Mister Duffy Changes Trains

Little Worlds Have you read a book called The Sittaford Mystery , by Agatha Christie? It’s a standalone novel, not one of the Poirot or Marple series. It is a murder mystery, the plot is an intriguing one, and the solution to the mystery, while banal, makes perfect sense. But its real attraction is the setting. It is midwinter in a little settlement of half a dozen or so houses on Dartmoor, the snow is coming and the place will soon be completely isolated. A gathering of neighbours messing about with a Ouija board receive a message that a friend in Exhampton, the nearest town, is dead. There are no telephones in Sittaford, and Major Burnaby decides to brave the oncoming snow to walk the six miles over moorland to check up on his friend. The book isn’t Aggie’s best, but the first few pages, introducing this little world of Sittaford, up on the moor and separated by the weather from civilisation, are very intriguing. The reader is hooked in minutes. I have pretensions to being well read,...

                                                   Dunfermline City Chambers, an iconic Fife view Me and the Queen We all knew that the Queen was very old and that she had to die sometime soon. However, she had gone on so long that we tended to think of her as permanent, so that for many people, myself included, her death came as something of a surprise. Between around 2005 and 2017, I wrote a series of stories featuring a small boy called Bill, growing up in Fife in the 1960’s and 1970’s. They related fictionalised events in my own childhood, and were written for the benefit of my children, Bill and Tom. I suspect Bill and Tom didn’t find them particularly interesting, but they were fun to write, and my great friend Kevin Connelly printed and bound them very attractively so that I could give Bill and Tom respectable hard copies r...