The Cutting Room by
Louise Welsh
pbk out October 02
(Canongate Books)
at £10.99
Can we claim The Cutting Room, already long-listed for the Guardian
First Book award, as a crime novel? I think we can. And a delightful,
dark and distinguished one at that.
The ‘detective’ is Rilke, a first person narrator and a Glasgow
auctioneer with an expert’s knowledge of antiques and much else besides.
Plot? Asked to clear rapidly the home of an elderly lady’s deceased
brother, he discovers, in the attic, not only a complete set of
publications from Maurice Girodias’s (often pornographic) Olympia Press
(including a mint first of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch) but also a
set of black and white photographs, many years old, that appear to
depict the slow torture and death of a young woman. Pace and tension?
Well, maybe B minus, though Louise can write a few short sharp sentences
when she wants to - and subtly increase the tension as Rilke steadily
runs through the relevant contacts that operate on the fringes of his
world. Clues? There are a few, if you can spot'em.
Character? Well, Rilke is gay, with a penchant for the rougher end of
the trade, so there’s little prospect of his seducing a duchess, Marlowe
style. But Rilke is nevertheless a Glasgow soul brother. He can’t “just
leave her there.” It “seems important” to him that he “might be able to
find out who did this to her.”
I’ve left the best till last. Welsh’s prose (“Some people run from
Grandma’s house” she says of seekers after porn, “they long for the bite
of the wolf.”) is consistently stylish, witty and inventive. She is also
a knowledgeable and entertaining guide to the lore and language of the
auctioneer’s world, its characters, her rendering of their dialogue
laced with Glasgow nuance (though not to Welshian excess), leaping from
the page.
The book’s bittersweet but real-world conclusion however, the central
mystery remaining (sort of) unresolved, may disappoint some crime
readers. Similarly Welsh’s picture of today’s ‘skin trade’, whilst in
keeping with the overall tone of the book, remains on the unlikely side
of decorous. But the reader’s journey is throughout delightful and
idiosyncratic.
