Canongate, 2022, 373 p, including 3 p Afterword.

This one was published twenty years after Welsh’s first novel The Cutting Room and in it she returns to the central character of that book, Rilke, an auctioneer for the financially troubled Bowery Auctions. Rilke is gay and the intervening years gives Welsh, through Rilke, the opportunity to comment on the evolution in attitudes towards homosexuality that has taken place in that time. (Some prejudice still appears here but on the whole the other characters – even those he is meeting for the first time – by and large accept who and what he is.)

This starts from the first scene where Rilke is attending the wedding of the two Bobbys, where the parents of one of the two grooms were never to be mentioned. Rilke has to escort one of the guests, Jojo, out of the reception to avoid the possibility of a scene. Jojo gives Rilke a tip about the wind-up of an estate at Ballantyne House in Dumfries and Galloway whose owners are looking to sell off the house contents, a commission which might save Bowery Auctions’ somewhat failing fortunes. The next day Jojo is found dead in an alley.

As Rilke delves into the circumstances of the death via Jojo’s lodger, an art student calling himself Sands, he gets embroiled with gangster Jamie Mitchell and encounters a strange situation regarding the affairs at Ballantyne House and farm, where there was a car crash a week or so before and the auction crew rescue a frightened Vietnamese refugee, Phan, on a nearby road.

Welsh is always on top of her material here and interweaves her plot intricately. We are almost incidentally given glimpses of the more outré aspects of Glasgow’s gay scene.

Her talent for characterisation is illustrated by the on-off relationship between the auction house’s owner, Rose, and police Inspector Jim Anderson. There was the neat observation, “He had slicked his wet hair back from his face, like Brian Ferry before the cardigans set in.”

This doesn’t quite reach the levels which The Cutting Room did, but it is still a very good piece of crime fiction. A cut above you might say.

Pedant’s corner:- Burns’ (Burns’s,) “the frail women’s exit” (frail woman’s,) “a pair of storm doors” (on the top floor of a tenement? Storm doors are external. I think Welsh meant ‘vestibule doors’,) Sands’ (many times; Sands’s,) “black surplice” (on a minister at a funeral. Surplices are traditionally white and can be worn at funerals. If they’re black they’re most likely not a surplice but an ecclesiastical gown.) “Rose looked out of place the lady of the house” (needs a comma between ‘place’ and ‘the lady’,) “aren’t I?” (The speaker was a Scot. We say ‘amn’t I?’) “a group of youths were huddled” (a group … was huddled,) “people who never had no luck at all” (the sense demands ‘people who never had luck at all’,) “Sand’s said” (Sands said,) “some bullets” (these were for a shotgun, which traditionally is loaded with cartridges, not bullets. As indeed this shotgun was, later,) “let off three quick shots” ([again traditionally] shotguns can fire only twice before needing reloaded,) distributer (distributor.)

Canongate, 2005, 158 p.

This novella is certainly a departure from the genre and style of Welsh’s first book, her novel The Cutting Room, a contemporary (more or less) crime tale set in Glasgow. The time here is London in 1593 and we are reading Christopher Marlowe’s account of his past few days, written in case he does not survive the morrow. Drawn before the Privy Council to answer charges of blasphemy and atheism (someone has been disseminating leaflets of this nature as written by “Tamburlaine” and naturally this is assumed to be Marlowe himself after his success with his play Tamburlaine the Great,) he is set free in order to procure evidence against Sir Walter Raleigh. His efforts in this direction are taken over by his quest to discover the person who had betrayed him; a search in which we are led through the byways, hideaways, stews and fleshpots of Elizabethan London, the politics of power and the drawbacks of having an influential patron.

I must confess I have not read nor seen any of Marlowe’s works – so how well Welsh captures his voice I cannot say, but it was convincing enough. Of course true Elizabethan prose would have been fairly impenetrable to the modern reader in any case so some degree of accommodation is to be expected.

On a second thought this is not actually so much of a leap by Welsh. She is still dealing with intrigue and crime. She has done it well though and is now on my look for list.

Pedant’s corner:- I couldn’t find ambidextor anywhere, on line or off, but its context was as if of people who might play one side against the other; nor could I find cosiner (but it may be a variant of cozener as it was in a list of felons of various sorts.) Otherwise:- wainscoted (wainscotted,) Baynes’ (Baynes’s,) hung (hanged, or was hung Elizabethan usage?) from whence (whence means from where, so from whence can only mean from from where.)