This book has been nagging me to write it for a long time now, but I kept putting it off to write other books. However, it’s been niggling at me, and nagging me, demanding to be written.
I suppose one of the reasons I kept putting it on the back burner was the simple one, that it wasn’t one of my Dundee crime books. All my previous murder, mysteries have been set in Dundee, either in the present day, or in the past. But this one is set in Gretna, where the government built a massive munitions factory in 1916.
My main character is Kirsty Campbell, you might remember her from The Death Game as Dundee’s first policewoman in 1919. This time I’ve taken Kirsty back two years to 1917, and based her in Gretna as one of the lady police who were based there during the First World War. Ever since I read about these policewomen providing a service in Britain’s munitions factories, I’ve been fascinated by them, and that’s one of the reasons this book nagged me to write it.
Devil’s Porridge is a complex story with quite a lot of characters, and I write in my usual multi-viewpoint style. It’s about my pioneering policewoman, Kirsty Campbell, who teams up with Beatrice Jacobs, a Belgian refugee, who is on a spying mission at Gretna for MI5. They come together to protect Sally, a young munitionette, who has witnessed the aftermath of a crime when the Silverwood Munitions Factory, in East London, explodes. Sally, who lost her home and all her possessions in the explosion, which flattened most of Silvertown, is sent to work at Gretna. But the killer, the man she can identify, is at Gretna as well. In the process of protecting Sally, Kirsty and Beatrice become embroiled with saboteurs, Irish revolutionaries, a German spy, and a killer without a conscience.
I’m not telling you any more about the story because I don’t want to spoil it for you. But Chill with a Book described it as ‘a criminally good read’.
Chris Longmuir
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