The Cut Up by Louise Welsh review: 'I was hooked'
Louise Welsh’s Rilke is one of the great characters of contemporary Scottish fiction, and she brings him to enjoyably vivid life in her latest novel, writes David Robinson
Maybe I’ve got this all wrong, but I can’t help thinking that the moment this book began in Louise Welsh’s darkly imaginative mind must have been when she found out about hatpins. Specifically, when she first learnt that women in Edwardian Britain found them handy to deal with handsy men on public transport, or policemen trying to arrest suffragettes. “I’m not sure if anyone was actually killed by one,” says Rose Bowery, the owner of Bowery Auctions, near the start of this novel, “but it would definitely be possible.”
Damn right it would. Because that is exactly what has happened to Mandy Manderson, a ubiquitously reviled jewellery dealer, found dead right in front of Bowery Auctions with an amethyst-tipped hatpin buried deep in his eyeball.
This is particularly bad news for Rose. She has already been filmed on a daytime television programme earlier that day talking about the potential lethality of hatpins, and their similarity to the stilettos used by medieval knights to finish off their opponents by stabbing them through their helmet visors. Worse still, the hatpin she waved in front of the cameras to demonstrate this was the very one that finished off Mandy Manderson. On top of all that, she made it quite clear, in front of a crowded saleroom, that there was no love lost between the two of them. Means, motive, opportunity: bish, bash, bosh.
This is such a bravura beginning that I haven’t even led off this review by pointing out the identity of the man who finds Manderson’s body. If you’re a fan of crime fiction, though, you should be able to follow clues: after The Cutting Room (2002) and The Second Cut (2022) there is only one possible person - the gay Glaswegian auctioneer who is so cool that he can get by as a mononym. Rilke.
True, it’s not a common Glaswegian name, but Rilke is no common Glaswegian, though he knows the city’s secrets better than most. He is stylishly retro, has a Sherlockian grasp of detail, but otherwise subverts many of the clichés of the genre, especially the sexual ones, evidenced here in a passing fling with a trans man and the hint of one in the past with a handsome scenes of crimes officer investigating Manderson’s murder.
Although not himself a detective, Rilke embodies everything Chandler had in mind for his ideal protagonist: solitary, uncorrupted, courageous, who walks down mean streets “but is not himself mean”. In Rilke’s Glasgow, moral decay is everywhere: the police are ineffective or on the take, judges corrupt, the children of the poor are abused in List D schools, and gangsters are the city’s unacknowledged rulers. But in a dirty, noir-ish world, Rilke is charismatically clean.
Because he is loyal to Rose and knows that she is not the murderer, no matter how the evidence is stacked against her, he removes the dagger from Manderson’s eye and, in a brilliantly written scene, puts it in with another batch for auction. He knows the police probably won’t spot it, and that he’ll be in big trouble if they do. It’s an illegal act but a heroic one too.
That’s the story up to page 39, when the hatpin is bought by an online bidder, and to say much more would be to tiptoe into spoiler territory, though it’s fair to mention that the plot then spins out to include drug-dealing, a prostitution and porn ring, and uncovering historic child abuse. If anything, there’s slightly too much of it, especially towards the end, when a plethora of threads are tied together.
Yet Rilke is one of the great characters of contemporary Scottish fiction and Welsh brings him to enjoyably vivid, three-dimensional life. I was hooked, not just by the murder but by her portrait of his rather rackety profession and the occasionally comic and sometimes deadly city in which he lives.
The Cut Up by Louise Welsh is published by Canongate on 29 January, price £16.99
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