Heather Critchlow has never forgotten moving to the north-east as a child when she and her family lived in their grandparents’ croft for six months before converting an old steading in Pitcaple in the foothills of Bennachie.
And it was a place which soon became special to Heather, who has just written a new crime novel Unsolved, which often draws on her early experiences in Aberdeenshire.
Although she went to school in Aberdeen, the youngster occupied a lot of her spare time riding a neighbour’s horses and roaming the woods and fields around her.
She loved the little hidden pockets of woodland or hillside, “where no one ever goes”, and the seeds for a literary career were sown from an early age. As she recalled: “These secret places have a real isolation to them – no one would hear you scream!”
Remote location perfect for novel
So when she started on her book, she knew she wanted to feature a true crime podcaster investigating a forgotten case in a remote rural location – and it proved an easy decision to revisit myriad places she had loved, albeit with some artistic licence.
From the age of 14, Heather had a part-time job as a waitress at Pittodrie House Hotel and a similar building appears in the pages of Unsolved. Before she goes missing, her character, Layla has the varied tasks of setting tables in a library and clearing glasses as wedding guests dance late into the night in the magical ballroom. And the chefs live in a row of cottages on the estate, next to woods exquisitely carpeted with bluebells.
However, as the author said: “Fortunately, the sinister cast of characters who I have imagined bears no resemblance to the people I worked with.”
Bennachie’s secret waterfall
Another location in her work is inspired by the ‘secret’ waterfall of Bennachie, where the ruin of a 19th-century Fog House sits. It’s a transcendent spot in the woods below the Mither Tap and, after Heather stumbled across it one day as a teenager, the memory of it has stayed in her heart ever since.
She said she has made it a little bigger than it is in real life, and there’s no stone folly but the idea came from here.
Heather pointed out that while storms have now felled so many trees it is almost inaccessible, it is possible to find it if you know where to look – she said it is “definitely worth the trip.”
The same can be said of her novel with its imaginative plotting and it’s hardly surprising that Heather is an aficionado of podcasts and talks merrily about her favourites, which include: Up and Vanished, The Teacher’s Pet, The Strange Death of Innes Ewart, West Cork, Culpable, Down the Hill: the Delphi Murders and The Clearing.
She’s in her element whether it’s in the cold – there was one particularly frozen winter which she enjoyed in her childhood – or with cold cases. And this new work is a cracker.
Unsolved is published by Canelo.