helen sandler | journalism

Louise Welsh

Get your Kit off

Whether she's writing about the Glaswegian underworld or Elizabethan spies, crime novelist Louise Welsh always crams in some man-on-man action. She tells Helen Sandler all about it

When a woman author writes two books in a row about queer men, the obvious question is "Why?"

"It's awful hard to say," Louise Welsh begins in her mild Scottish accent. "Perhaps it allows me to use a part of myself that I wouldn't otherwise get to use."

She has written short stories and a radio play with a female lead but both her novels so far feature men who sleep with men. The first, The Cutting Room, stars Rilke, a dissolute Glaswegian auctioneer. When he finds old pornographic photographs of a woman being tortured which he suspects are not staged but real, he feels impelled to investigate.

"That could have been a female character but it would have been different," says Welsh. "In hindsight, Rilke being a gay male diffuses the sexual tension when he looks at the photos."

The book won the Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger and the Saltire Society First Book Award along with rave reviews. Gay men have enjoyed it and told her it's believable, including the graphic sex scenes. They will doubtless say the same about her latest work, Tamburlaine Must Die, which features some full-on fellatio.

Inevitably, they will also wonder about the author's own sexual preferences. Although currently in a relationship with a woman, Welsh, who is in her late thirties, has been involved with men in the past and is not keen to define herself. "It's useful for some people but not for me," she says thoughtfully. "I'm not sure. Deviant? Variant - but that sounds like you go with different species! I quite like 'queer' or William Burroughs' use of 'inverts'. People can call me what they want."

Asked if she's a bit in love with Rilke, she answers, "Absolutely! They had a play of The Cutting Room at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. It was the weirdest thing - to see somebody that you've made up walking about. I was terrified before I went that I'd lose control of myself and join in." In fact the play was sufficiently different from her own vision to give the author a bit of distance. "I managed not to run on and start kissing Rilke," she laughs.

But she did find herself drawn to the actor who played the part and is offended when people describe the character as horrible. "I say he's not horrible, he's my pal! But then again, it's a bit sad when you have to make up your own pals."

Many readers expected Welsh's second novel to feature Rilke again and she might have made more money by following this formula. But much as she enjoys returning to familiar characters by reading PD James's Adam Dalgleish series or Ruth Rendell's Wexford mysteries, she didn't have another story ready for her hero and has left him to stew for a while. "I would like to go back to him," she adds, "and I have a wee notebook where I write things down for him."

Instead her publisher asked her to write a short novel about a deceased author. Welsh immediately chose Christopher ("Kit") Marlowe, the playwright who was Shakespeare's contemporary.

"He keys into themes I'm interested in: variant sexuality, if you like. He writes very beatifully about both gay love and heterosexual love." There is also an air of mystery about him, not least in the fact that he was murdered. "If we have a map of Marlowe's life, we know certain points on it," says Welsh. "We know when he was born and the mode of his death; we know he was arrested once on a murder charge and once for coining, in Holland. We suspect he might have been a spy. We know he went to Cambridge University. But beyond that, we don't really know anything - and it was the space between what we know and what we don't know that I found attractive."

The book that resulted is Tamburlaine Must Die, which follows Kit Marlowe and his sidekick Blaize through the mean streets of late-sixteenth-century London in a short, taut and entertaining thriller. "It's character led, like The Cutting Room," says the author. "Although there are serious points hidden in it, it's meant to be a fun read, an adventure book. Because the text is quite short, I could make it something like John Buchan's The Thirty-nine Steps: I wanted a race, a relentless narrative. I wanted the reader to pick it up and then not put it down until they'd finished."

The historical setting is not just a backdrop. The novella is written in Marlowe's voice and skilfully takes the reader back in time. Welsh certainly did her research but is quick to point out that this is fiction. "There's an awful lot of imagination that has to go into it. You're conjuring yourself into a completely different time and there's something really satisfying about that." She sees a parallel with writing science fiction (which she has never done), in thinking up an era with its own logic but where people are still affected by the same things. "We're moved by money, sex, attraction and revulsion, throughout the centuries and different cultures."

The author was drawn to the Elizabethan period for its contrasting sophistication and savagery. "It's quite a brutal age," she says. "That brutality can be useful in the kind of fiction I write. If I'm writing about the West End of Glasgow today, then murders do happen round here but it's not state-sanctioned. So the idea of heads on top of spikes does up the ante a wee bit."

There are also parallels between then and now, such as a paranoia about immigration that distresses Welsh, who advocates open borders. "In a country like Scotland, we have space," she says. "I believe in 'come all ye!' Everybody should get in. In Marlowe's age they had a similar hysteria about immigration to what we're seeing now. It's not in the forefront of the novel but it's something I felt I could use without being didactic."

More central are the machinations of the Privy Council and its spies, the threat of torture and the way men shop their friends to save their own lives. The biggest danger to Marlowe comes from someone calling himself Tamburlaine - the name of the anti-hero of Marlowe's own play.

"The world of espionage and the world of the stage was an irresistible combination," says Welsh. And then there were the swashbuckling sword fights. The author saw Marlowe as looking a lot like Johnny Depp in tights. He was somebody who would not be limited by his class or anything else. "He's going to go for it and if that means he'll get into trouble or ultimately that he dies, he still can't resist - it's not in his nature."

This is a man who is sensitive and artistic but has a very short fuse. He has been up on a murder charge but is highly intelligent. "I wanted that combination of compassion and violence you get from his work: tender love poetry and then a play like Tamburlaine which is incredibly violent and was controversial because the protagonist of all the mayhem and murder wasn't punished."

Welsh is pleased enough with the results of her labour and is now working on her next book, encouraged by having a contract for it, which makes her take the project more seriously than she might otherwise. "I've just got the contract and it gives me a feeling of having an obligation to somebody other than myself. That's weird because I don't have children, there's nothing really stopping me, and yet you just feel..." She laughs. "You feel like a wanker, you know what I mean? It's like it's not a proper job."

Proper job or not, she does it like a pro. 

Tamburlaine Must Die is published by Canongate

This piece first appeared in Gay Times, August 2004

© Helen Sandler 2004

Back to list of articles

Home