Jeez, Louise!

Everyone has been telling me: 'I found your book very interesting'", says Scottish mystery writer Louise Welsh. "I want to ask: 'Did you like it?'"

You can't really blame the readers because "interesting" sums up Welsh's Naming The Bones pretty well. Furthermore, you'd be hard pressed to find a more suitable adjective to describe a murder mystery which refuses to conform to the conventions of the genre. For most of the novel there's no body, no discernable crime and no killer. What's more, Welsh's befuddled academic protagonist, Murray Watson, is perfectly safe for the bulk of the book's almost 400 pages. Despite that, Naming The Bones feels like a mystery and you will want to keep reading to the end.
Even Welsh is unsure how exactly to describe the book.
"I guess it is a mystery or there's a mystery at the heart of it. But whether it fits into the crime canon, I'm not sure. There's definitely a quest and I think most crime books are quests. So there are points of contact… I don't know – it's usually up to marketing where it gets put!"
She warms to the topic. "I like the idea that this book starts quietly. I wanted something that began in a safe place and then pushed the boundaries," she says.
This is indeed the basic structure underlying Naming The Bones, and fans of crime novels should not be put off by the fact it is not a conventional murder mystery. There is, as it turns out, a body – it just takes a while for Murray to discover it. When he does, it's not the one the reader may have been expecting. Like Welsh's much-lauded debut The Cutting Room, the body is not contemporary to the rest of the story.
"I love traditional three-act crimes, but I think in a way I'm squeamish about the body. Often, in crime novels, the body is used as a plot point and it's usually a female body. You have this body that has been abused, raped, murdered and it's put centre-stage. It's there just to be a point in the plot and I've always avoided that – using the victim as an object."
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.
"I don't really know where that comes from. I guess I'm also interested in the gothic genre. It is all about taboos. With Rachel and Fergus, I don't know how unusual that is. They're not hurting anyone until they start to play around with Murray. He's getting pulled into something. He doesn't really know what's going on, he hasn't given permission for this. I don't really know where it comes from. Maybe that's what this kind of fiction is about – sex, drugs, murder and death."
All the good stuff?
Welsh gives a throaty laugh: "Yes! That's it"