Chris Longmuir, Crime Writer: I Lost a Good Friend when Eileen Ramsay Passed Away

It was with great sadness that I learned Eileen Ramsay had passed away. Among the many Scottish writers that I now rub elbows with, she was my first friend in the writing community. That was way back in 1989. And she was a good friend who provided me with a great deal of encouragement to embark on my own writing career, but I was not the only writer she helped. There were many others.

Eileen led an interesting and varied life. She was born in the southwest of Scotland and had ambitions to write from an early age. However, like many writers before her, she decided this was an unattainable aim and became a teacher. Once she qualified, she left Scotland to teach in the USA for a year and stayed for 18 years. Her pupils were the children of famous people and politicians, and she was employed by Senator McCarthy and his wife in 1968 to tutor and care for their children while they were away campaigning on the presidential trail.

Eileen always refused to write about this time of her life and the people she knew and worked with, but I loved her little anecdotes, like the time she was travelling in a limousine and had to sit on Dustin Hoffman’s knee because there were too many people in the car. Eileen was a very attractive lady, and I’m sure Dustin must have enjoyed having her perched on his knee.

Apart from this, she spent time in California and Mexico, as well as Washington DC, and she always had a deep affection for Mexico.

On her return to Scotland, she taught in Dundee for several years and wrote novels at the same time. Her routine was to arise at 4 am to write before starting work. She always told a story against herself about her decision to do this. At a conference she’d heard a famous writer say that was how she worked so Eileen thought if she can do it so can I. It was many years later when in conversation with this writer she found out that she had been joking and she had never risen as early as that to write. But it worked for Eileen because she published many novels over those years. To say she was successful is an understatement. She wrote historical sagas and romances under her own name, and novels set during the second world war under the pseudonym of Ruby Jackson.

During her writing career, she won many awards, including both the Scottish Association of Writers’ Pitlochry and Constable trophies and the Romantic Novelist Association’s Elizabeth Goudge Award. She was on the committee of the Society of Authors in Scotland for six years, four of which she served as secretary. She was also vice president of the Scottish Association of Writers for several years and was the Chairman of the Romantic Novelists’ Society between 2015 to 2017.

Over many years, we attended and shared a room at a variety of conferences, and I still treasure the book she signed for me which said ‘My pyjamas are nicer than your pyjamas’. I shall miss her.