Scottish historical thriller bloody fab

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/08/2022 (1495 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Helen Crowther is blissfully unaware that she’ll soon find a murdered body when she sets out for her first day as a doctors’ almoner on that fine 1948 Edinburgh morning when the National Health Service is born.

Helen and her husband Sandy share a crowded tenement with her disapproving parents and her obnoxious sister — the working poor living in abject poverty.

Helen’s family thinks she’s way out of line for pretentiously trying to rise above her station by taking work with two doctors running a clinic, one about to be overrun, once the impoverished hordes of Edinburgh realize there is no charge to access the NHS.

But finding the body is only a few hours away.

An almoner?

Not really explained, but if you took all the clerical duties Miss Higgins splendidly performs at the clinic in Call the Midwife, and combined that with all the community education and welfare checks the midwives carry out, you get the general idea.

The doctors astonish Helen by offering her the use of a vacant flat — reasoning that she shouldn’t be living among the patients. Not, it goes without saying, that the flat might contain some secrets.

And we’re getting to Helen’s finding the body in the garden shed.

In Place of Fear is a heavy-duty, grimly serious murder mystery superbly written by California-based Scottish author Catriona McPherson, who has a PhD in linguistics and who has written 15 much lighter novels of historical fiction. Nothing light here — nae even a wee bit.

The dead woman in the shed is immediately dismissed by the police as a suicide, even though it’s clearly evident she was killed elsewhere and dumped in the shed. Helen can’t get anyone to listen, even though she thinks she recognizes the dead young woman whom the police insist on IDing as a notorious lowlife from Glasgow.

Why would a prominent judge offer up his own posh car to carry the body to the mortuary, questions Helen. And why would aforesaid judge say the body was taken back to Glasgow, when it’s lying in a locker in the Edinburgh morgue?

Let’s leave it there for the details.

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill whodunit — anything but. What In Place of Fear is, definitely, is marvellous.

Helen and Sandy were betrothed before the war, but he was captured pretty early on and spent the war in a Stalag. Almost six years a POW, Sandy can’t abide being inside — he’s content to push a municipal dustcart around the cobblestone streets, being outside at every opportunity.

And for all the grief Helen gets about not yet having produced any bairns, it’s not clear whether she and Sandy have even consummated their marriage, so strong is his PTSD.

In Place of Fear is about many things: poverty, abusive working-class men, powerful men who are above the law, so many downtrodden people ignorant of so many basic biological facts of life, institutionalized misogyny, despicable elite men who use girls as they will and then toss them aside like…

But also of decency in the most unexpected places.

As Helen struggles against all odds to solve the murder, In Place of Fear is above all else a love song to the National Health Service. McPherson reminds us why our health-care systems are so precious, all the while spinning a crackerjack of a mystery.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin strongly recommends visiting the People’s Palace in Glasgow to see what working-class poverty was really like in Britain.