RIP Catherine Aird (1930-2024), Silver Age Crime Queen

Catherine Aird, who died ten days ago at the age of 94 from a massive stroke, was one of the notable figures of the British Silver Age of Detective Fiction, as I call it (I don't know whether it's caught on with anyone else yet), roughly from 1940 to 1990.  The Silver Age gets little attention relative to the Golden Age, though it produced a host of wonderful crime writers, like (aside from Aird) Edmund Crispin, Julian Symons, Andrew Garve, Michael Gilbert, HRF Keating, Elizabeth Ferrars, Christianna Brand, Patricia Moyes, PD James, Ruth Rendell, Sara Woods, Joyce Porter, Anne Morice, Margaret Yorke, Peter Lovesey, Reginald Hill, Simon Brett and Robert Barnard.

monument commemorating
Catherine Aird's parents 
and brother in Rosskeen
Churchyard, Scotland

The oldest writers in this distinguished cohort actually began writing mystery  fiction in the early years of the Second World War, when the younger writers in the group, like Peter Lovesey, were but children.  Simon Brett, the baby of the group, as far as I know, is actually a baby boomer and still in his seventies. 

Catherine Aird published her first detective novel, The Religious Body, at the age of 35 in 1966.  It received high praise at the time as a detective novel in the classic genteel British mold.  Over the next 57 years, she went on to publish 25 additional detective novels, the last of which, Constable Country, appeared just last year.  In his tribute  last week to Aird, Martin Edwards mentions visiting her two or three years ago, when she was enthusiastically working on this book.  A successful mystery writer for nearly sixty years--that puts Aird in select company, like the great Agatha Christie herself, as well as Peter Lovesey and the late James and Rendell.  

I started reading Aird back in the 1990s, as I did other Silver Agers.  Between 1966 and 1969 she had a great initial run with The Religious Body, A Most Contagious Game, Henrietta Who? and The Complete Steel (aka The Stately Home Murder, once American publishers retitled it), all Silver Age classics of the genre, before coming somewhat a cropper, in my estimation, with A Late Phoenix (1970), reviewed by me here four years ago.  But that was her fifth book in five years, everybody needs refreshing after a jag.  

After three years came her locked room mystery (Aird was a great fan of this mystery subgenre) His Burial Too (1973) and the author had another nice run with a total of eight more books in the 1970s and 1980s, all of which, I believe, were reprinted in Bantam Books' Murder Most British series, which one could still easily find in used bookstores in the United States back when I use to haunt the shops back in the 1990s.  

Catherine Aird (1930-2024)

I kind of lost touch with Aird after that, though in the internet age I used to pick up copies of her books on occasion.  She published thirteen more from 1990 onward, as well as three books of short stories, though I think her popularity diminished somewhat, as the genteel British detective novel fell out of critical fashion.  

The late Rue Morgue Press reprinted several of the author's older detective novels in the first decade of 21st century, usually depicting on their covers photos of quaint village churches, and then along came the eBooks. Much of Aird's work is readily available today in nice eBook editions.  

Catherine Aird, I think it's safe to say, is one of the survivors.

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The real name of "Catherine Aird," who was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire in 1930, was Kinn Hamilton McIntosh--it won't surprise you to learn that her medical practitioner father was a native Scotsman.  Her mother, Violet Jessie Kinnis, was herself half Scottish, the daughter of John Kinnis, a dry cleaner in St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex whose parents were born in Scotland.  

Kinn derived her Christian name from her mother's surname "Kinnis."  She derived her pen name Catherine Aird from a great-great grandmother after an incredulous publisher ordered her, as she divulged to an interviewer, "to go away and get myself a name that people would recognize [either] as a man or a woman."  No sexual ambiguity for mystery readers!

Kinn also had an elder brother, Munro, who was born in 1921 and died in 2012 at age ninety.  Her family all are buried at Rosskeen Churchyard in Rosskeen, a parish tucked away in the Scottish highlands.  

Kinn's father, Robert Aeneas Cameron McIntosh, graduated from the University of Edinburgh and 1922 and that same year was listed on the medical register.  He was only 22.  The year before he and Violet, who was slightly younger than he, produced Kinn's elder brother, Munro, though apparently they didn't actually marry (in Sussex) until 1929, a year and a half before Kinn was born.  Now there's an interesting circumstance.

Rosskeen Parish Church (now closed)
In the churchyard, which is still in use, Catherine Aird's immediate family lies buried.

The new husband and wife moved north with their son to Huddersfield, where Kinn was born.  She grew up and attended school in Huddersfield until she was sixteen (1946), when she became seriously sick.  When she recovered later that year she went to live with her parents back in southeastern England at the village of Sturry near Canterbury, where she served as her father's practice manager and dispenser and was active in the Girl Guides.  Did they move back south for their daughter's health?

They parents and their daughter lived at a big house, Invergordon, near the railway station at the bottom of Sturry Hill.  The home was named after a town in the Scottish Highlands.  Here Dr. McIntosh maintained, with Kinn's help, his surgery.  The author herself later recalled that she had planned to become a doctor before she her problematic health setback.  She apparently lived here, dispensing, girl guiding and, most importantly for mystery fans, writing, for literally the rest of her life--nearly eighty years!  

Aeneas Mackintosh
(1879-1916)

Kinn McIntosh recalled being an inveterate mystery fan during her childhood in Yorkshire during the Second World War.  (Did she ever run across future crime writer Sara Woods, who lived fifteen miles north of Huddersfield in Bradford?)  

Being a huge mystery reader, Kinn was thrilled when her library in Huddersfield allowed patrons to check out a dozen books at a time.  She read everything from English thrillers to the Crime Queens to American hard-boiled.  

Was Kinn McIntosh related to Scotswoman Elizabeth MacKintosh, aka Josephine Tey?  Her lauded mystery novel A Most Contagious Game (1967) is definitely an homage to Tey's The Daughter of Time.  

I get the feeling everyone in Scotland is related to some degree.  If you're Clan Mackintosh, for example, you're connected, even if you spell the name differently.  Especially if you're named Aeneas.  

How common in Scotland is the name Aeneas, one of the Christian names of Kinn's father?  It seems a distinctly favored name by McIntosh men.  There was a Captain Aeneas Mackintosh of Mackintosh, for example, a canny laird who was active in the Jacobite Rising of 1745.  Then there was handsome, intrepid Aeneas Mackintosh, one of the members of the famed Shackleton Antarctic Expedition.  

Unlike that poor, brave, ill-fated fellow, who died heroically but futilely at the untimely age of 36, Kinn McIntosh, aka Catherine Aird, though she never married lived a long, creatively productive life of nearly ten full decades.  As with Aeneas, Aird's name will live on after her, through her charming, long-running crime fiction saga. 

Rosskeen Stone