Louise Welsh

Interview

Lynne Patrick talks with Louise Welsh

Louise Welsh is one of those names that lingers in the background of crime writing, but a name we can expect to hear a lot more as her work grows in popularity and critical acclaim. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the John Creasey Memorial Dagger for her first novel, The Cutting Room.

Before her latest and most ambitious project, the Plague Times trilogy, set in an
uncertain near-future in the wake of a devastating global pandemic which has wiped out nine-tenths of the population she was already the author of a handful of the kind of books that can’t quite be classified but invariably contain a strong element of crime and mystery. She is also regarded with great respect by the Scottish literary establishment, to the extent that she recently became a professor at a leading
university.

Intrigued? So was I...

Lynne:  Your books have been described as ‘straddling the line between literary and crime fiction’, and you’ve won awards on both sides of the line. Is that how you see your work?

Louise:  My books tend to have strong narratives, a fast pace and involve quests – characteristics typical of the crime genre. I engage with other genres too, notably gothic, horror and as the Plague Times series progresses, the realm of speculative fiction. I don’t think too much about where my work lies in terms of classification when I am writing – I do not want to be inhibited by ideas of what ‘fits’.

Lynne:  Do you think that line really exists in any meaningful way, outside the perception of booksellers who feel a need to categorize a particular author’s work?

Louise:  Booksellers are often influenced by publishers when deciding where to place particular novels on the shelf. Publishers and booksellers obviously need to sell books and it can be helpful for readers to know what kind of book they are buying. Does the line exist? I see it more as a Venn diagram with fuzzy edges. 

Lynne:  Assuming it does exist, which side of it would you prefer to be on?

At the risk of sounding like a copout, I don’t feel a need to take sides – but if anyone denigrates crime fiction I will fight them to the death!

Lynne:  Clearly a woman after my own heart! You were recently appointed professor of creative writing at Glasgow University. But still assuming the line exists, which side of it would you advise your students to aim for?

Louise:  It doesn’t work like that. A writing mentor’s role is not to tell other writers what to do, but to help enable them to find their voice. Someone may set out wanting to write solid, commercial fiction and discover they are a completely different type of writer. Conversely there have been some very unlikely top sellers. I would advise students to write the books that they want to write and not to try and second-guess the market. If your book does not do well commercially you will at least have the satisfaction of knowing you were true to your vision.

Lynne:  As a teacher of creative writing at a relatively high level, what will you look for in a student to render him or her qualified to pursue a degree level (or higher) course?

Louise:  Talent, energy and the potential and ambition to improve their writing.

Lynne:  Do you think it’s possible to teach someone to write, or is it the kind of innate talent which can’t be taught or acquired?

Louise:  No one can teach talent, but it is possible to support and mentor writers, in the same way that it is possible to work with artists in other disciplines. It is also useful for emerging (and established) writers to be part of an artistic community.   

Lynne:  Teaching must absorb a lot of both time and energy; and writers have to work hard these days to promote each book as it comes out. Do you find you have to set time aside for writing, consciously and deliberately?

Louise:  I am very lucky to have been appointed to a 0.2 professorship (one day a week). I treat writing as a job and have always set writing hours. Inspiration is very much a part of the process, but if I waited to be inspired I might never finish a book.

Lynne:  What brought you to fiction? Have you always been a writer of stories?

Louise:  Like most writers I have always been a reader. Stories are part of the way in which I understand the world.

Lynne:  If you had to choose, which would you prefer – big sales figures, or a prestigious award for your work?

Louise:  The two can be intimately connected – prizes can result in bigger sales figures. I’m lucky enough to have earned my living from writing for over a decade, but there are no guarantees and for most writers no safety net. I’ve been poor enough to know that poverty is not glamorous and I would prefer not to end my days in penury, but if my books stopped selling tomorrow I would keep on writing. It’s a compulsion.

Lynne:  Moving on to your recent and current work, the Plague Times trilogy: you started on the project long before the Ebola crisis made headlines, but the real-life scenario made your fictional one even scarier. What triggered the concept? A devastated world in the aftermath of a pandemic of holocaust proportions isn’t the stuff of everyday fiction.

Louise:  I was brought up during the cold war; it was a period when Armageddon seemed a distinct possibility. I also studied medieval history at university and became fascinated by the devastation wrought by the Black Death. The plague wiped out much of the population of Europe. It changed politics, art and the structure of society. I wondered how it might be were a similar event to happen in the twenty-first century.

Lynne:  Your scenario is a great deal darker and more horrific than, say, Terry Nation’s 1970s drama Survivors and its reworking a few years ago. Do you think it would be possible to turn your books into TV or film, or would they have to be so watered-down that the impact would be lost?

Louise:  Plague Times is partly inspired by television (including Survivors, and Barry Hines’s Threads). It would be pleasing to have the series re-infect TV or movie screens. I would only option the books to people I thought would do a good job – after that it would be up to them!  

Lynne:  How much of the trilogy is coming out of your imagination, and how much from research? How do you go about researching something so far outside most people’s experience?

Louise:  I spent time walking the places that I feature in the Plague Times series, looking at the buildings and landscapes, trying to imagine how they might be post-pandemic. I also read a great deal and interviewed historians and virologists. As the book progresses it becomes increasingly difficult to know where imagination and research intersect.

Lynne:  Who do you feel you are writing for? Is there a reader in your mind when you begin to write any new novel?

Louise:  I don’t have a specific reader in mind. I guess I write for the book and the characters that inhabit it.

Lynne:  The first two books in the Plague Times trilogy, A Lovely Way to Burn and Death is a Welcome Guest, contain ‘language which may offend some readers’, and a lot of graphic violence and descriptions of the appalling consequences of the Sweats, the disease which ravages the world. Is there anything you wouldn’t write, any line you wouldn’t cross?

Louise:  People sometimes get hot under the collar about swearing, but there is a sense of realism within my books which requires characters to use language that people use in real life. There are also scenes of sex and violence in my novels, but I am careful not to use gratuitous violence simply to turn the page. Like everyone else there are lines that I will not cross – but of course we all put our line in different places.

Lynne:  And finally – is there a project in your mind, waiting its turn after the Plague Times trilogy?

Louise:  I’ve always got lots of ideas – but knowing which one will stick is difficult!

A Lovely Way to Burn, the first volume of the Plague Times trilogy, was published last year.
The second, Death Is a Welcome Guest,  is out now. The third and final volume is scheduled for 2016.

Louise Welsh’s earlier books are :The Cutting Room, Tamburlaine Must Die, The Bullet Trick, Naming the Bones and The Girl on the Stairs.

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Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.

‘The Savage Hour’ by Elaine Proctor

Published by Quercus,
7 May 2015.
ISBN: 978-1-78206-652-1(HB)

This novel is set in the remote and arid North-West Province of South Africa. It begins with the discovery by a young girl Delilah of her grandmother’s body floating in a dammed-up lake. For Delilah this is devastating: the grandmother, always called Ouma (Afrikaans for grandmother) had provided the love that her own rather chaotic parents had not even in her old age when increasing confusion made it impossible for her to work as a doctor. In fact Ouma’s death, apparently by drowning, is devastating for many people: she had worked as a doctor in the locality for many years and had provided tireless and dedicated support for many of the local people.  It is devastating for her son, Groot (Big) Samuel who farms the land and for his African manager, Klein (Little) Samuel. For the young Afrikaans policeman Jannie Claassens: when he was a child Ouma had intervened to protect him and his mother from his violent father and now that he is a grown man she supports him in coming to terms with his homosexuality. For the young and beautiful African woman Cheetah who had fled violent parents only to be drawn into the world of city prostitution where she fell prey to HIV: Ouma had fought with determination to ensure that Cheetah obtained the retroviral drugs she needed to survive. Above all, for old Gogo (Zulu for grandmother), Ouma’s cook and lifelong friend.

But it is Delilah who insists that Ouma had not slipped and fallen to her death, that she had not been in a confused state of mind on that day, that her death had perhaps not been accidental. And she convinces Jannie that she is perhaps not mistaken. But Jannie is warned off further investigation by his boss Mokheti Mokoena who feels that there is no realistic evidence that Ouma’s death was anything other than an accident. Mokoena is beset by the problems that violence and corruption have brought to South Africa extending even to his own force. But his superiors have told him to leave that particular hornet’s nest alone, and Mokoena feels there is no alternative.

This is a very fine novel; although there is a mystery as to Ouma’s death which is eventually resolved, it is as much a novel of human relationships. It is, however, for those who are not familiar with South Africa, not an easy novel to grasp. Highly recommended.

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Reviewer: Radmila May

Elaine Proctor was born in South Africa. She grew up in Johannesburg and in the African bush which she loves. Along with a small number of politicized white teenagers, Elaine became active in the anti apartheid movement. She began to document Black resistance to Apartheid in overtly political documentary films like Forward to a People’s Republic and The Sun Will Rise.  The latter was a series of interviews with mothers whose sons were on death row for political offenses.  

Punctuated by bouts of film training in London, Elaine continued to make documentaries in South Africa until 1986, when the political situation made it impossible for her to continue to do so. Her final documentary, Sharpeville Spirit, followed the lives of a group of young activists organizing resistance in that infamous township.  Concurrent with her arrival at this political cul-de-sac, Elaine entered the masters program in writing and directing feature films at the NATIONAL FILM AND TELEVISION SCHOOL in England. Her feature-length graduation film called On The Wire, won the British Film Institute’s Sutherland Trophy (most original and imaginative first film) for 1990.  On The Wire, is the story of tragic marriage between a South African Defense Force reconnaissance battalion commander and his rural Afrikaner wife.  We learn through their relationship, and particularly his sexuality, what terrible damage the war exacted on both perpetrators and victims.

Elaine’s first film after graduation, Friends, continued to explore the personal stories inside the political epic that is Apartheid/post-Apartheid South Africa. It was selected by the Cannes Film Festival to be part of its coveted Official Competition and won Mention Speciale - Prix de Camera D’Or in that year.  

Elaine then wrote LOADED, a series for the BBC looking at the creation of ‘new philanthropy’ and its consequences for world peace and development over the past two decades. Paradise and the Dog of Plenty followed. It tells the story of five American women who go on a plastic surgery safari in South Africa with most unexpected results. 

In 2009 Elaine wrote the novel RHUMBA.

She now lives in North London and is married with two teenage children.

Radmila May was born in the US but has lived in the UK ever since apart from seven years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice. Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and has been working for them off and on ever since. For the last few years she has been one of three editors working on a new edition of a practitioners' text book on Criminal Evidence by her late husband, publication of which has been held up for a variety of reasons but hopefully will be published by the end of 2015. She also has an interest in archaeology in which subject she has a Diploma.

‘This Thing of Darkness’ by Harry Bingham

Published by Orion,
9 July 2015.
ISBN: 978-1-4091-5271-2 (TPB)

When I first encountered Fiona Griffiths, Harry Bingham’s somewhat unusual detective constable in the South Wales police, I didn’t know whether to gasp in admiration at her brilliance and unorthodox methods, or suspend disbelief rather further than usual in order to accept that she would ever have been taken into the police force at all, given her medical history and personal background.

In the end, I did both, and settled down to enjoy a pacy, twisty story peopled with well-drawn characters, some of them as offbeat and unlikely as Fiona herself.

Four books into the series, nothing has changed. Fiona is still in recovery from Cotard’s Syndrome, a form of mental illness which, among other things, leaves sufferers dissociated from the real world. Her maverick brain doesn’t work in quite the same way was most people’s, which is good news for any investigation she undertakes, but bad news for real-life situations like shopping and relationships. Her father is arguably one of South Wales’s most successful unconvicted criminals, and more hints about his activities emerge here.  Despite all this, she is still a serving police officer, and has little truck with doing things by the book – though she does try, because she wants to keep her job. Fortunately her senior officers, stern DI Dennis Jackson and eccentric DI Rhiannon Watkins, know when not to ask questions.

Harry Bingham not only convinces the reader, this one anyway, that all of the above is possible; he also gets under his protagonist’s skin in a way few authors achieve, and his use of first-person narration pulls the reader in there with him, so that her skewed way of seeing the world feels almost normal. After all, why wouldn’t she get 78% in her sergeant’s exam after no revision when the average is 50%?

This time Fiona is investigating cold cases, an apparently impossible burglary and a suicide which she is convinced is murder, alongside the tedious routine job of her nightmares: collecting and logging forensic evidence in a rape case. She spots a possible link between the cold cases which no one else has seen, and bingo, we’re off-piste and on another journey into the South Wales underworld. Only Fiona Griffiths would connect an apartment in Bristol and the theft of valuable paintings on the Gower Peninsula with an art student in London, a climbing school in Snowdonia and a fishing trawler in Milford Haven. And uncover a major financial scam while she was about it.

The fact is, the police force needs less bureaucracy and more Fionas; that way connections would be made and crimes would be solved. But Fiona Griffiths is a one-off, and a fictional one at that. Pity, though.

She even solves the rape case.

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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Harry Bingham is forty-something, married and lives in Oxfordshire. He runs The Wruters Workshop.  Formerly a banker, is now full-time writer. Enjoys rock-climbing, walking, and swimming.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.

Daphne Du Maurier

Today Virago publish two books by Daphne Du Maurier

in stunning new hardback covers 

The Birds

First published in her 1952 in her collection of short stoies entitled The Apple Tree  It is the story of a community that are attacked by flocks of birds and seabirds. The story is set in Cornwall shortly after the end of the WW2. By the end of the story it has become clear that all of Britain is under aerial assault. The story was the inspiration for Alfed Hitchcocks film  The Birds released in 1963

 
 





Don't Look Now 

A collection of short stories first published in 1966.

Don't Look Now was made inot a film in 1973 starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland as a married couple who travel to Venice following the recent accidental death of their daughter, after the husband accepts a commission to restore a church. They encounter two sisters, one of whom claims to be clairvoyant and informs them that their daughter is trying to contact them and warn them of danger. The husband at first dismisses their claims, but starts to experience mysterious sightings himself.