The Three Big Tasks

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Catriona McPherson is so insanely perfect that I don’t even wanna take time away from letting you get to her post (but I will ) to tell you  how endlessly brilliant and fabulously wonderful and ridiculously talented she is and yes, I am totally gushing, punctuation be damned, because truly, she is a force of nature. Maybe she IS nature. Who knows. But she’s incredible, and her new book (more below) is thrilling and here’s how it all happened.

Part of it, at least.

Strangers at the Gate

 By Catriona McPherson

Q: What’s in a name?

A: Everything. Literally everything.

There are three big naming tasks associated with any book. In ascending order of significance  and capacity to drive me crazy these are: naming the places (if I’ve made them up); naming the characters; naming the book.

Naming the book should be the easiest, because it’s the one I get help with – my agent, her staff, my UK editor, her staff, my US editor, her staff, the sales teams, the publicity departments, my friends, family, random strangers, and unsuspecting readers of blog posts (this is fair warning of what’s coming, okay?) – all get roped in. Also, it’s the one that’s not even up to me in the end. The book title isn’t a bit of the book; it’s a marketing tool for the book, and the thoughts of publishing professionals weigh heavier than the thoughts of a frazzled author who’s far too close and has never worked in marketing.

But that’s for later. The first and easiest (for me) task is naming places. There’s abundant help here, in the form of the Ordnance Survey Land Ranger maps of the real bit of Scotland I’m writing about (even if I’m putting a fictitious setting there). Because every hamlet, farm, hill, valley, trickle of water and bump in the grass throughout the UK has a name. And every one of these names is dutifully printed at one and a quarter inches to the mile.

Also, in the land of Drumnadrochit, Auchtermuchty, and Ecclefechan, no made-up name is implausible. That takes the pressure off marvelously.

So, in Strangers at the Gate, I’ve got: Simmerton – a town in a deep, dark valley that only gets sunshine in the height of summer (or “simmer” as it’s pronounced in Scots); Jerusalem – a house with its face turned (giro) to the sun (solem); Widdershins – a house not as unlucky as it sounds, because its name is nothing to do with walking anti-clockwise round a church but is rather a corruption of “widow’s portion”. In other words, it’s a dower house. And that gave me an idea for a cottage called Bairnspairt – literally ‘the child’s part’ – a house given to an heir under Scots Law.

So far, so low-stakes. Because it doesn’t even matter if the place names don’t resonate with readers. At least I don’t think so. After all, if I had set the book in a real place, as I sometimes do, I’d be stuck with whatever names I found there.

It’s a different matter with characters. I think the names of the people matter a great deal. They have to bring to mind the right era, the right social class, the right ethnicity, and beyond all that they have to “fit”. But why do they have to fit? Why should they? In real life, we get our names as tiny babies and don’t often change them no matter whether they suit us or not. I don’t know the answer to this, but I’m a slave to the truth of it, with multiple discarded character names and a finely-honed “global search and replace” habit.

(By the way, when changing a character’s name from Olive to Nora, watch out for scenes with pizza.)

So, in Strangers at the Gate, I’ve got: a young couple, Finnie and Paddy Lamb; Paddy’s mum, Elayne Lamb; Finnie’s parents, Eric and Mary Doyle; an elderly couple, Lovatt and Tuft Dudgeon; a single woman in her thirties, Shannon Mack; and a pair of retired church volunteers, Sonsie and Adam Webb.

What I don’t have are any Mcs and Macs. I always try to keep them down lower than they would be in real Scotland, because a novel populated by an authentic serving of MacToggles and McToories would be hard on the eye and the memory. (I might have gone too far this time, in cutting them out completely.)

As for the rest, Lovatt and Tuft are posh; Shannon isn’t. The Doyles are Roman Catholics of Irish descent; the Lambs could be, but not necessarily. Elayne, with her Y, has social pretensions. And Sonsie – it’s short for Sonia – is exactly the sort of woman who wouldn’t mind a pet-name drawn from a poem about a haggis.

I got very fond of them all. Which is just as well, because it stopped me paying back the advance, deleting the drafts and forgetting about them, instead of slogging my way to a title for the finished book.

While I wrote it, it was called The Cuts, after the very deep, very narrow, side valleys around Simmerton (and after some of the details of the murder). I loved that title. My propensity for typos was a worry – Can you imagine??? – but otherwise I loved it.

I was alone.

So the process started, trying to find the book a new name. A squad of us brainstormed and brainstormed and came up with:

The Cuts – still no

A Walk in Darkness – too generic

Take One Step – sounds like a recipe

Every Step You Take – Great! Oh wait. Wasn’t that a song?

A Step in Darkness – Didn’t we already-? Oh, that was “walk”. Well, no.

At The Edge of the Wood – sounds too similar to other books

In The Dark Of The Wood – sounds even more similar to other books

A Walk in Shadow – worse than a step in darkness

A Walk in The Shadow of The Valley of Death, Through a Wood – let’s take a break, eh?

Until finally, April, my US editor, came up – apparently out of nowhere – with Strangers at the Gate, and we all went “Oooooooh!”.

I hope the inside of the book makes everyone go “Ooooooooh!” too.

And if anyone reading this blog has a brainwave about a good title for a murder mystery set in Dundee, in Scotland, in 1937, concerning a Punch and Judy Show and a women’s magazine publisher, I’d be enormously grateful.  Because it’s that time again already and I got nothing.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Ooooooooooh. 

This is so fascinating--and I so agree. I made up a town for Trust Me, a suburb of Boston called Linsdale. Because it seemed like linden trees, which are beautiful but don't they whisper mysteriously? And they are thin, and elegant, but vulnerable. (Don't tell me if I'm wrong, this is how I felt about it.) And dale because is sounds like a pretty place. (Cypressdale sounded made up.)

And when a main character in The Murder List was Gianna Delaney, she was a total lump. When she became Rachel North--well, watch out, sister. Attitude. Why does that happen?

Tell us a terrific name, title, or place--and one lucky commenter will win a Catriona book! 

 

CatrionaMcPherson is the national best-selling and multi-award-winning author of the Dandy Gilver series of preposterous detective stories, set in her native Scotland in the 1930s. She also writes darker contemporary suspense novels, of which STRANGERS AT THE GATE is the latest. Also, eight years after immigrating to the US and settling in California, Catriona began the Last Ditch series, written about a completely fictional Scottish woman who moves to a completely fictional west-coast college town.

Catriona is a member of MWA, CWA and SoA, and a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime, committed to advancing equity and inclusion for women, writers of colour, LGBTQ+ writers and writers with disability in the mystery community.