Product Description

Para Handy has been sailing his way into the affections of generations of Scots since he first weighed anchor in the pages of the Glasgow Evening News nearly a hundred years ago. The Master Mariner and his crew - Dougie the Mate, Macphail the Engineer, Sunny Jim and The Tar - all play their part in evoking the irresistible atmosphere of a bygone age when puffers sailed between West Highland ports and the great city of Glasgow. This definitive edition contains all three collections published in the author's lifetime, as well as a new story never previously published. Extensive notes accompany each story, providing fascinating insights into colloquialisms, place-names and historical events. This volume also includes a wealth of contemporary photographs, depicting the harbours, steamers and puffers from the age of the Vital Spark. This edition includes one further story, which was discovered in 2001.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74526 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 462 pages

Review
'... will delight readers old and new' - Scots Magazine 'A fine collection from Birlinn... really well-presented, introduced and edited... light-hearted but exemplary in scholarship... a delightful large volume' - Douglas Gifford, Books in Scotland

About the Author
Neil Munro was born in 1863. He followed a career in journalism, eventually becoming editor of the Glasgow Evening News. He achieved great success as a poet and novelist, writing masterpieces of historical fiction such as John Splendid and The New Road as well as the humorous tales of Para Handy, Erchie and Jimmy Swan. Neil Munro died in 1930.

Customer Reviews

Whimsy you can use.
I don't know if you have to be Scottish to get this. I am Scottish and I have always got it.

What you have here is a collection of short stories written early in the 20th Century about the crew of a "Clyde Puffer" - a small coastal boat plying its trade from the Clyde and out into the Western Isles of Scotland.

For me there are parrallels with Damon Runyon, but the humour is gentler and the setting rural.

There are comic situations but most of all there is comedy of character. These are brilliantly observed people.

A lot of the action is topical to the time of writing. The stories first appeared in a newspaper after all.

Its sad to think that the author was not particularly proud of these stories, and considered them as junk. He tried really hard to make it as a serious historical novelist - in vain.

But ironically his name lives on in Scotland and beyond for these daft wee sketches of men conniving gently against each other.

If Dougie was here he would tell you himself.

Return to an old favourite
This is a very nice edition of the Para handy tales, the West of Scotland dialect is lovely, the humour gentle, each story is a treasure. This edition comes with some explanatory text and pictures of the similar boats and some of the harbours. A map would have been nice, but a lovely book all the same.

Chust sublime!
Captain Peter Macfarlane (aka Para Handy) and his ship SS Vital Spark (smertest ship in the tred) have been making Scots laugh for almost a hundred years, and it's about time the rest of us caught on. Shrewdly observed character humour (leavened with topical gags that may need footnotes nowadays) are the staple of these classic short stories by Neil Munro. They evoke the long-gone world of the Clyde steamers and the men who sailed them. The humour is wry rather than laugh out loud, but the cumulative effect is most enjoyable. "We put into Greenock for marmalade, and did we no stay three days?"