Welsh crime wave

Aug 20 2010 by Gregor White, Stirling Observer Friday

WITH her cheery smile and gentle speaking voice Louise Welsh seems an unlikely candidate for the title of Scottish crime queen.

Since the publication of The Cutting Room in 2002, however, she has been thrilling readers not just here but around the world with some of that genre’s most original fiction.

Not for her the tried and tested route of an ever-recurring character à la Rebus, as each of her four novels to date stand splendidly on their own merits.

That aforementioned first work followed a promiscuous auctioneer who comes into possession of a set of disturbing photographs.

Follow-up Tamberlaine Must Die was a murder mystery set in Elizabethan London, while the Berlin cabaret inspired third outing The Bullet Trick.

In some ways Naming the Bones, published earlier this year, is her most conventional yet, set entirely in Scotland and following academic Murray Watson as he investigates the life of an obscure poet, with no idea of the applecarts he’s about to upset in doing so.

Chunkier than its predecessors it’s also slower to build, with Louise admitting she previously tended to favour the “Ka-boom!” approach to plot.

“It was like I was on the run from the start and just kept running,” she says.

“In this instance I wanted people to get to know Murray, get to know the setting, be intrigued by him and even have an affection for him – so when things start to go off kilter there’s a sympathy.”

Shifting from Edinburgh to the west coast island of Lismore the author’s sense of fun - “it’s a hard book that doesn’t have any humour in it” - is perhaps particularly evident in the Wicker Man whiffs that start to emanate at this point.

It’s also suggestive of the full blown horror novel that remains an outstanding literary ambition - “though by horror I don’t mean a shlock horror, not blood and gore”.

The Gothic tag is one that has long attached to her and that she seems pretty comfortable with.

As she says: “Gothic is about sensation, about feeling - and what writer doesn’t want their readers to feel things?

“I definitely like lifting stones and looking underneath them too!”

In Naming the Bones it’s the academic world that is subject to her scrutiny, the stereotypical view of professorial straight-lacedness thrown over in favour of much hard drinking and even a spot of voyeuristic naughtiness.

It’s more of that trademark humour though serious intent is also evident when she adds: “I think the academic world is an interesting one and I worry now that it’s becoming too much like big business.

“Of course you want people to be efficient and all of that, but I think part of what academics really need, whether they’re in sciences or literature or whatever, is the space to have leaps of the imagination. I think that’s being lost a bit and I wanted to look at that in the novel as well.”

The one-time history graduate who went on to run her own secondhand bookshop before achieving literary success insists she was “not a very good student” herself.

Academia’s loss is literature’s gain though, the large amounts of alone-time writing requires suiting Louise to the ground.

She said: “Writing is like exercise really – I don't always enjoy it, but I feel better for having done it and quite bad when I'm not doing it!”.