Synopsis (taken from the back cover):

August 1923, and as the village of Queensferry prepares for the annual Ferry Fair and the walk of the Burry Man, feelings are running high. Between his pagan greenery, his lucky pennies and the nips of whisky he is treated to wherever he goes, the Burry Man has something to offend everyone wherever he goes whether minister, priest or temperance pamphleteer. And then at the Fair, in full view of everyone – including Dandy Gilver, present at the festivities to hand out prizes he drops down dead.

It looks as though the Burry Man has been poisoned – but if so, then the list of suspects must include everyone in the town with a bottle of whisky in the house, and, here in Queensferry, that means just about everyone …

Part of my interest in The Burry Man’s Day is that it is set in South Queensferry, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, now part of the city of Edinburgh, formerly in the County of Linlithgowshire. I’ve been there once. It’s close to the Forth Road Railway Bridge:

I haven’t seen the Burry Man’s Parade, which features strongly in this book; it must be a strange sight.

The book has a rather slow start, but it’s one I enjoyed for all its historical detail about the place, its traditions and the people. It has a great sense of place, with a map of Queensferry at the beginning of the book which helps you follow the action. I wasn’t very taken with Dandy Gilver. I liked her more in a later book in the series. In this book she comes across as a busy-body, albeit kind-hearted, and a snob, but then that’s probably just a reflection of the class structure of the times. She’s married to Hugh, who seems to spend his life hunting and shooting and managing his large estate at Gilverton in Perthshire. Dandy doesn’t have much in common with him, being rather bored by life at Gilverton and Hugh doesn’t feature much in this book.

This is Dandy’s second investigation and I suppose if I read the first book, After the Armistice Ball, I might understand her relation with Hugh and with Alec Osborne, her co-investigator. That’s one of the drawbacks of reading a series out of order.

There’s a lot more to this mystery than the death of Robert Dudgeon, who been the Burry Man for 25 years. He’d been extremely reluctant to take the part this year and the question  why was that remained unanswered for the majority of the book. I had an idea about the reason, but only guessed part of it. It’s a convoluted tale and the motive for the murder is buried deep in the descriptions of the characters and their histories. It’s a book you need to concentrate on, and at some points I did have difficulty in sorting out some of the minor characters. Other than that I think it’s a very good book, although maybe a bit too long.

• My Rating 4/5
• Author’s website: http://www.dandygilver.com/author.htm - where you can read an extract from this book
• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Robinson Publishing (30 Aug 2007)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 1845295927
• ISBN-13: 978-1845295929
• Source: Library book

I think it’s an impressive sight!

It’s a peel tower perched on top of a rocky crag, originally built in the 15th/16th centuries to protect its occupants from English raiders. It’s now a Scheduled Ancient Monument in the care of Historic Scotland.

Although the Tower now stands alone on the crag it was once the centre of a small castle toun. Sir Walter Scott stayed with his grandparents who lived at Sandyknowe Farm in the hollow near the Tower, where his parents hoped his delicate health would improve. It was there that his love of the Borders began as his aunt and grandmother recited to him ballads and Border tales and legends.

For more S posts visit ABC Wednesday.

Here is a closer look at the medieval bridge:

As we went along the river bank the salmon were leaping out of the water, but no matter how quick I tried to be with the camera I couldn’t snap a fish as it leapt out of water. This is the closest I got:

The nearer circle is where the fish jumped out and the further one where it went back into the river!

We carried on down the river bank to Twizel Viaduct. This stands 90 feet over the Till and used to carry the Tweedmouth to Kelso railway line. It was built by the York Newcastle & Berwick Railway between 1846-9. This line closed in 1965:

The autumn trees still have most of their copper leaves:

But when we got to the junction of the Till and Tweed there were these leafless trees on the opposite side of the river. The angle of the trunks is just amazing:

We weren’t the only people out enjoying the autumn sunshine – the fishermen were there too.

There is a ruined castle on the ridge overlooking the Till, but more about that in a later post.

A Saturday Snapshot post, hosted by Alyce, At Home with Books.

The view below shows the beautiful, unspoilt beach, with Bass Rock on the horizon. Bass Rock is the home of thousands of gannets.

Enjoying the view:

An ABC Wednesday post to illustrate the letter R.

White Nights is set mainly in Biddista, a fictional village of a few houses, a shop, an art gallery and restaurant called the Herring House, and an old Manse. Kenny Thomson finds a man’s body hanging in the hut where the boat owners of the village of Biddista keep their lines and pots. Perez recognises the dead man – he’s the mystery man who had caused a scene the previous evening at the opening of Bella Sinclair’s and Fran Hunter’s art exhibition. At first it looks as though the man, his face covered by a clown’s mask, has committed suicide, but he’d been dead before he was strung up and the murder team from Inverness, headed up by Roy Taylor, are called in. It takes quite some time before they can identify the dead man and even longer before the motive for killing him is revealed. And that is only after more deaths have occurred.

This is a most satisfying book for me. It’s not only full of believable characters, each one an individual in their own right, it also has a nicely complicated plot and a great sense of location. As well as the mystery of who killed the man in the clown mask and why, there is also the disappearance 15 years earlier of Kenny’s older brother Lawrence. It was thought that he left the island after Bella had broken his heart. Kenny hadn’t heard from him since and at first thought the dead man could be him.

It’s the place, itself, that for me conveyed the most powerful aspects of the book. The ‘white nights’ are the summer nights when the sun never really goes down. They call it the ‘summer dim’, the dusk lasts all night, and in contrast to the bleak, black winters, fills people with ‘a kind of frenzy‘. The landscape and the climate certainly play a great part in people’s lives.Taylor feels very much an outsider, almost too impatient to cope with what he thinks is Perez’s hesitant approach, until it occurred to him that

here in this bizarre, bleak, treeless community, Perez’s strange methods might actually get results. (page 263)

However, I did think that the ending came rather suddenly after the careful build up to the mystery. The tension just gradually faded away as it became obvious who the culprit was. But I still think it’s a very good book, that held my interest, one that made me want to get back to it each time I had to put it down.

This book was an excellent choice for my project, Britain in Books, of reading my way through the British Isles. I could see the landscape and the sea, and I could hear the birds, the kittiwakes on the cliffs, the puffins and skuas. The Shetland Islands are part of theBritish Isles, but are so far north of the mainland that they are on about the same latitude as the southern point of Greenland. I’ve included a map of the Islands (click image to enlarge) and for a more detailed map showing the locations of the Shetland Quartet see Ann Cleeves’s website. There is more information on Shetland at Shetlopedia.

• Paperback: 340 pages
• Publisher: Pan (5 Jun 2009)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 0330448250
• ISBN-13: 978-0330448253
• Source: Library Book
• My Rating: 4/5

The other books in the Shetland Quartet are:

• Red Bones - set on the island of Whalsay
• Blue Lightning - on Fair Isle (Jimmy Perez’s birthplace)

Below is a view from the roof:

and here is a close up of two of the gargoyles:

Posted for Saturday Snapshot, hosted by Alyce of At Home With Books.

I’ve visited just two of them – The Main Street Trading Company at St Boswells and Latimer Books at Kelso, both lovely bookshops, well worth visiting. The Main Street bookshop has the additional attraction of a café and gift shop.

I hope to look up the other bookshops as well, especially the wonderfully named Founditatlast Bookshop whose address is The Middle of Nowhere (actually it’s near Kelso). This is a secondhand bookshop spread over four floors with thousands of books on practically any subject.

Then there is The CobbyShop, also near Kelso, selling secondhand children’s books and postcards, three bookshops in Melrose, one in Peebles and lastly, by no means least, Last Century Books in Innerleithen. More details on The Borders Book Trail website. (By the way, I’m not getting commission from any of these shops, just in case you were wondering!)

A Friday Finds post.

Click to view full size. More Wordless Wednesday.

'Pentecost' St Katherine's Aisle, Linlithgow Parish Church

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Linlithgow Parish Church

Click on photo to view full size.