The Cutting Room

Louise Welsh

This is one of those books where the reader who isn't an insider is going to enjoy it, but the person who knows is going to get far more out of it. Another in the seemingly endless list of British mystery authors turning out stunning debut novels is Louise Welsh, who introduces us to homosexual auctioneer Rilke (no first name, at least not that I caught), whose auction house is offered a job clearing out the estate of a dead man, with one caveat: the person offering the job (the man's sister) wants the contents of the attic destroyed. He must agree not to sell them, not to keep the, but to burn them. Rilke discovers, in the attic, among other things, a series of pictures that look as if they are of the torture and murder of a woman almost half a century ago, and he sets out to track down the identity of the woman in the pictures, stirring up a hornets' nest on both sides of the law while doing so.

The mystery itself is a good thing, but you can read any superlatives I have to say about it in my reviews of the debut novels by Mark Billingham, China Mieville, Erin Hart, or a score of others I've penned over the past year. Welsh goes one further, adding slices of Rilke's sexual exploits into the mystery that are so realistic I wondered off and on throughout the novel whether “Louise Welsh” is actually a pseudonym for a gay man, and the picture on the back jacket is the wife of the guy Stephen King used for Richard Bachmann's back cover picture. The emotional tugging of loneliness while resisting the cruising spots just down the road, the nervous ecstasy of hurried sex in a public place, even the odd, paradoxical thrill of the roundup, all are handled with such stark realism, and the flavors herein are so germane to the cruising culture, that if Louise Welsh really is Louise Welsh (and not Louis), she possesses an amazing talent for assimilating character depth that portends a fantastic career ahead.

You want to read this one, but it might turn your stomach. You have been warned.