . . viable, if you'll forgive that unfortunate word in this context, I just don't see killing someone.  Anyone.  I mean, up to and including Osama Bin Laden.  (Don't freak - see below.)

In Kate Atkinson''s new one Life After Life (click), the only possible exception comes up.  If I could time-travel back to 1930s Germany I might well pre-emptively kill Hitler, to save 15,000,000 others.  I'd pre-emptively kill Osama Bin Laden too actually.  If I could time travel.  On the other hand, the one time I did write a time-travel caper it wasn't called Kill Hitler.  I called it Save Elvis.  Which tells you a lot about me.

But back to evil mass-murdering psycopaths and why I wouldn't punish them with death after the fact.  It's because in my personal philosophy, this life is all there is and being dead doesn't hurt enough.  If you don't have any supernatural beliefs then being dead is no worse than not being born yet.  I was absolutely fine for millenia before 1965, a state of pain-free non-existence I think is too good for evil people.  Of course, they'll get there in the end but I wouldn't help them.

If you believe in hell, I can see why killing Hitler and Bin Laden would be an excellent idea. But if you believe in redemption for all then executing a monster just fast-tracks him to the good bit - like taking away a toddler's meat and potatoes and letting her go straight to cake.  I've always wondered about that.  I've always wondered too, for the same reason, why devout believers think murdering a good person is bad.  If you're ushering them into a life of eternal paradise, then . . .

I think the most fit punishment is to make someone accept what they've done and accept the suffering they've caused.  Then they live with themselves.  That's my idea of vengeance.  If I try to get my moral ducks in a row, the next step is atonement and forgiveness.  All three together pretty much underpin the "crime" part of the African system of Ubuntu (click) which is what allowed the awesome era of truth and reconciliation in South Africa after the end of apartheid.  I remember being blown away by the Black South Africans' ability to forgive and move on, and the White South Africans' ability to face their own acts, lay them down and walk on, without debilitating guilt.  They really are useless at festering.

In a culture of vengeance-based or payment-based justice like ours the TRC could never have happened.  I remember a radio programme on the BBC years ago when a Northern Irish combatant (I can't remember what side he was from) was faced with a post-apartheid South African describing Ubuntu and was totally unable to comprehend it.  He got pretty close to saying that the Irish Troubles were too severe and South Africa had had it easy.  He stopped himself just in time, I'm glad to say, and I always wondered if they chatted off-air and what came of it. 

So, in conclusion, killing people is not for me.  And I wish Ubuntu was what South Africa exported, instead of diamonds.  It outshines them any day.

It's my story and you'll cry if I want to

Dandy Gilver is a unenthusiastic wife, a half-hearted mother, upper-class, a city-lover, relies on sevants to do everything from cooking her meals to choosing her clothes.  I'm married to my best friend, don't have kids, working-class, country-bumpkin, grow some of my own food but cook all of it from scratch and am usually wearing something from at least a thrift store if not a dumpster.

And here's the kicker.  She loves dogs and I love cats.

Oh and she hasn't had the action-packed hair-colour past that I've been through either. 

Safe to say Dandy's not me.  But does my stand-alone character, Opal Jones, share my interests?

The whole of As She Left It takes place in a few pretty fraught weeks in Opal's life, with not much time for macrame and yoga.  And it's just occurred to me that I don't think she switches on a radio or telly or plays a single track of music in the entire book.  She does give up on Ikea as a source of furniture and goes to a charity shop instead, so with a bit of a stretch I suppose you could say we're both bargain-hunters.  Or mean anyway.

I was just talking to Laura Disilverio (click) about this at Left Coast Crime at the weekend; apparetly ballroom dancing is like dog vs cat as far as characters and authors go.  Laura has the hardest time persuading readers of her dancing mystery series (most recent Homicide Hustle) that she's - whisper - making it all up, and not fitting the writing in around travel to professional tournaments in the ballroom world or at least the daily grind of foxtrot lessons in her studio.

But then I have my troubles in separating writer and characters too.  My friend Jess Lourey (click)  writes the gripping yet hilarious murder-by-the-month series (most recently December Dread) and in my head the heroine, Mira, is Jessie, so much so that when Jessie talks about her dog, I feel bad that she's showing such favouritism and hardly mentioning her cat.  Her fictional cat.  Dammit, her protagonist's fictional cat!

The funniest example of a writer herself not being able to separate her interests from her characters is another friend of mine Cathy Cassidy, (click) a UK children's writer and a vegetarian of many years' standing.  Cathy just can't stand to write a meat-eating protagonist.  Her books are full of kids and adults from all walks of life in all sorts of extreme situations, all ordering mushrooms and chips in British chippies, or eating quorn sausages and quiche.  It's so much a moral issue for Cathy that she couldn't have a sympathetic character chomping into a chicken leg for the Pullitzer prize.

It makes me love her (and miss her) but it's a good thing she doesn't write mysteries; we'd all know in the first chapter whodunnit.  Him over there with the bacon cheeseburger.  Call the cops.
 

Superstition is the way.

I was going to say I don't have any writing rituals that would count as superstitions; all I have are sensible working practices.  But, while looking around my office for examples, I noticed my pens.

I use blue Bics.  Bic Cristals.  But that's not a ritual, right?  That's a preference.  They're a design classic, for a start - evidence: they're in MOMA.  Also, they don't leak like Hi-techpoints and other fancy-schmancy pens when you take them on a plane.  Finally, they smell like pens should.  Not that I sniff my pens. 

But the reason they caught my eye is this:

When I say I use blue Bics, I really mean I like to have a full pen-holder of them, as well as the one I'm using, one in my bag and a packet of new ones in my desk drawer.  And it gets worse.  The three back slots in the pen-holder - a sea-washed brick picked up on Prestwick beach in the late eighties - contain a red Bic for corrections (under the Dandy Gilver fingerpuppet), a black Bic for occasional scanned government forms (under the Bury Her Deep gravestone) and a pencil (under the Bunty Dalmatian).

Now, the black-pen-under-blackish-gravestone and red-pen-under-red-Dandy look either neatly orgnanised or slightly anal, depending on your point of view, but at this point you probably think the pencil-under-Dalmatian is completely random.  A devil-may-care detail that balances out the rest of it.  Not so:

It's really quite a Dalmatiany pencil under there. 

So.  Writing superstitions.  Hello, my name is Catriona and although I can write in my office, by the fireside, on the porch, in bed, in coffee-shops, in the Ethel Merman quiet room of the Davis Public Library, in departure lounges, hotel rooms and on planes, I can only do it if I know that on my desk there are five blue Bic Cristals in their slots against a backdrop of red, black and pencil finger puppets.  Don't judge me.

Dandy Gilver and The Cannibal Kitten Smasher?

Perhaps not.  Writing a series of detective stories about an amateur sleuth in the 1920s keeps me well away from the bit of the genre where we all start to wonder where it's going to end.  The tone would be a joke; worse than a sado-masochism series by an an author who couldn't use plain terms for genitals.  No, wait!  Bad example.  But you know what I mean.

Which is not to say I've never had complaints.  There was one time when someone at a reading said - in very schoolmarmish tones - that she hoped I wasn't going to be poking fun at religion again.  AGAIN?  It turns out she didn't like the line in Bury Her Deep (DG3) where I said "The Church of Scotland gets by on a little doctrine and a lot of scones."  I persuaded her that it was affectionately meant and we parted friends.

I imagine that most people's threshold is set a wee bit higher than that, but we've all got one.  I wouldn't have a problem with serial killers if the muse ever dragged me that way; they're so vanishingly rare in real life and so effulgently ubiquitous in fiction that (to me) they've become almost as cartoonish as zombies and vampires.

[TRIGGER]

But if the muse started whispering a tale of serial rape in my ear I'd sing "La-la-la can't hear you" until she shut up again.  Partly that's because serial rapists are not rare and their victims are all around us.  Hence my trigger warning.  And likewise paedophila.  Empathy for survivors who might be kicked back to their worst moments by my writing would always stop me dead: there's a world of difference between being "offended" and being hurt.

Serious stuff.  So to finish, I'm sharing a video (click here) that always makes me laugh: three people, extremely offended.  Or as they would have it . . .

Mix thoroughly and bake for fourteen years

I've never written a short story.  See you in two weeks.

Kidding.  Just because I've never written a short doesn't mean I've never come up with plots that would be perfect for them.  But when I do, I call the idea a sub-plot and lay it aside until another one comes along that complements it.  Then both of them are set aside until a third spark ignites and maybe a fourth.  Then there's a big sprawling complicated cast of thousands novel ready to go.

The master of this kind of of labyrinthine plotting in the mystery genre is Kate Atkinson (if you haven't read Case Histories and its three sequels you're in for a treat and three more treats to follow).

I'm no Kate Atkinson, but my June release, As She Left It, is the result of years of sub-plot collection.

On summer holiday in France in the mid-90s, driving to the boulangerie one morning, I had an idea about an elderly jazz trumpeter with pneumonia who needs a stand-in.  This character  - Fishbo Gordon - is in the book.  In my head, in fact, the story was called "Fishbo's Puffer" for years.

Then in about 2005 I saw a magnificent bed in an antique shop in Castle Douglas and bought it:

It was a bed with a puzzle, a puzzle which - refracted through the mind of a mystery writer - became a secret, a secret which became another sub-plot in what was now a third of a novel.

A year later, in Leeds, on an all-girls weekend, two friends and I met a little old lady wandering around in the street (and wandering around in a gently mythical version of reality too), took her home and contacted her carers.  It was a tiny incident and would have made an effective short story but I don't write short stories.  So this little old lady joined the jazz trumpeter and the bed-with-a-secret and the book was halfway to being afloat.

That weekend gave me the setting too; As She Left It is set in a short dead-end street of old red-brick houses in Leeds; in my friend Diane Nelson's house, in fact, where we were staying that weekend.  The wonderful design department at Midnight Ink captured the mood of the story perfectly with this jacket:

but I promised Diane that I'd show the real street too - much less gothic and grim.

In 2009, I was writing Dandy Gilver and not thinking about Fishbo at all, but one day in Tesco, watching the online shoppers filling trolleys with groceries for strangers, I got to thinking about how much you could tell about someone's life if you did their shopping and how those shoppers must live somewhere local and I wondered if they did their neighbours' shopping for them and what if they worked out that their neighbours were . . .

Another short-story-sized plotlet that was modern and dark went into the cauldron and now my protagonist had a job as well as a house and I had four linked tales to tell.  It was time to start writing and I felt more than usually sure that I knew where this one was going

Imagine my surprise when, a little way into the first draft, the red bricks of that dead-end street started whispering a completely new story in my ear.  It turns out, after years of preparation, that the main plot of As She Left It is none of the above.  But the bed, the trumpeter, the little old lady and the neighbour's secret are all in there too and I've still never written a short story.