Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1951, 279 p. First published as Olivia in India in 1913.

O Douglas was the pen name of Anna Buchan, sister of John. She published ten or so popularly successful novels over her career.

Olivia, her first novel, is the tale of the eponymous narrator’s trip to India to visit a brother called Boggley. It is written, initially in a self-deprecating tone, in the form of letters to a male friend, Arthur, back home.

It is at least semi auto-biographical. “Douglas” visited India herself in 1907 and in Olivia she mentions a brother, John, whose writing has been well-received and asks, “Other members of the family can write, why not I?” (In the novel, Olivia conceives the idea of writing a book about the Mutiny. I don’t think “Douglas” ever did write that though.)

On the boat over, Olivia meets a young woman, Geraldine, swiftly dubbed G, and they become firm friends, their paths criss-crossing through the text from time to time.

There is little plot here – Olivia is not concerned about the time-honoured custom of women going to India to find themselves a husband. It is more an account of experiences with a few insights thrown in. Of the characters of the mem-sahibs she says, “the women who are pure gold grow more charming, but the pinchbeck wears off pretty soon” and finds the desire for one-upmanship of the colonialists unseemly.

There is also a slight dig to Arthur about the urge to explore. “Men at times hear the Red Gods call them (women hear them too, you know, only they have more self-control.)”

As is to be expected of a novel now 110 years old it does display the attitudes of its time.

Pedant’s corner:- wakened (x 2, woken.)

Or: The Astrologer. Edited by P D Garside.

The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, 356 p plus 53 p Essay on the Text, 50 p Emendation list, 2 p list of end-of-line “hard” hyphens, 16 p Historical Note, 67 p Explanatory Notes, 20 p Glossary, i p Foreword, i p Contents vi p General Introduction to the Edinburgh Edition, and iii p Acknowledgements. Guy Mannering first published 1815.

Reading Scott these days is an exercise in completion or in acknowledging roots. The roots of long-form fiction, of Scottish story-telling, of the historical novel as a genre.

For time has not been good to novels like this. First there is the author’s prolixity, words thrown about with abandon, then there is the long outmoded practice of addresses to the reader, not to mention direct statements of what will come next, all of which are now passé. More problematically, from very early on the reader has no doubt in which direction this is going, since the plot here is that of the long-lost heir (with a touch of Romeo and Juliet thrown in.) When Scott wrote it, most likely such a story was fresh and new, but in the intervening 210 years it has become all too familiar. And story-telling itself has changed.

The Guy Mannering of the title comes to the estate and house of Ellangowan in Galloway on the night the lady of the house is to give birth to her first child. Mannering casts a horoscope for the boy which predicts misfortunes when he will be aged five and ten plus a further significant event at twenty-two. As well as the laird, Godfrey Bertram, Mannering meets the taciturn dominie Abel Sampson (who however is prone to uttering the word pro-dig-i-ous, in that elongated fashion, when over-excited) and the – kenspeckle, since she is very tall for a woman – gipsy Meg Merrilies. At this point Scott digresses into a discourse on the history in Scotland of what some at the time termed Egyptians, who had been rendered by law to be common and habitual thieves. His sympathies are with Meg however as she is to some extent the heroine (if one there be) of his tale. Five years later, as Mrs Bertram is in labour with a daughter, a murder occurs on the estate, blamed on smugglers, and the son of the house is kidnapped. Bertram, meanwhile, is not a good guardian of the estate’s fortunes and by seventeen further years’ time the estate, in the absence of a male heir, is to be sold by roup.

Mannering, who has been soldiering in India, where his own daughter Julia formed an attachment to one of his subordinates whom Mannering thought unsuitable and whose death he thinks he caused, has now returned and attempts to buy Ellangowan but is too late due to dealing with a concern of the friend with whom Julia is staying, and so takes another house nearby. That subordinate, of the name Vanbeest Brown from a sojourn in Holland, is still alive and in communication with Mannering’s daughter Julia.

On his way to Galloway, Brown saves a local farmer, Andrew (known as Dandie) Dinmont, who breeds terriers, from robbery by two ruffians. Dinmont becomes a fast friend and is instrumental in aiding Brown when he meets difficulties later on.

Even from this short summary it is perhaps obvious who is the lost heir and what part of the resolution will be.

The novel is not without its moments, though, and there are incidents aplenty, as how could there not be in a tale involving smugglers, gipsies, a murder, abduction and thwarted inheritances? Gilbert Glossin, who actually bought Ellangowan, is as slippery a character as you might wish, and the lawyer Pleydell – along with Dinmont – larger than life, but the women, Meg Merrilies apart, tend to be ciphers. In the end the tale is more Brown’s than Guy Mannering’s though and the astrology aspect falls by the wayside. Perhaps as his plot developed Scott lost (fore?)sight of it.

Pedant’s corner:- early nineteenth century spellings, chuse, exstacy, eve’sdropper, paralytick, etc, etc; “the place from whence he came” (since whence means ‘from where’ then ‘from whence’ incorporates a repetition; ‘the place whence he came’.) “None …. were present” (None … was present. Several more examples of ‘none’ with a plural verb,) whiskey (whisky,) a full stop at the end of a question, “from thence” (again repetitious, thence = ‘from where’,) “Meg Merrilies’ wound” (Merrilies’s.) In the essay on the text; miniscule (minuscule.)

Little Brown, 2014, 412 p

I noticed early on while reading this book how different the style was compared to the same author’s Queen Macbeth, which I read only a week or so before. The prose is much less literary, more utilitarian, with more intrusive information dropping. (Once again I only read this because the good lady had borrowed it from the local library.)

The present-day events of The Skeleton Road are set in the run-up to the Independence Referendum of 2014. (Which seems ancient History now and has no actual relevance to the plot.) Karen Pirie – now a DCI in the newly merged Police Scotland – is still in charge of cold cases but due to the reorganisation her office is now in Edinburgh, not Kirkcaldy, necessitating a commute across the Forth Road Bridge.

When an eight-year-old skeleton is discovered hidden in a roof turret on the crumbling John Drummond building in Edinburgh a hole in its head makes it obvious it was murder.

In the meantime the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is shaken up by its new boss’s determination to find the identity of the person going around killing the perpetrators of atrocities not yet – and not now (in the 2014 of the book) likely to be – brought to justice. Suspicion falls on former Croatian General Dimitar Petrovic who disappeared around the times these murders started. His wife, Oxford Professor Maggie Blake, in the absence of any other explanation, always assumed he had returned to his former existence in Croatia.

Thus DCI Pirie is launched into an investigation which will reveal to her more horrors about the Balkan Wars of the late twentieth century than she might have wished.

This is not really a surprising subject for McDermid to take on. After all, the first shot of those most recent Balkan Wars was fired in her home town of Kirkcaldy.

It is not hard for the reader to join the dots about the victim. The murderer is initially more of a mystery but a reference about three fifths of the way in rather jumped out.

Crime fiction is how McDermid made her name – and it is what pays her bills – but the contrast between this and Queen Macbeth demonstrates how undemanding the genre can be for a reader (and for its author?) but its consumers can’t seem to get enough of it. And there’s something disturbing about people seeing murder as entertainment.

If the purpose of the fictional detective is to set the world right again after the transgression of the crime, cases such as this give the lie to that assumption of cosiness.

Pedant’s corner:- confectionary (confectionery,) a missing start quotation mark at the beginning of a piece of dialogue, “Dorothy L Sayers’ description” (Dorothy L Sayers’s.) “‘He was as a much a butcher as …’” (He was as much a butcher as …)

A Novel of the Life and Loves of Robert Burns.

Collins, 1946, 382 p including 2 p Note.

This is the first in Barke’s series of books covering the life of Robert Burns, known collectively as The Immortal Memory. I gather Burns scholars did not look kindly upon them.

This one is a strange concoction, seemingly well researched – in a foreword Barke says he did not want to get anything wrong – yet in parts it does not read like a novel. But it is also not a biography, containing scenes that must be imagined, with dialogue certainly so, and larded with a wheen of Scots words and usages that might be off-putting to those furth of Scotland.

I assume Barke has evidence for his family calling their eldest child Robin unofficially – as do some of his intimates – but it was an odd decision to render throughout the town of Mauchline as Machlin.

The young Robert very early in his life becomes aware that the well-off have it their way and there is little to no justice in the world. This is particularly so in the case of his father, William Burns, a staunch Presbyterian – of the Auld Licht persuasion – passionately opposed to fornication, whose position as tenant farmer on successive poor soils which he did much to improve is taken advantage of by unfeeling (or downright criminal) lessors. William recognizes in Robert an innate potential to make a mark but a tendency to passion which he fears will undo him but strives mightily to ensure his two elder sons, Robert and Gilbert, both gain a good education for themselves.

There is a divagation to Irvine where Robert is set to learn heckling as a prelude to growing linen and entering that trade. It is here he gains his first sexual experience with one of the many Jeans – not to mention other lasses – with whom he will be associated but his sojourn is cut short when the linen shop burns down and it is back to the plough and the land. Robert of course imagines himself in love with all the girls with whom he dallies but does not consider any of them marriageable. Not that he has much to offer them anyway beyond a glad eye and the odd verse.

This first instalment goes up to the point of William Burns’s vindication in the eyes of the law, and final death, worn out by a life of toil; toil which has already taken its toll on Robert.

Barke is not a fine novelist. His prose gets the job done but lacks sparkle and there are occasional passages of purple prose. And at the end I did not feel the text had inhabited Robert as a person. Then again, rendering a fictional account of a real person is the hardest job in writing.

Pedant’s corner:- “Jock Richards’ back room” (x 4, Richards’s,) riccochetted (ricocheted,) “vocal chords” (vocal cords.)

Polygon, 2022, 112 p

On a cold December night in Edinburgh in 1591 Geillis Duncan awaits execution in the morning for the crime of witchcraft. She is visited in spirit by Iris, a woman from our own time, who calls herself a time traveller and a modern-day witch.

Historically 1591 was the height of the hysteria against witches encapsulated by James VI’s Daemonologie and Geillis Duncan was one of the victims of the North Berwick witch trials.

The scenario gives Fagan the platform to outline the misogyny behind the witch hunts and its prevalence today.

In the conversations between Geillis and Iris the question arises, “How does he” (the King) “fight the Devil?” The answer? “Via teenage girls. Doesn’t everyone?” The rationale back then being, “We go after the Devil via womb-bearers – they are weak for him.” So the targets were women. Women who were alone, or tall, or ugly, or smart; women who inherited, sassy women, women who were healers. If a woman doesn’t exalt men always she is a threat, “a Demon whore, a witch.”

Despite all her efforts to be polite, docile and unthreatening, not to draw attention to herself, still Geillis was picked on: primarily since she was handy, a servant in the household of a man called Seaton but also suspect because, “I helped women birth, I helped calves, I knew the right herbs to cure a headache.” Seaton was jealous of the fact that his sister-in-law, Euphame, had inherited her father’s estate and wanted a legal reason to eliminate her so Geillis was tortured and abused to implicate Euphame and others.

Fagan has her characters try to explain misogyny. Geillis says, “We bring life from our bodies where before there was nothing,” – that being a kind of magic – and Iris tells her, “Men want to know how they got trapped on Earth,” but the real crime is that, “There is no man on this Earth who didn’t get here except by a woman parting her thighs.”

Apart from the conceit of Iris time travelling Fagan’s tendency to indulge the fantastical sees Iris during the night begin to grow feathers and eventually turn into a crow.

Though Geillis’s prior suffering is never in doubt the set up allows Fagan to treat the witch trials almost indirectly but nevertheless underline that misogyny is ever with us.

This is another of Birlinn’s Darkland Tales (see here) and again was borrowed from the local library by the good lady.

Pedant’s corner:- lightening (lightning,) “filed into a tea-room” (in 1591?) “the thing I had that shined” (shone,) a priest comes to hear her confess at the last (a priest? In Reformation Scotland?) the priest uses a pencil to sign in to the jail (suitable graphite for this purpose was discovered in 1560 so it’s possible; but pencils as such would not, I suspect, have been widely available, a scratchy pen is more likely,) smoothes (smooths,) okay (in 1591?) ditto teenage.

Polygon, 2024, 140 p, including iii p Glossary and i p Acknowledgements.

This is one of a series of short novels Birlinn (Polygon’s owner) has commissioned from modern Scottish authors under the rubric Darkland Tales: “dramatic retellings of stories from the nation’s history, myth and legend.” The good lady picked it up from the local library and I thought I might as well read it too.

An author’s note prefaces the tale with a note saying that Shakespeare – like people today – knew little about life in Scotland just over a thousand years ago now and his “Scottish play” about two power-crazed tyrants was an invention (actually taken from Hollinshed’s Chronicles.)

McDermid’s book – like Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter – is an attempt to restore the balance and has two strands; one in the present of Macbeth’s wife Gruoch as she tries to evade capture by Malcolm’s followers (specifically MacDuff) some time after Macbeth’s defeat at Lumphanen by sheltering in a monastery on an island in Loch Leven and the other (printed in italic) her memories of her life when she met and fell in love with Macbeth while in a dynastic – and on her part loveless – marriage to the Mormaer of Moray, Gille Coemgáin, the man who had killed Macbeth’s father Findlaidh. The whole is a love story in which McDermid conjures up late tenth century Scotland admirably.

Macbeth here is not the Earl of Orkney of Dunnett’s imagination but has a power base on the isle of Mull and a prickly relationship with Gille Coemgáin until he takes revenge for his father and establishes his rule by adopting Gruoch’s son Lulach, whom this account asserts is his son anyway.

Within the text there are several sly references to Shakespeare’s play – the handle toward my hand, to the sticking place, untimely ripped etc – but McDermid gives it her own spin.

On the whole I found Queen Macbeth more interesting and writerly than McDermid’s crime fiction. This is Gruoch as a living, breathing – feeling – human being.

Pedant’s corner:- “quantities of ginger and peppermint tea” ( I wondered when ginger came to Britain. It was known in the 11th century so that’s fine. Peppermint was apparently only identified in 1696 but its use will certainly predate this.)

Hodder and Stoughton, 1918, 309 p.

This is Buchan’s second book to feature Richard Hannay as its protagonist (the first being The Thirty-Nine Steps) and it is very much of its time, displaying all the attitudes we might expect of a novel written when the British Empire was at its height – before the Imperial overstretch resulting from the treaties ending the Great War – and more especially of a man (Hannay) whose formative experiences took place in South Africa.

It is what must be called an adventure novel, ranging over Europe from Britain through Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Balkans and finally Turkey, within which Hannay gets into all sorts of scrapes and situations and somehow manages to come through them all barely scathed.

It starts when he is convalescing after the Battle of Loos and is tasked by his old acquaintance Walter Bullivant with trying to prevent the Germans from using a prophecy of a Muslim religious leader who will bring prominence back to Islam to overthrow British control of Egypt, a point at which Buchan has Bullivant say presciently “‘I do not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number.’” Intelligence of this plan – conveyed to Britain via Bullivant’s son who died in the effort – has only three clues; the words Kasredin, cancer, and the cryptic v I.

A team composed of Hannay’s friend Sandy, a US citizen called John Blenkiron, an old Boer Pieter Pienaar and Hannay himself make their separate ways to Constantinople, as it then was. Hannay’s lies through Germany, posing as a discontented Boer. There he meets the almost cartoonish German Colonel Ulrich von Stumm so stereotypical a German it’s possible he was the prototype.

The text has several observations about such men. The German “has no gift for laying himself alongside different types of men …. He may have plenty of brains … but he has the poorest notion of psychology of any of God’s creatures.” This is followed by “In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises,” a notion that is strikingly misguided in the light of latter events.

By the time they get to Constantinople the group has between them unravelled the clues. Kasredin refers to an old Islamic story of a leader called Greenmantle, whose modern avatar it turns out has cancer. v I is a woman called Hilda von Einem. Ater more adventures they finally end up in eastern Turkey in time to play a crucial part in the Erzurum offensive.

As well as unthinking references to Jews as if that designation told us anything about the person referred to, the text has some now antiquated spellings; Moslems, Jehad, Bosporus, Bedowin, Bagdad, Windhuk, uses ‘England’ for Great Britain, plus the phrase ‘a white man’ as a term of approbation, the casual aside that a ‘negro’ brought coffee, not to mention Hannay as narrator saying he had been a nigger-driver.

File in “of its time.”

Pedant’s corner:- motnhs (months,) General Smuts’ (Smuts’s; which appeared a few pages later,) “terribly honest in some   ings”  (some things,) a missing full stop (x 4,) “I wondered if I had woke up his suspicions” (woken up,) nicknacks (knick-knacks,) “for people to disappear in ;” (‘to disappear in;’) “scarcley begun” (scarcely,) “uncommon like inspiration” (uncommonlike?) “more rot to the second that any man ever achieved” (than any man,) “must have woke the dead” (woken.)

Harper Collins, 2008, 377 p.

This is the second of McDermid’s Karen Pirie books. I read the first in 2017/8. In this one she is now a DI in charge of the Cold Case Review Team at Glenrothes Police headquarters. A woman, Misha Gibson, has walked into the station and reported her father missing. He was Mick Prentice, a former miner who painted in his spare time, who left during the coal strike of the 1980s and wasn’t heard from again, assumed to have joined the scabs who decamped for jobs in the Nottinghamshire coalfields. Misha’s son has leukaemia, needs a close relative tissue match for him and this is her only hope.

Meantime, freelance investigative reporter Bel Richmond, on holiday in Italy, has stumbled on what looks like a crime scene in an apparently hastily abandoned villa and recognises a poster there as resembling a ransom note from a kidnapping gone wrong years ago. In a proposed money handover, Catriona, only daughter of successful Scottish businessman Brodie Maclennan Grant, was shot and Grant’s grandson, Adam, spirited away by the kidnappers.

How the two cases interlap is what is revealed as the book progresses, with a couple of twists thrown in along the way.

The scenario allows McDermid to illustrate how the legacy of the bitter mining strike of the 1980s endures and poisoned relations between mining communities and the Police. Various locations such as the Wemyss caves are very familiar to anyone who lives in the area, as I do, though some are invented (Grant’s home of Rotheswell Castle) or slightly renamed conflations of real places (the village of Newtown of Wemyss.)

The way the book was structured, with each section preceded by an italicised heading giving its location and date, was slightly intrusive though it did give McDermid the opportunity to present the relevant scene novelistically rather than as being related to Pirie or Richmond as in an interview.

As a character Pirie is engaging but we perhaps don’t see enough of her here.

Pedant’s corner:- “The women who entered” (The woman,) “In his Wham period” (the band was named Wham!) “in Simon Lees’ gut” (Lees’s; there was another Lees’ later,) fit (fitted,) “the big Tesco down by the bus station” (when spoken, yes, but when spoken of, that big Tesco was still a William Low’s supermarket,) sprung (sprang,) “‘not a Raith Rovers shirt’” (I know this was for the benefit of readers furth of Scotland but a Raith fan would have said simply ‘a Rovers shirt’,) “a smile that reminded him of Julia Roberts’.” (Julia Roberts’s,) “her Harvey Nicks’ sundress” (her Harvey Nicks sundress. You don’t say ‘an Armani’s suit’,) Certifcato de Morte (Certificato de Morte,) “scribbling the details down on.” (down on what?) “Toby Inglis’ name” (Inglis’s,) staunch (stanch.)

19 this year; 12 by men 7 by women, 4 with an SF/fantasy tinge (5 if you count Beloved,) 1 non-fiction, 1 fictionalised memoir. Not in any order; apart from of reading.

News of the Dead by James Robertson

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

Tomorrow by Chris Beckett

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Landmarks by Robert McFarlane

Toby’s Room by Pat Barker

Independent People by Halldór Laxness

Confessions by Jaume Cabré

Sparks of Bright Matter by Leeanne O’Donnell

Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

Lizard Tails by Juan Marsé

Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé

Xstabeth by David Keenan

Borges and Me by Jay Parini

Beloved by Toni Morrison (review to appear here soon.)

Richard Drew, 1985, 326 p, including 2 p Foreword by Dairmid Gunn. First published 1949.

Archaeologist Simon Grant has been sent north to excavate a previously unexplored chambered cairn surrounded by a ring of stones on the land of Donald Martin. On the way to the site he comes across a mother and daughter sleeping curled up in the heather. These are Anna and Sheena, respectively daughter and granddaughter of Mrs Cameron with whom he takes lodging. At night Mrs Cameron tells Sheena traditional stories of the Silver Bough, a branch with nine golden apples on which music can be played. The Silver Bough “was the passport in those distant days to the land of the gods.” This is one of a few local tales, another is of an urisk which supposedly haunts the stone circle. The text mentions in passing that attempt to define the key to all religions, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, to which Gunn’s book’s title surely alludes.

Taken by Sheena (whose mother Grant quickly divines is not married, having come back early from service in London in the Second World War as a result of her pregnancy) Grant later has made for her a silver bough made as an item of jewellery “two feet long with nine golden apples pendent.” Sheena’s father is not unknown, though. He is that same landowner, Donald Martin, but his war experiences in the Far East, where he witnessed various atrocities, have left him taciturn and unengaging, prone to wandering the hills or out on his boat, and Anna, in her pride, is content to leave things as they are. There are, in any case, questions of their differing stations in life intervening.

The main plot, though, revolves around the uncovering of the cairn, for which Grant employs for the heavy work the only local help available, a not-fully-there young man dubbed Foolish Andie, who speaks only in grunts. Their first discovery, beside the cairn’s entrance, of a burial cist containing the bodies of a mother and daughter spooned together, reminds Grant of Anna and Sheena as he first encountered them. Inside the cairn itself they find collections of bones and an urn with a hoard of golden objects.

Throughout, Gunn displays a knowledge of archaeological terms and practices which is convincing to the otherwise unversed. Grant’s mistake, though, in returning to the cairn at night unaccompanied seems one a proper professional would not have made. Without it, however, there would have been no remaining plot to unfurl.

On that night visit, Grant is surprised by the appearance of Foolish Andie and knocked unconscious, while the urn disappears, presumably taken by Andie to some hiding place of his. Grant’s discomfiture at this is not helped by the presence nearby of some journalists who quickly latch on to the story and sensationalise it.

There is a lot more to The Silver Bough than this short account might suggest. Each of the characters is finely drawn, even down to Foolish Andie’s mother Mrs McKenzie, Martin’s sister Mrs Sidbury, both protective of their respective close relatives, Grant’s ultimate boss, Colonel Mackintosh, come up from London to verify the hoard.

This is another fine example of Gunn’s œuvre.

Pedant’s corner:- “for appearance’ sake” (appearance’s sake,) “his heart swole up” (old Scots for ‘swelled up’. )