The Total Freak Out of Gideon Mack
(Or “Yes, sometimes I scare myself.”)
I had written six Dandy
Gilver mysteries – 1920s, fabulous clothes, a butler, you know the world we’re
in – and while they have their creepy moments, the words that cropped up again
and again in reviews were words like “witty” and “delightful” and even
“charming”. (I’m not complaining: “witless”, “disgusting” and “charmless” could
have cropped up. Then where would I be?)
But then I wrote something a
bit different. As She Left It has no butlers, the characters wear Tesco
leggings (think Target brand) and there’s no nostalgia to cast a sepia
glow.
It was when I started going
to events to talk about As She Left it, and even more so the follow-up - The Day She Died, that I first started to
get the question “Do you ever scare yourself when you’re writing?”
And the answer is that I do.
Sometimes I can be writing a scene and my cat brushes against my legs then
bolts from the room because I’ve shrieked and jumped out of my chair. It’s pretty funny when a cat is perfectly
balanced between a. wanting to nag you for her dinner and b. still being
annoyed with you for making her look uncool. (Cat “owners” will understand. Dog
owners will be reminded why they prefer dogs.)
But the truest answer to the
question is “Yes, I sometimes scare myself writing, but the worst scare I ever
gave myself was signing.”
Let me explain: I happened to
be reading a wonderful book by James Robertson called The Testament
of Gideon Mack, about a Scottish
minister (of the church not the parliament) who meets the devil. I can’t recommend this book highly enough to
anyone who wants to understand Scotland. **So long as you don’t mind being
creeped out seven ways to goosebumps.**
Early on in the story, Gideon
is out for his daily run in the woods near his home, when he finds a standing
stone – an ancient, lichened, weathered, enormous standing stone . . . that
wasn’t there the day before. For some reason I found that one of the most
unsettling things I had ever read. No one else runs in these woods and there’s
no one to tell, who would believe him.
From that moment Gideon is on his own.
I was on my own too, alone in
my house on the hillside in Galloway while my husband was travelling. We had no neighbours, no other houses in
sight across the valley. I loved it
there, in the peace and solitude, and had never been frightened to be alone.
With no mobile phone reception. And no one in screaming distance.
I had watched The Sixth Sense alone in this house; I
had read the end of Stephen King’s Dumas
Key, alone in this house in a power cut, by the light of a guttering
candle. This was not a creepy house.
So, this particular time,
when I was reading Gideon Mack, I was
also signing stock for Goldsboro Books
in London. They’re a wonderful bookshop
who sell signed first editions at cover price and have always been good friends
to me. (You might know them as the bookshop who got boxes and boxes of first editions
of The Cuckoo’s Calling signed by
“Robert Galbraith” and didn’t put their prices up even when the truth came out.
They just sold those millions of pounds worth of books to their regular
customers for the price on the jacket and got priceless great publicity for
themselves, as part of the deal.)
Anyway they had sent me three
big boxes of hardbacks, lots of bubble wrap but also quite a lot of books, to
sign and return. I had finished with them and the FedEx guy was coming to pick
them up the next day. I needed to remember to take them downstairs. But it was
late and I was tired. So I left them in my study doorway, one on top of the
other, where I would see them when I came out of my bedroom at the other end of
the landing in the morning.
Get it? I made a tower of
three big boxes in an open doorway where
I would see them and remember about the FedEx guy.
Well, it half-worked. I went
to bed, read another few hair-raising chapters of Gideon Mack and nodded off. About four o’clock in the morning I
woke up and set out to go to the loo (it was an inconvenient house, with no
upstairs bathroom). The moonlight was shining in the landing window. I stepped
out of my bedroom door . . .
. . . and saw a stranding
stone in my house! A great hulking monolith of an ancient standing stone
growing right out of my carpet! Gideon’s stone!
In my house! A harbinger of the
devil!
It took me a long time to
reach out and turn on a light, eyes squeezed tight shut. I opened them a tiny
crack. It was still there, but it was made of cardboard, not stone. And it was
three boxes and I needed to scamper to the bathroom pretty urgently.
And that, dear readers, is the worst fright I
have ever given myself in my career so far as a writer. I still loved the house
– Fintloch – and it was a wrench to leave it. I’ve used it as the setting of
the book that’s coming out in September 2015 – The Child Garden – and I’ve put a standing stone in there too.
Catriona McPherson will be at the February Meeting of San Joaquin Sisters in Crime.
