MY MOD HERO
Author brings ground-bre from her hit debut nove show how much Scotlan
It’s 20 years since Rilke, a gay auctioneer with one foot in Glasgow’s seamy underbelly, first skulked through the city.
He was the unlikely hero of Louise Welsh’s first novel, The Cutting Room, finding alarming pictures of a dead woman while he was clearing a house, then using his underworld contacts to solve her murder.
Now Louise, 56, has caught up with him again. In The Second Cut, he is still slouching around in a long coat and dead men’s brogues. Rilke, she insists, “is never going to adopt the fleece”. He is older, but it’s not clear by how much. This is deliberate. The writer wanted to avoid Ian Rankin’s mistake of letting his creation age in real time.
“I’ve done the opposite of Rebus,” Louise said. “Ian now wishes he hadn’t done that. I wanted Rilke to have the same energy and still be as physically able.
“He was always an old soul anyway. I didn’t feel the need to make him any older. It’s the world that has changed.”
So 2022’s Rilke finds partners on his phone rather than by cruising in Kelvingrove Park. At work he fields bids on computer screens as well as from dealers with paddles in the auction room. But he’s still a loner who, against his better judgement, gets dragged into other people’s sticky stuff. This time a friend points him towards a lucrative house clearance in a creepy pile in the Borders. Within days, he is dead in a doorway. Turns out the creepy pile is full of dark secrets as well as questionable paintings and the story twists through trans rights protests, modern slavery and a drug-fuelled men-only orgy.
One reason Louise wanted to revisit Rilke was to show how much life has changed for gay Scots like herself. She wrote The Cutting Room during the campaign to keep Clause 28, which made it an offence for schools and local authorities to promote homosexuality. “It was written with anger,” she recalled. Yet the book itself does not feel furious and doesn’t mention the hated legislation. She said this is because “writing it cheered me up”.
To point up the contrast, The Second Cut opens at a gay wedding. She explained: “I knew from the very beginning I wanted to star t with equal marriage – I wanted to show that change and also something that’s joyful. Even t o d a y, qu e e r relationships are viewed as being more transitory than st raight ones.”
She knew it
Anna Burnside
wouldn’t be Rilke tying the knot. She said: “He is a transitory type of guy. But I wanted to start with an image of two people who had been together for a really long time.
“It’s a celebration, a recognition of the change. Who would have thought this would ever happen?”
When she wrote The Cutting Room, Louise was a student on Glasgow University’s prestigious creative writing course. She ran a secondhand bookshop, Dowanside Books.
The novel was a huge success, earning slavering reviews and several prizes. Publishers pushed for a sequel at the time but she held back. “I didn’t feel I had anything to add,” she said. “There was always something I wanted to write more.”
She thought she might copy Patricia Highsmith, one of her favourite writers, who returns to her character Tom Ripley once ever y decade. But somehow 2012 came and went with no sign of Rilke.
Then in 2018 the Saltire Awa rds named The Cutting Room the most inspiring first novel in the awards’ 30- year history. Clause 28 was long forgotten and banks and building societies f ly the ra inbow f la g dur ing Pr ide month. It was t ime to plot Rilke’s return.
She knew it would not be easy. Louise said: “I really admire people who do series – Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Chr istopher Brookmy re. These are really hard things to do – w r i t e books people want to come ba ck t o , to honour those characters, honou r t he reader, still make it interesting. It’s the same world but still fresh. This
is what I wantedwante to do.” Returning to Rilke’s world of dusty brown furniture and the detritus of others’ lives was like coming home.
These days Louise is a professor on the creative writing course where she was once a student. The Second Cut fits together like a handmade jigsaw. It’s a literary novel with murder at its heart rather than an old- school detective novel.
Professor Welsh, however, is happy to be called a crime writer.
She said: “Why would I mind? I’m honoured, plus what nice people you get to hang around with. I wrote that first book partly out of fandom to the detective genre.
“Crime and gothic fiction [her other great love] come from the same roots – fear and desire. Everything comes down to love, money and power. It’s just the emphasis that is slightly different.
“I like turning the gas up on the gothic because it’s fun. I still have the same ambition as I had then – I want people to feel something.”
The Second Cut has a depth and texture that is missing in many slighter detective stories. She says this is one reason she loves writing about the world of antiques.
“Rilke knows the provenance of everything, what things are made of, why a particular table might be in that place. I like that he’s allowed to know that. If I had a character who was a professor, there would have to be a reason for him to know all that – I couldn’t just throw that in.”
When it came to researching the logistics of wild sex parties and forced labour, she spoke to friends, then friends of friends, and used her impressive powers of deduction to fill in any gaps that were left.
She said: “I have my own idea about how something might work. I have Google, I ask people. Sometimes, when I can’t find out, I use logic to unpick it.”
She applies the same powers of reasoning to f iguring out Wordle every morning.
She said: “I am really annoyed if I don’t get it in three.”
So, will we meet Rilke again in 2042? Louise does not rule this out.
She added: “I certainly intend to be around for the next 20 years. Rilke would be doing all the same things – but with a self- driving car.”