The Cutting Room (Canons)

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My brother's home help laid out a refreshment for us. I suffer from arthritis and angina, among other things. I like to save my strength for non-domestic tasks.' Well, if it's going to get done, I may as well start now. What about personal effects - papers, letters, anything of a private nature you might want to keep? Have you been through them with someone already?' The amateur detective, the cruising flaneur, the queer auctioneer and his dubious friends: it's the kind of set-up that makes the reader anticipate further adventures for Rilke and co; his crew of rough trannies, bent coppers and Merlot-slugging femmes fatales. Like any genre plot it makes us want more, and its world is strangely cosy. We know we're confined by the safe walls of certain conventions.

The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh | Waterstones

I halted, my hand resting on the door jamb. She was staring at me hard, hesitating, as if she was trying to make up her mind about something. Astonishingly this is a first novel, catapulting Welsh straight into the superstar league, while establishing Rilke as a true original” The room had the dead feeling common to public buildings when empty of people. Without the activity of a sale it was a ghost of itself, an echoing shell. There was a junk of heavy oak furniture, monstrosities too big for modern apartments, boxes of soiled napery and bric-a-brac. Six large wardrobes stood like upright coffins against the far wall. Louise Welsh is an award-winning author of eight novels. The Cutting Room, her debut novel, won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award and the Saltire First Book of The Year Award. In 2018, she was awarded the Most Inspiring Saltire First Book Award winner by public vote. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.Woolworth's has had better sales. It's sad, Rose, sad. Crap furniture for DHSS landlords and it's been like that for weeks, months. This is good stuff, the best. I've seen it, you've not. We can shift it, but only if we stop arguing and get moving.' Resident Participants | The International Writing Program". iwp.uiowa.edu . Retrieved 12 April 2017. In the crime fiction genre, sequels can seem unavoidable, these often entirely unnecessary follow-ups to bestselling books in which the story never quite feels as effortless as it did the first time around. While Louise Welsh’s The Second Cut, the follow-up to 2002’s award-winning The Cutting Room, does fall into this category – it exists within a world of bad guys, and is a sequel – it mercifully doesn’t read as a rehash so much as a welcome return to familiar, and clearly fertile, ground. I turned to go. I wasn't looking forward to the phone call I was about to make; three weeks' work to be done in one and the usual sale only three days away.

The Cutting Room - Louise Welsh - Google Books

He is quite the character, Rilke, a man who tries to pass for a respectable citizen, “but I am too tall, too thin, too cadaverous to look anything other than a vampire on the make”. Now uncomfortably into midlife, he remains a perpetually single gay man who spends far too much time on Grindr and balances a bleak worldview sustained largely on a liquid diet of whisky. The Cutting Room is the debut novel of Scottish author Louise Welsh. The book was first published in 2002 by Edinburgh-based publisher Canongate. It has won several awards including the 2002 Saltire Society First Book Award. In 2009, she donated the short story "The Night Highway" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the Air collection. [8] The literary beauty of a Glaswegian beast: The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh". The Independent. 9 August 2002. Archived from the original on 11 November 2012 . Retrieved 14 August 2011.

The Sunday Times described The Cutting Room as: "one of the most intriguing, assured and unputdownable debuts to come out of Scotland in recent years". [3] The List was particularly impressed by Welsh's portrayal of Glasgow: "...the city becomes a character in its own right; Gothic, dismal, decaying and frightening in equal measure". [4] I'm too old to discuss things, Mr Rilke. Either you can do it or you can't. I know it's a big job. I'm asking a lot, so there will be a commission paid directly to you on top of the auction house fee as a token of my appreciation - if you manage to get the work done on time.'

The Cutting Room Series by Louise Welsh - Goodreads The Cutting Room Series by Louise Welsh - Goodreads

Obsessions are dangerous, yet they are also so human. They drive the most amazing and visionary projects—and fuel the darkest, most horrible passions. Obsessions play a fundamental role in The Cutting Room, both in the actions of the dead antagonist and in Rilke, the protagonist and auctioneer who stumbles across snuff photographs while processing an estate and begins to wonder if they are real. From December 2010 to April 2012, she was the Writer in Residence for the University of Glasgow and Glasgow School of Art. [1] Louise Welsh (born 1 February 1965 in London) is an English-born author of short stories and psychological thrillers, resident in Glasgow, Scotland. She has also written three plays, an opera, edited volumes of prose and poetry, and contributed to journals and anthologies. [1] In 2004, she received the Corine Literature Prize. The novel was adapted for the stage a year after publication, the world premiere taking place in the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in October 2003. [5] Rilke, when my father left me his share in this auction house it was little better than a junk mart and organised fence. What is it now?' I raised my eyebrows; never interrupt the litany. 'It's the best auction house in Glasgow. But it'll not stay the best if you do things like this. There is no way we can shift that amount of stuff in a week.'Hopefully this conveys the almost hyperaware way Welsh sets a scene through Rilke's observations. And I don't mean this as criticism, because it's not a bad stylistic choice at all. However, I do think it prevented me from viewing any of the other characters as fully three-dimensional personalities; to me, they all seemed too distilled when filtered through Rilke. This is a danger of any story narrated in first-person, but it is not one that The Cutting Room overcomes. Charles Taylor (8 April 2003). "Captivating Thriller from a new Scottish Writer". Salon.com. Archived from the original on 29 September 2007. For God's sake, Rose, look at those wardrobes. The Sally Ann had a sign in their window last week, Buy one wardrobe, get another one free.'

The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh | The Independent | The The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh | The Independent | The

The stained glass of the front door cast a red glow across the hallway, a staircase with an ornately carved mahogany banister was to our left, the parquet floor laid with thinning Turkish rugs; this family had been rich for a long time. A heavy mahogany table stood to the right of the door. It was bare, none of the usual family photographs, and I guessed she'd been doing some clearing out already.Welsh studied history at Glasgow University and after graduating established and worked at a second-hand bookshop [2] for several years before publishing her first novel. The reason you never had kids, Rose, is you would strangle them in the first week. But if you've changed your mind we could probably have them together. I owe you that much. You're forever getting me out of trouble and I never have to hit anyone in your defence or mind you when you're on a tear.' My apprenticeship had been served in an atmosphere of regret. The regret of my elders at the passing of 'the good stuff', the Georgian silver, treasures and spoils of empire that according to CP had littered the salerooms of his day. I'd rolled my eyes and cursed him for an old man. Now I mourned junk-shop Victoriana and art-deco bibelots. I missed the street hawkers and book barrows of Paddy's Market's prime, shook my head at what passed for quality, and pitied youth. The best was not yet to come. It had vanished for ever. Or so I had thought. It was take it or leave and it's unbelievable stuff. Christ knows why they've called us in, but be glad they have. This could make us, and if we pull our finger out we can do it in a week. Look around you. What's in here right now?' Blue eyes that used to be bluer looking straight at me. I should have stopped right there and asked her why, but I was already making calculations in my head, adding up time, manpower and money, wheeling straight into business as she knew I would.