Jeez, Louise!

A murder mystery with no body, no crime and no killer? And at least two pervy relationships? Writer LOUISE WELSH explains what motivated her to write a whodunnit with a difference.

Anne Sexton, 30 Jun 2010

In The Cutting Room, an auctioneer's discovery of what appears to be snuff photographs sets the story in motion. In Naming The Bones Watson is researching the life and rummaging through the papers of Archie Lunan, a Scottish poet who disappeared off the island of Lismore 30 years previously.

"I'm interested in the way the past inhabits the future, the way the past is present and intrudes upon what we are doing now. It might have a little to do with being a second-hand bookseller when I was younger. Often you would find things within the books, although I never found anything horrible."

From these tantalising clues Welsh's protagonists get drawn into the mystery. As her characters are never professional investigators, they are out of their depth, but unable to resist the lure of uncovering the truth. Welsh has yet to write a book where the protagonist is a detective or on the police force. This, she jokes, is laziness.

"I'd have to go and do lots of research and hang out with policemen – I don't want to do that! You have to find out about these jobs and I'm not so interested in writing anything that's a police procedural. My interests don't lie that way, although I read a lot of detective fiction.

"Although I take Murray out of the academic world quite quickly, I think that setting is fascinating," she adds. "I've been back in and out of universities as a writer and my partner works in the university part-time.

"With Murray and Archie there's the relationship between academia and art. Murray loves literature but he can't produce literature, although he can talk very well about it and perhaps illuminate it for others. I think there is often this strange tension between academia and art. There can often be a little resentment between the two camps, an uneasy alliance."

Like The Cutting Room, Naming The Bones explores dark sexual territory. Without spoiling the plot, neither Archie's relationship with his partner Christie or the marriage between two of Murray's colleagues, Rachel and Fergus, could be described as conventional.

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