Erchie, My Droll Friend

Erchie, My Droll Friend is Neil Munro’s collection of comic sketches featuring Erchie MacPherson, a Glasgow waiter and beadle whose dry observations on Scottish life and on the various Glasgow worthies he encounters at his various jobs gave Munro one of his most popular characters. The Erchie sketches were originally published in the Glasgow Evening News, where Munro worked as a journalist and editor for many years, and were eventually collected into book form for an audience that had been following Erchie’s adventures column by column.

Neil Munro is best known to many readers for his comic Para Handy stories about the eccentric crew of the puffer steamboat Vital Spark plying the waters of the Clyde and the Western Isles. The Erchie sketches share with the Para Handy stories Munro’s gift for Scottish dialect, his ear for the rhythms of working class Scottish speech, and his eye for the small comedies of ordinary urban life. Where Para Handy gave Munro the rural Highland and coastal world to work with, Erchie gave him the urban Glasgow setting where Munro himself spent most of his working life.

Erchie speaks in a thick Glasgow Scots that some readers will find delightful and others will need to take their time with. Munro renders the dialect with the kind of accuracy that gives the prose its particular flavor. The sketches typically follow a small comic incident that Erchie observes or participates in at one of his various jobs, with his commentary providing both the humor and the wider social observation. The Glasgow that Erchie moves through is the Glasgow of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, a major industrial city with all of the social complexity that came with that position.

For readers interested in Scottish humor, in the Glasgow literary tradition, or in Neil Munro’s catalogue beyond the Para Handy stories, Erchie is essential. The collection is a fair sample of Munro’s comic writing and includes some of his sharpest character work. Modern readers who enjoy J.M. Barrie’s comic Scottish work, the Whisky Galore novels of Compton Mackenzie, or the broader tradition of Scottish humor will find Erchie squarely in the same neighborhood.