WINTER

Silent snow.

Scottish crime novelist McDermid is best known for her uncompromisingly realistic “Tartan Noir” detective stories, featuring the down and out, the violent, and the vain. But pick up this book, and you’d never know it. This is a sweet, reflective memoir on the cold season in Scotland. McDermid remembers “guising,” a kind of proto-Halloween tradition of dressing up in late October. She recalls Guy Fawkes Day bonfires. She luxuriates in the warmth of Christmas hearths. Edinburgh itself becomes a personality: “a city addicted to the crash, bang, wallop that goes with the heavenly glamour cascading down Castle Rock from the Esplanade to the gardens below. The city doesn’t confine itself to 5 November nor does it wait for winter—on every night of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo during the festival month of August the sound of fireworks reverberates through the city centre.” There is an easy domesticity to the reflections here. “Winter means soup,” and in paragraphs of recipes and memories of meals, McDermid writes a story of her own creative life. Writing is like cooking. As her Scottish mother says, “There isnae a recipe” for soup. “More a rummage.” And so, we rummage through her childhood, as each holiday and farm and street corner go deep into the stockpot, simmered until they blend into a heady literary broth. Illustrated with charming woodcuts, with just over a hundred pages of large type, the book is a warm bowl, fit for an hour by the fire. Readers of McDermid’s fiction may miss the blood and anger of crime. Instead, here, you can almost hear the carolers amid the snow and pan across the quiet fields.

An endearing panorama of Scottish winters, told by a crime novelist on holiday from horror.