The Herald - The Herald Magazine
In seamy streets, the lots thicken
Louise Welsh’s gavel-wielding sleuth makes a welcome return to Glasgow
Louise Welsh Canongate, £14.99
IT is 20 years since Rilke, the streetwise, gay Glasgow auctioneer, last banged his gavel. When he first appeared, in Louise Welsh’s multiaward-winning novel, The Cutting Room, he was an original: a fresh and engaging presence in the all-too cliched crime genre. Not surprisingly, perhaps, in 2018 Welsh’s literary debut was publicly voted the Most Inspiring Saltire First Book.
In that arresting appearance, Rilke turned amateur detective after discovering snuff photos of a young woman while clearing a Glasgow villa. The core of the drama revolved around the white slave trade, but much else was uncovered in passing, as Welsh’s narrator traced the source of the picture. Now in The Second Cut, its long-awaited sequel, there is slavery of another sort, both historic and presentday. The circles of misery and vice it uncovers are no less shocking.
Much has changed in the intervening decades besides Rilke, who is now in his late 40s and gaunter than ever: “I am too tall, too thin, too cadaverous to look like anything other than a vampire on the make.” It’s an appropriate image, the night being where he is most at home. These days, though, his casual hook-ups are more often arranged by Grindr than by a stroll in the park after dusk.
Nevertheless, the era of gay repression and oppression in which he grew up is hard to forget, and Rilke bears the mental scars: “I could remember the days when a look in the wrong direction would earn you a kicking or even cost you your life … Whatever app I used, I had never quite managed to disentangle sex and danger.”
While Rilke has aged, society has evolved, growing more diverse, openminded and quick to challenge discrimination. Even so, the sunny uplands of full equality and respect for those whose sexuality or identity are not traditional are a long way off.
Part of The Second Cut’s appeal is the cameo it offers of Glasgow and its flourishing, occasionally flamboyant, sometimes sleazy LGBTQ+ scene, which Welsh depicts with fond and infectious brio. Early on, there’s a demonstration in George Square against a TERF, who stands accused of hate speech: “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, right?” asks Rilke, rather clumsily acting as tutor for readers needing a reminder of gender identity acronyms.
This ever-expanding and vocal community sometimes overlaps with the city’s criminal fraternity who, unlike some of Rilke’s chums, prefer to keep a low profile. The product pushed by drug barons and their lackeys can cost lives, either by enraged dealer, overdose, or countless other permutations of risk.
Rilke is to discover just how close these tangential worlds can become. On the first page, at a wedding, he meets Jojo, a long-time friend who occasionally supplies Bowery Auctions, where Rilke is head auctioneer, with goods. Rilke notes how rough-looking he has become:
“He made me think of a man who, after years of carefully crossing at traffic lights, had decided to fling himself across a three-lane motorway without bothering to look left or right.”
Before Jojo heads off for an afternoon orgy – Rilke makes his excuses – he offers a lucrative tip-off about a house whose contents are about to be sold off. He also slips a bottle that promises “sexual energy” into Rilke’s pocket. It’s a gift to pep up the newlyweds’ honeymoon, but he urges caution: “It can knock you dead if you don’t take care.” Not surprisingly, when he is found dead in a doorway a few hours later, the easy assumption is that drugs were his undoing.
When Jojo’s flatmate, an obnoxious art-school student, asks for Rilke’s help in clearing his effects, the plot fires up. Beneath the general junk lies a large stash of bottles like the one
Jojo gave Rilke. The urgent need to get this consignment back to its rightful owner before he comes calling is the start of a cascade of increasingly threatening events.
These take Rilke and his colourful associates from a dodgy house clearance in the wilds of Dumfries and Galloway, to a drug-fuelled male orgy in Glasgow city centre (which Welsh describes with memorable panache).
The Cutting Room offered an indelible portrait of the loucher side of
Glasgow, which had rarely before been so persuasively drawn. Welsh’s mission, if that is the right word, to record and commemorate its less trumpeted denizens continues here. Also notable is the quality of her writing, which has grown more powerful and effective with every book.
Her skill with plot, character, dialogue and atmosphere fuses the disparate elements into a wholly convincing depiction of a city where glamour and danger, hope and despair, beauty and horror, are frequent partners.
Setting her story in the wake of the worst of the pandemic, Welsh takes advantage of this upheaval to explain the arrival of ferocious new predators in already treacherous waters: “Covid had taken a big bite from the criminal ranks. The virus had not been choosy, but it had had a special taste for those in their later years, with extra weight on their bones and fur on their lungs.”
Turning the screw on dramatic tension with the relish of Torquemada, she never loses sight of the characters who give her story heft. Rose, the femme-fatale who owns Bowery
Auctions, and her on-off relationship with a police inspector; her junior staff, whose quirks light up the page; the extrovert trans friend from Rilke’s past, who adds lustre to Glasgow’s nightlife: “He looked like Rudolf Nureyev might have, if he had survived HIV and given in to the occasional fish supper.”
The tone and depth of observation in The Second Cut raise it from a whodunnit into something more impressive and enduring. Defined by its humour, which carries echoes of William McIlvanney but is uniquely Welsh’s own, it is underpinned by political rage, making for a potent combination. In execution, the narrative never falters. The only quibble – too strong a word – is that now and then Welsh’s fury, as at the Merchant City’s Tobacco Lords, reads like the author breaking cover. Yet the inhumanity of those who profited from slaves is an unignorable part of the city’s legacy, and tragically relevant to this modern-day plot.