The Chicks are beyond thrilled to welcome back one of our favorite authors and human beings, Catriona McPherson. Remember how Winston Churchill supposedly said, “Guests and fish stink after three days?” You’re in for a treat as Catriona shares her usual hilarious take on the subject of guests, which plays into the plot of her 16th – yes, you read that right, 16th – irresistible Dandy Gilver Mystery.

Four-Day Fish

At the opening of THE WITCHING HOUR (Dandy Gilver No.16), in spring 1939, Dandy is beset with houseguests come to Gilverton for her husband’s sixtieth birthday. She is not enjoying the birthday dinner, what with “Major Someone on my left regaling me with anecdotes about Spion Kop and Colonel Someone Else on my right drooling over Spain’s latest antics as only a childless bachelor, himself too old to fight, could do.”

The discovery of a murder, with all the facts pointing to the guilt of Dandy’s oldest and dearest friend, is far from ideal but as Dandy says, “one silver lining was the break-up of our house party” as all the majors, colonels, captains and their wives melt away.

As I write this, I’m just about to have a houseguest, fellow writer and juggernaut of happiness, Jessie Chandler, and I’m just about to be a houseguest, of three different pals, as I make my way from the west to the east coast.

So it’s been on my mind. Also, I read Miss Manners in the Washington Post and frequently have to scoop my jaw back up off the floor. I mean, guests who leave pizza crusts in the bed? Guests who invite guests of their own, complete with sleeping bags, to stay for days? Guests who take the flowers, toiletries and box of tissues with them when they go?

My favourite ever houseguest (I’m not counting my parents who used to come for a month, during which my dad would build, fix, adapt, invent something wonderful every year and my mum would leave no thrift store in northern California unturned) was a professional acquaintance of my husband Neil’s.

My dad with the just finished stile

Ignatius was an economics professor from Uganda who came to stay one January on a research trip. The night he arrived was the 25^th. Burns Night. So he joined in with the celebration: the poems in Scots, the haggis, cock-a-leekie and cranachan, the toast to the lassies, the lassies’ reply, the whisky and song and revelry. At the end of the evening as he went off to bed, he said “Thank you for showing me a typical American dinner party. It’s been very interesting.” That’s when I realised how far from home he was. How very very far from home.

My own worst performance as a houseguest was partly informed by being far from home too. We arrived in the US with two cats, two suitcases and nowhere to live, but were kindly taken in by a new colleague of Neil’s and his wife. We settled down in their granny flat and started house-hunting. Five months later, we moved out. Five months!

Moving into our house – finally.

And that’s not even the worst of it. During that time, our hosts had planned to redo what I’ve come to know as “the hall bath”. So for part of the five months, their wee girls tromped through the master bedroom to the master bath while we tied up the lovely shower-room in the granny flat. No big deal for Brits, who share bathwater never mind bathrooms, but for Americans? These people were very good to us and I’ve still not finished saying thank you.

Because I get it now. I’m functionally American when it comes to bathrooms. I love having my own one and if I ever move I don’t want to go back to normal-for-Britain. I haven’t assimilated to the same extent about all aspects of “visitors from out of town” in America, mind you. Rellies booking into a hotel instead of you blowing up air mattresses somewhere in your house even if it’s already full? Still seems very weird.

I love my bathroom.

The worst experience of being a houseguest that I’ve ever heard of wasn’t mine. It was Neil’s. He was getting ready for bed in the home of a work pal and casually asked where the coffee-making equipment was, in case he was up first in the morning. “Oh, we don’t have coffee in this house” his so-called hosts revealed.

Monsters.

Maybe this is “cat” for preparing a warm welcome, but it looked a lot like making the most of someone else’s clean bedding to me.

How about you, Chicks? Any terrible experiences seared into your brains? Any hot tips to help me be a good host and/or a good guest? I’ve already shut the spare-room door so there’s no re-run of this scenario.

SYNOPSIS FOR THE WITCHING HOUR: It’s the spring of 1939 and Dandy Gilver, the mother of two grown-up sons, can’t think of anything except the deteriorating state of Europe and the threat of war. Detective work is the furthest thing from her mind. It takes a desperate cri de coeur from an old friend to persuade her to take on a case.

Daisy Esslemont’s husband Silas has vanished. It’s not the first time, but he has never embarrassed her with his absences before. It doesn’t take Dandy and her side-kick, Alec Osborne, long to find the wandering Silas, but when they track him down to the quaint East Lothian village of Dirleton, he is dead, lying on the village green with his head bashed in, in full view of a row of alms houses, two pubs, a manse, a school and even the watchtowers of Dirleton Castle. And yet not a single one of the villagers admits to seeing a thing.

As Dandy and Alec begin to chip away at the determined silence of the Dirletonites, they cannot imagine what unites such a motley crew: schoolmistress, minister, landlord, postmaster, park-keeper, farmworkers, schoolchildren . . . Only one person – Mither Golane, the oldest resident of the village – is loose-lipped enough to let something slip, but her quiet aside must surely be the rambling of a woman in her second childhood. Dandy and Alec know that Silas was no angel but “He’s the devil” is too outlandish a claim to help them find his killer. The detecting pair despair of ever finding answers, but are they asking the right questions?

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BIO: Serial awards-botherer, Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. She writes: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories, including September 2024’s THE WITCHING HOUR; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories about a medical social worker; and contemporary psychological standalones. These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comedies about a Scot out of water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California. She is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.

 www.catrionamcpherson.com