Whispering Gallery, Issue 158

Two significant events, both scheduled for April, shape this issue of Whispering Gallery: the Dorothy Dunnett Centenary Gathering & Conference and the reissue of the Johnson Johnson books.

To mark the Centenary, the Dunnett family have given us permission to publish extracts from Alastair Dunnett’s biography, Among Friends. We begin with Sir Alastair’s account of meeting Dorothy Halliday, their wedding and their early life together.

Farrago, an imprint of Duckworth Books, will publish Tropical Issue (Bird of Paradise) on 13th April. The rest of the series will follow, one title per month throughout 2023. We have an introduction to the reissue of the books by Duckworth’s managing director, and we take the opportunity to publish the transcription of a 1992 talk by a member that discusses the similarities between Dunnett’s histories and detective stories, and tells us what attracts her to the Johnson Johnson mysteries.

We begin a new gorgeously illustrated series about clothing in our period. We have the first part of a talk from 1996 on the structure and style employed in writing The House of Niccolò, and we join the search for Gardington.

Contents

• The Chairman’s Column
• Trustees’ Notice Board
• Solver of Ciphers and Maker of Codes: the Cryptic and the Cryptological
• A Carpentry Culture
• ‘What am I missing?’, part 5
• Reading Lymond: A Child’s Perspective
• The Plan de Bâle, part 4
• ‘Collapse’
• Güzel and the Bektashi Tradition
• Wrapping Up Dunnett
• A Dunnett Lexicon
• Members’ Page
• Talking Point
• A Close Read
• That’s Relevant!

Published March 2023