Ten questions with Catriona McPherson
Catriona McPherson is a multi-award-winning, national best-selling author of: the DANDY GILVER historical detective stories, the LAST DITCH mysteries, set in California, and a strand of contemporary standalone novels including Edgar-finalist THE DAY SHE DIED and Mary Higgins Clark finalist STRANGERS AT THE GATE. She is also a warm, witty and fantastic person to interview.
1.Please tell us about your debut novel.
It was a love letter to the Golden Age of British detective fiction – gently-born lady sleuth, butlers, maids, fabulous frocks, all that. More specifically, it was a curtsy to Dorothy L Sayers, because I made it about a jewel theft, like Lord Peter Wimsey’s first case. The title is After The Armistice Ball, published in 2005 and still in print!
2. I’ve read that only 4% of the people who start a novel, finish writing it. Why do you think you beat the odds?
I upped the stakes on myself by resigning from my job and telling everyone I was writing a book. It would have been so embarrassing not to do it.
3. Was your debut novel the first book you wrote? (Any prior efforts hiding on your hard drive?)
Uh, no. My first attempt, The Hook and the Slab, went in a drawer after forty rejections. But years later I dusted it off and re-wrote it and it finally came out as Come to Harm in 2015. It felt lovely to share the characters after all that time.
4. What helped you become a better writer? Any books or resources you found helpful?
Reading novels is the thing that helps me most. Seeing people doing things well. One time I was trying to express an awkward moment at a social gathering where no one says anything but everyone thinks the same thought. I happened to be reading Laurie King and she had the line “A memory swept through the room”. Perfect! The how-to manual that chimes with me best is Stephen King’s On Writing. I would recommend that to anyone. And MWA has just published the pretty magisterial How To Write A Mystery. I contributed the humour chapter.
5. What was your process like getting an agent?
One of those forty rejections was from a woman who said in her letter “I don’t like this but I quite like the sound of you. Send me the next thing you write”. Now then, here’s the hardest advice for a beginning writer to follow. Don’t sign with an agent just because they’ll have you. I did that and ended up switching in under a year. I’ve now been with the blessed Lisa Moylett of Coombs Moylett Maclean for fifteen years and my only concern is that she might retire before I do.
6. How did you celebrate when you learned your book would be published?
I remember this so clearly! I was living in Galloway in a beautiful empty valley and my nearest neighbour along the road was also writing. She had just got a deal with Penguin. I knew, rationally, that her deal was unrelated to my prospects, but it still seemed unlikely that lightning would strike the same patch of countryside twice. When it did, we sat on the grass in my garden staring at each other, both unable to believe it. Her name is Cathy Cassidy, by the way. She’s a wonderful children’s author and still a dear friend.
7. What was the most exciting moment involving the publication of your debut novel? (The moment you first saw the cover? The call when you learned when it was being published? When you cashed your advance check?)
Okay, this is going to seem like revolting bragging, but it’s the truth. Yes, getting the jacket mock-up was exciting. I wrapped it round a book the right size and posed in front of the mirror. And yes the first launch was ace! None of my friends or family had ever been to one before (except Cathy) and we had a major party. (They are all soooo over it now that I’m closing in on book number thirty.) But the most outlandish moment was that I heard pretty well immediately after the book came out that it had been shortlisted for the Ellis Peters historical dagger. I went to London to an awards ceremony and thought “How is this my life?”
8. What’s your best advice for someone who wants to be published?
Finish the book. Decide whether you want to be traditionally published or you want to publish independently. Pursue your choice while finishing the second book. And if you’re publishing independently, write some satellite short stories using your book characters. They do draw readers in and they’re fun for the writer too.
9. What are you currently reading? Or, what's one of the best novels you've read lately?
I’m going to answer both. Right now I’m reading the manuscript of Shannon Baker’s forth Kate Fox series, about a county sheriff in the Nebraska Sandhills. Easy Mark is another belter in a series of belters. It’s about the only Mexican ranch worker in the county coming under suspicion of murdering the man whose job he “stole”. So good.
I keep notes of what I read (see here) and I just took a squint at the riches I’ve been wallowing in, to try to choose one. I’m going to have to say Cottonmouths by Kelly Ford. It’s a short book about coming home, growing up, betrayal, loss . . . with a BANG! HA! CAUGHT YOU! twist worthy of any thriller.
10. What are you working on now? Any projects coming out soon?
I’m seventy-four thousand words into the first draft of a standalone psychological thriller. I’ll finish it next week if it kills me. Then I’ve got a month to do edits on a historical novel. (I’m still writing about the lady sleuth with the butler and the frocks; fifteen and counting.) Then I’ll work on drafts 2 to infinity of the thriller. After that . . . I’ve taken to writing the Last Ditch Motel comedies during NaNoWrimo and the three weeks following it. Well, I did it last year and it was a blast. So I’ll end the year banging out jokes about a Scot in California, before I hit the couch for my Christmas holiday.
That’s one end of the sausage machine. At the other end: A GINGERBREAD HOUSE is coming out in August. And that fifteenth historical THE MIRROR DANCE is set for November. Last Ditch 4, SCOT MIST, is coming in January.