Highland Laddie Gone

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When I am not writing mysteries I am a regional scholar, and as such I am particularly concerned with cultural patterns, dialect, etc. Therefore, when I decided to have three Scots as main characters in this book, I consulted the real thing. Dr. Gavin Faulkner, who turned out to be Scotland’s answer to Henry Higgins, guided me through hours of research, provided invaluable material on dialects, and even went along to a few Highland games to test my cultural theories. I couldn’t have done it without him.

I am also grateful to Dr. Alan Haddow (Colonel Pickering to Gavin’s Higgins) for being more help to a writer than one could reasonably expect of an engineer, and to Marcia Romano and Stephen Goldie for their help with Glaswegian. The Scots-Americans at the various Highland festivals have without exception been friendly and helpful to me in researching my book-even the Campbells. Most of the aberrations depicted herein are purely imaginary, but the cultural observations are as accurate as I was able to make them.