S.R. Crockett describes  Raiderland as “a garrulous literary companion for Galloway lovers and Galloway travellers.” It was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1904 by which time Crockett had been a best seller for ten years. 
 
The bare bones of Crockett's biography are fascinating. He was born in Balmaghie 1859, the illegitimate son of a dairy maid. For the first eight years of his life he was brought up by his maternal grandparents at their farm in Duchrae and was then educated in the small town of Castle Douglas. In 1876 he gained a Galloway Bursary to Edinburgh University where he began writing as a way of supporting himself as he studied. This seems to be an impressive educational trajectory and I rather wonder whether it could have been replicated in England at the same period? It's certainly a tribute to the moral and serious approach to life fostered by rural Scottish Presbyterianism. Crockett's grandparents were Cameronians - a section of the Scottish Covenanters who became a separate church after the religions settlement of 1690, refusing to take oaths of allegiance and continuing to object to the union between England and Scotland.  Scottish religious dissent and factionalism forms a major part of Crockett's fiction – especially where it's aligned with political resistance to the age-old enemy, England. It may be that there is a current political message in the republication of Crockett's oeuvre at a time when the Union is again under scrutiny. Whether or not this is so, Raiderland offers a wonderful opportunity to glimpse dissent from the inside. After his time at Edinburgh Crockett spent the best part of ten years as a Free Church minister himself, resigning in 1895 to concentrate on his writing.
 
Much of the early part of Raiderland is autobiography through landscape. Crockett recreates his childhood self (“the Boy-who-Was”) in a somewhat Wordsworthian way, mentally revisiting the landscape of his childhood and using it to rekindle memories of “those bright days when the sun had not long risen and the feeling of morning was in the blood.”
 
Here's his introduction to his grandparents' Duchrae farmhouse: "The farm I know best is also the loveliest for situation. It lies nestled in green holm crofts. The purple moors ring it half round, north and south. To the eastward pine woods once stood ranked and ready like battalions clad in indigo and Lincoln green against the rising sun – that is until one fell year when the woodmen swarmed all over the slopes and the ring of axes was heard everywhere. The earliest scent I can remember is that of fresh pine chips, among which my mother laid me as she and her brothers gathered kindling among the yet unfallen giants.”
 
His first indoor memory is of lying in his cradle in the farmhouse kitchen aware of his grandmother “padding softly about in her list slippers (or houshens), baking farles of cake on the girdle, the round plate of iron described by Foissart. The doors and windows were open and without there spread that silence in comparison with which the hush of kirkyard is almost company – the silence of a Scottish farmyard in the first burst of harvest.”
 
There is no sense that Crockett suffered any stigma for his illegitimacy or that he was anything other than a loved and cherished (though lonely) child experiencing a particular rural mixture of freedom and discipline. Raiderland proves that his senses remained wide open to natural beauty throughout his life and his imagination ranged freely backwards and forwards in historical time. That small detail of the girdle being “as described by Foissart” is indicative of Crockett's awareness of the living history that surrounded him.
 
The Galloway novels are set variously from the 15th century onwards and Crockett finds many of his characters within his native landscape. Sometimes he is explicit, linking the solitariness of his childhood to his development of imaginary people – who were often  not imaginary at all but based on the adults around him, as in the following passage: “Chiefly I love the Crae Hill because from there you get the best view of the Duchrae, where for years a certain lonely child played and about which, in after years, so many poor imaginings have worked themselves out. Here lived and loved on Winsome Charteris – also a certain Maisie Lennox, with many and many another. By the fireside night after night sat the original of Silver Sand, relating stories with that shrewd and becoming twinkle in his eye which told of humour and experience as deep as a draw-well and wide as the brown-backed moors over which he had come.”
 
At other places in the book Crockett simply segues into a relevant passage from one or other of his novels, usually with the briefest of historical notes. He tramps the hills and gazes down into the lochs of both East and West Galloway and takes the reader with him, delightfully. All of this is accessible to the English reader with no prior knowledge of the area or of Crockett's fiction. There are occasional moments when one reaches for a glossary or when he delves a little too deep for the ignorant southerner. I admit that my eyes glazed over the c18th century diary of landowner William Cunninghame but I apologise for this as a sign of my own English weakness.  Raiderland must be supremely rich for those with the relevant knowledge.

Review by Julia Jones 

Literature, it seems, is as subject to the quirks of fashion as just about every other area of human activity. S.R. Crockett was a tremendously popular novelist back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; now, barely a hundred years later, he’s much less widely known. 
 
The Black Douglas revolves around a cast of actual historical figures, including William Sixth Earl of Douglas (“The Black Douglas” of the title), and Gilles de Retz, the loopy French nobleman who fought alongside Joan of Arc before (allegedly) embarking on a life of occult rituals and murder most vile. The story unfolds against a backdrop of mediaeval Scotland (in particular, Crockett’s native Galloway) and France, and is frequently told through the eyes of the Earl’s sidekick and knight, Sholto MacKim.
 
And what a story it is, involving murder, blood-drinking, witchcraft and werewolves, no less. The Black Douglas was published in 1899, two years after Dracula first appeared, and I’d be surprised if it hadn’t been influenced by that novel to some extent. Many of the elements of Dracula are also present here: a sinister, intriguing nobleman who lives in a castle with such a blood-curdling reputation that very few people dare go there; the curious command that said nobleman has over animals, and in particular wolves; and the significance of human blood, particularly as a means of prolonging life. Indeed, anyone who has read Dracula may experience a strange sense of déjà vu when reading a particular passage in The Black Douglas, in which a woman whose child has been abducted hammers, screaming, at the castle door, pleading for his return: “Give me my boy, murderer! Restore me my son!” All that is missing is Stoker’s curious psychosexual take on his material – that, and the vampirism.
 
For de Retz is not actually a vampire, though his physical appearance brings Stoker’s Count to mind: “The upper lip was retracted, and a set of long white teeth gleamed like those of a wild beast.” Indeed, it may be that he’s simply a deluded madman, though Crockett himself suggests that there’s something genuinely supernatural underlying the story. De Retz is a curious, complex figure: unashamedly villainous, yet given to moments of charm, and even of tenderness. At times he seems to be driven by a desire for knowledge: “I have in secret pushed my researches beyond the very confines of knowledge . . . Evil and good alike shall be mine.” Despite worshipping a demon, and carrying out blood sacrifices in its honour, he is also strangely devout, to the extent of allowing a community of monks to live in his castle and spending hours at his devotions. Crockett describes him as a “good Catholic and ardent religionary.” (This, interestingly, is a feature of much Gothic fiction: a deep suspicion and dislike of Catholicism. More on this in my contribution posts for the Edinburgh Ebook Festival this summer. . .)
 
The Black Douglas also tells two love stories: the happy one between Sholto and the mischievous but ultimately sweet-natured Maud, and the altogether less happy one between William and Sybilla, the niece of Gilles de Retz, and an integral part of de Retz’s plan to ensnare William. There are traces of La Belle Dame Sans Merci in Crockett’s description of Sybilla. However, there’s also a robust streak of humour in the novel. During a tournament in which Sholto has performed well, a spectator (an armourer by trade) cries: “Well done, Sholto MacKim – well done, lad! . . . Ye shall hae a silken doublet for that! . . . At little mair than cost price!”
 
I suppose there is a sense in which it is unsurprising that The Black Douglas is less well-known these days. It’s not due to any lack of ability on the part of the author: Crockett was clearly a talented writer. It’s just that fare such as The Black Douglas is perhaps more morally earnest and melodramatic than is currently fashionable. The Black Douglas portrays a world of fair maidens, foul fiends, and unblemished heroes; but you shouldn’t let that put you off reading it. It struck me as being a little like the literary equivalent of a Pre-Raphaelite painting: a little sentimental, perhaps, but ultimately a colourful, adroit, and highly entertaining creation.

Review by Mari Biella

I’ve just finished reading “The Cherry Ribband”. Needless to say, it is my current favourite. It is set during The Killing Times of the late seventeenth century, when a deadly game of cat and mouse between the King’s Men and the Covenanters was played out across the hills and moors of South-West Scotland. While the story begins in Crockett’s beloved Galloway, much of the action takes place on the East Coast of Scotland, a territory that is certainly more familiar to this Edinburgh laddie.

To be honest, though, I’m never much bothered about the historical context and geographical settings of Crockett’s novels. It’s the writing that interests me. There are Crockett’s superb trademark descriptions of the landscape for a start. From blushing dawns over the moorland to velvety black forests at night, those descriptions never fail to move me.

Then there are the characters he brings to life. Heroes and heroines, of course. But of more interest to me are his secondary characters. In “The Cherry Ribband”, he presents us with an array of memorable players. There’s Rantin’ Rab Grier, scourge of the Covenanters. And there are the two East Coast fishermen: wily, scheming Prayerful Peter and his nephew, honest and laconic Long-bodied John. These are characters who will stay with me for a long time to come.

As will the Countess of Liddesdale, a loud, brash, courageous giant of a woman. And it’s her words that serve to illustrate a third and not less important reason why I love Crockett’s work – his masterly command of the Scots tongue. This outburst from the big lady almost had me in tears: “And what for then should I be afraid o’ wee Steevie Houston, daft or wise, guid or ill – me that could grip three Steevies in my left hand and shake them till their very banes played castanets!” So vivid. So Scottish. So perfect.

So there you have it. “The Cherry Ribband” is my current Crockett favourite. But I’m off now to peruse the great man’s catalogue for my next favourite!

Review by Brendan Gisby. 

With over seventy published works, the reader new to Crockett is so spoiled for choice that it can be hard to know where to begin. I can recommend many start points, but the easiest entry point into Crockett’s Galloway fiction still remains The Raiders.  
 
The modern reader should be aware that The Raiders is in fact the middle part of a trilogy in which the character John Faa, King of the Gypsies is ever present.   The Raiders was Crockett’s ‘breakthrough bestseller’ in 1894.  Its sequel The Dark o’ The Moon was published six years later in 1902.  The prequel, Silver Sand, was published on the day Crockett died in April 1914.  So while a reader today may still come to Crockett through The Raiders, the modern reader has options as to how to engage with the narrative beyond that afforded by original publication.
 
The Raiders is certainly a novel which grips the reader from the very opening sentence:
‘It was upon Rathan Head that I first heard their bridle-reins jingling clear.’
 
Straight away Crockett pulls us directly into the landscape:
‘This was now May, and the moon of May is the loveliest of the year, for with its brightness comes the scent of flower-buds, and of the young green leaves breaking from the quick and breathing earth.’
 
Set around the time of the Acts of Union, the purported hero of the story is the young ‘bonnet laird’ Patrick Heron. There are shades of David Balfour about him, but there are also hidden depths and other heroes in this story - not least John Faa, who is known as Silver Sand for reasons that become apparent in good time.
 
Throughout the three novels Crockett reveals a view of Scottish history unfamiliar to many.  His stock in trade is fast paced historical adventure/romance.  He tells his stories from the perspective of the underdog, the losers, the dispossessed and the ordinary Galloway folk. He also employs a device best known as ‘Scots humour’ and no one, character, narrator or author, is exempt from his biting, dry wit. Reading Crockett without embracing Scots humour is like reading Austen unaware she employs irony.
 
In The Raiders the young Patrick Heron finds himself less the hero and more the victim of a retrospective older self as narrator. He reflects:  ‘It was with me the time of wild oat sowing, when the blood ran warm.’ 
 
While it is full of fast paced adventure and not a little romance, the enduring strength of Crockett’s writing is in the natural description. He gives the Galloway hills the kind of treatment that had tourists flocking to the area when the novels were first published.  He is, indeed, credited with causing the first tourist boom in Galloway (we are still waiting for the second!)
 
The trilogy explores through generations. In The Raiders, Patrick’s story really begins with the death of his father who, as a young man, fought alongside John  Faa in what was known as ‘The Killing Times.’   These experiences are the focus of the 1914 prequel Silver Sand.
 
My personal favourite of the three novels is The Dark o’ the Moon. It moves the action on a generation from The Raiders. The hapless hero is Patrick Heron and May Maxwell’s son Maxwell Heron, who inherits both his father’s adventurous spirit and his youthful gaucheness. In this Raiders sequel Crockett plays fast and loose with time (and some say with history) utilising as his central plot a little known historical event – the Galloway Levellers Rebellion – which occurred in 1724. 
 
History aside, the opening scene is every bit as intriguing and descriptively powerful as its predecessor.   
 ‘At the Sheil of the Dungeon of Buchan – a strange place half natural cavern, the rest a rickle of rude masonry plastered like a swallow’s nest on the face of the cliff among the wildest of southern hills – this story begins.’
 
The heroine of The Dark o’ the Moon, Joyce Faa, is as feisty as her predecessor in The Raiders, May Maxwell. Women don’t usually fare well in boys’ own adventure stories but Crockett’s heroines are invariably strong and sensible. They usually give the men a run for their money and they offer the voice of reason as well as providing love interest.
 
In The Dark o’ the Moon, the romance story of kidnap and smuggling segues well with the historic events of the 1724 Rebellion. The character of Silver Sand is somewhat upstaged by his wicked brother Hector Faa, known as Black Hector.   Think of darker, more rounded versions of Stevenson’s Long John Silver and Barrie’s Captain Hook and you have Silver Sand and Hector Faa to a tee.
 
Yet while the villain very nearly steals the show in The Dark o’ The Moon, pride of place is once again reserved for the landscape. The breathless chase through the dark over the Dungeon Range of hills is a tour de force of which any writer would be proud. 
 
Crockett is every bit as much a master of natural description as Hardy, and landscape is central to his writing. He creates a sense of place which is evocative and realistic – despite his habit of shifting locations to suit his fictional purposes.  Crockett’s places are a blend of fact and fiction, and to visit them you have to use more than an Ordnance Survey map for your guide.

Crockett and his contemporary readers could never quite let the character of John Faa go and in Silver Sand we are taken back to his youth.  It perhaps fitting that the man who was there at the beginning of Crockett’s own adventure in fiction should be there at the end.  In Silver Sand Crockett once again serves up a heady mixture of history, romance and adventure – utilising and developing familiar and favourite genres while holding firm to his own unique style.  He also uses the novel to question the nature of rule of law. This is explored in three versions: gypsy, ‘Gorgio’ (secular) and religious. In each case we see that power can have a corrupting influence over supposedly social and religious matters. Silver Sand, like many ordinary people, has little real interest in religious issues, indeed he states:  ‘It is no great matter to me… whether bishop or presbytery wins out ahead – only we will not be ordered to believe this or that on the order of a King who does not believe anything.’
 
This reveals the core of a radical individualism that accurately reflects many of the Gallovidian folk past and present.

Despite their cracking pace and popular appeal, there is depth in Crockett’s writing.  These are books you can read time and again, always finding another nugget of treasure. In each story, the main plot forms only a part of the whole. The episodic nature of the narrative allows for multiple narratives and equally satisfies those with a craving for history, adventure and/or romance in their fictional fare.  Crockett challenges society and its hypocrisies head on while filling his pages with a landscape as romantic as it is bleak and uncompromising.

​In his lifetime Crockett was a bestselling popular author. Today he may hold more of a niche appeal, but he still exerts a pull on those who yearn for times past, especially those who like their action fast paced, their history unorthodox and their heroes beyond romantic.  

Review by Cally Phillips  
All the texts are available in paperback (and ebook) format from www.unco.scot (The S.R.Crockett collection), as well as from Amazon and other book retailers.
 

 
 
 

If you haven’t visited Dumfries and Galloway you’ll want to after reading this novel; if you haven’t read any other of Crockett’s novels besides “The Raiders” you’ll want to read more.
“The Raiders”, probably Crockett’s best known novel, is much more than an adventure story come historical romance.
Certainly, its storyline is straightforwardly episodic with priggish Patrick Heron a somewhat reluctant protagonist in the action. Having a first person narrator is a commonplace literary device but Crockett gives Patrick two “voices”, cleverly counterbalancing Patrick, the naïve young laird of Rathan, and Patrick, his prosaic older self.
Circumstances oblige young Patrick to come to terms with an unconventional world that features smugglers, gypsies and murderers and is populated by such larger-than-life characters as the aptly named May Mischief, the mysterious Silver Sand and the blunt Scots-speaking Lady Grizel Maxwell.
May is far from the usual “romantic” heroine. May and Patrick’s wooing is somewhat unconventional. There is an amusing side to Patrick’s rescue of May when she has been kidnapped. As May and Patrick are pursued, it is May whom Crockett provides with all the heroic speeches and actions. The latter culminates in May’s defence of the unconscious Patrick from slavering blood hounds at personal injury to herself. May gets a kiss as she and Patrick are rescued, in turn; but as Patrick declares “this was all our love-making”. Patrick’s sober comment on the matter is merely that it is “strange, considering the coil that is made about the affair in verse-books and ballads”. 
Crockett’s portrayal of the ambivalent Silver Sand is judiciously balanced.  Silver Sand is a convincing mentor to Patrick and mystery man to the reader, a man with high moral scruples yet an accomplice of ill-reputed gypsies. Crockett provides clues to Sands’ enigmatic character and his real identity. The reader discovers the latter before the slow-witted Patrick and this is both entertaining and dramatically ironic.
“The Raiders” has one of those memorably novelistic first sentences: “It was upon Rathan Head that I first heard their bridle-reins jingling clear”. The first chapter is shot through with vivid images but it is Crockett’s later set-piece descriptions that are even more intensely cinematic: the defence of Rathan’s cave against the smugglers; the stampede of the “rough red Highland and black Galloway cattle” at the bridge-head over the Dee Water; Patrick skating over the frozen lochs and, with Silver Sand, emerging from the Cave of the Aughty after an apocalyptic “sixteen drifty days” of blizzard to see “a wide world of wreathed snow”.
Throughout, Crockett capitalises on his personal knowledge of the Galloway landscape, selecting atmospheric place names with relish to suit his purpose. If you haven’t visited Dumfries and Galloway you’ll want to after reading this novel; if you haven’t read any other of Crockett’s novels besides “The Raiders” you’ll want to read more.

Review by Stewart Robertson.