I read widely and voraciously, which means it’s difficult to choose only five of my favourite books – so I’m going to cheat and start with a series or two.
1. Miss Blaine’s Prefect series by Olga Wojtas. Shona is a proud former pupil of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. Impeccably educated and an accomplished martial artist, linguist and musician, Shona is delighted when selected by Marcia Blaine herself to travel back in time for a series of missions. Whether in Tzarist Russia, fin de siècle France or Macbeth’s Scotland, matters rarely go her way and there are misunderstandings galore to be resolved whilst ensuring she doesn’t fall prey to a murderer.
2. Almost any novel by the comic genius PG Wodehouse is worth reading, but I’m particularly fond of his Blandings series. Beginning in 1915, they tell the story of life in a rural castle. The eccentric Lord Emsworth, the ninth Earl of Emsworth, is obsessed with his pig, the Empress of Blandings, a multi-prize winner in the Fat Pigs class at the local Agricultural Shows, and fails to notice the many melodramatic events involving his family.
3. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. A charming and witty coming of age novel told through the journal of Cassandra Mortmain, who lives with her family in genteel poverty in a cold and crumbling castle during the 1930s. Who could not like a story that begins I write this sitting in the kitchen sink? I’d always wanted to live in a castle and when my family and I moved to the north of Scotland I came close: an eight-bedroomed Georgian house on four storeys. It was dilapidated with only the middle two floors even vaguely habitable, but I was more than happy. Unlike the Mortmains, we didn’t have to sell off the furniture to buy food, but we did send out the children to pick tatties (potatoes) in the school holidays.
4. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons is a glorious satire on the romanticised, doom-laden novels of rural life which were popular in the 1930s. The cheerful young heroine Flora Poste has been expensively educated to do everything but earn her own living. When she is orphaned at the age of twenty, she goes to live with her relatives, the Starkadders, at dreary Cold Comfort Farm and sets out to bring order to their chaotic lives. Our own semi-derelict Georgian house in the country came with ‘something nasty in the woodshed.’ Whatever was the cause of Aunt Ada Doom’s traumatic experience, in our case it was rats. And not just in the woodshed; they were also in the house. One memorable night we woke to the sound of a rat splashing about in the recently-installed en suite lavatory. Sadly I never met any cows with the names Graceless, Aimless, Feckless, and Pointless, but at least I didn’t have to clean the dishes with a clettering stick.
5. Writing cosy crime means I’m not keen on novels depicting graphic violence, but I do enjoy psychological thrillers. My current favourite is The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware. Lo Blacklock is a travel journalist who goes on the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise ship for an assignment in the Norwegian fjords. She witnesses what she believes to be woman being thrown overboard, yet all the passengers remain accounted for and no one on the ship believes her. As with a number of Agatha Christie’s novel, my favourite of these being And Then There Were None, this is a murder mystery with a group of people trapped in a dangerous environment. Thrilling stuff.
Lydia Travers was born in London. She moved progressively north until settling with her husband in a village on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. She has raised children, bred dogs and kept chickens; and for as long as she can remember has written for pleasure. A former legal academic and practitioner with a PhD in criminology, she now runs self-catering holiday accommodation, sings in a local choir and is walked daily by the family dog.
Lydia also writes as Linda Tyler and her first novel under that name, Revenge of the Spanish Princess, won a 2018 Romance Writers of America competition for the beginning of an historical romance. Her second novel The Laird’s Secret was Commended in the 2021 Scottish Association of Writers’ Pitlochry Quaich competition for the beginning of a romantic novel. Mischief in Midlothian won the 2022 Scottish Association of Writers’ Constable Silver Stag trophy. She has had a number of short stories published in magazines, journals and anthologies in the UK, the USA and Australia.
