Golf into Fiction

“A Great Opportunity”

When the Manchester Guardian reported Auchterlonie’s record round of 71 in August 1897 — played as a three-ball match alongside Crockett — it added a pointed suggestion: that Crockett had “a great opportunity to clothe it with the flesh of picturesque descriptions.” The invitation went largely unanswered. Despite years of daily play on the Old Course, golf appears in only two of Crockett’s works. 

The first is The Grey Man (1896), set on the Ayrshire coast with Maybole Green named as the golf course. Chapters 29 and 44 place the action on the links, but given the timing it is likely that St Andrews was the direct inspiration for the terrain and atmosphere, despite the stated setting. Crockett was playing regularly at St Andrews while writing the novel, and his method relied on close observation from nature. He treated the subject with characteristic humour. When his narrator attempts to raise the alarm about a murder, a bystander holds up a hand for silence: “it was the putting stroke which his neighbour played, and of its kind difficult, so that men held their breath.”  

The second is Sandy’s Loves (1913), a semi-autobiographical late work set at Leith Links and Portrush — not St Andrews. Here, the golfer is McComie, one of Crockett’s characteristically forthright female characters, who joins a group of male players and is three up at the turn before anyone realises she has been beating the club champion on his own course.