Glasgow gets sold two ways: as a grin and a punchline, or as a rain-soaked moodboard for crime tourists. Louise Welsh refuses both. Her Glasgow doesn’t exist to flatter the city or entertain outsiders with grit-as-flavouring. It’s a working machine: money moving hands, taste laundering guilt, “respectability” acting like a varnish you can scrape off with a fingernail.
The masterstroke is the auction house. In The Cutting Room, Bowery Auctions isn’t just a job backdrop for Rilke, it’s the whole moral physics of the book. Everything can be priced, displayed, reframed, sold on. Objects carry histories, and those histories get edited into something “presentable” the moment they hit the catalogue. Welsh understands that trade from the inside — she’s worked the book world, she’s lived in Glasgow for decades, and she knows exactly how culture pretends it’s separate from commerce while feeding off it like a parasite.
Rilke, gaunt and watchful, sits in the middle of it as both participant and contamination. He’s queer, cynical, curious in a way that’s less detective-hero and more bad habit. Welsh doesn’t make his sexuality a sticker of progress, and she doesn’t make his jadedness cute. She makes him a man shaped by the city’s bargains: what you’ll ignore to keep your job, what you’ll joke about to keep your nerve, what you’ll call “just business” so you can sleep.
And then Welsh does the thing so much crime fiction fakes: she shows how violence hides in plain sight, not in the glamorous shadows. The horror in The Cutting Room isn’t a theatrical psychopath stalking alleys for the thrill of it. It’s the neat front room, the polite voice, the locked drawer. It’s what happens when a culture keeps teaching people that privacy equals virtue and that money is the same thing as decency.
Glasgow noir loves to posture about darkness; Welsh shows you the invoices, the euphemisms, the polite smiles that keep the darkness employed.
That’s why her Glasgow isn’t a postcard. Postcards simplify. They sand off the transactional ugliness, the class pressure, the constant low-level threat of being poor in a city that worships appearances. Welsh writes the exact opposite: she writes the atmosphere of a place where taste can be weaponised. Antiques aren’t quaint; they’re evidence. Collectors aren’t harmless eccentrics; they’re consumers with appetites. The auction house becomes the perfect symbol for a city that’s always selling itself while pretending it isn’t for sale.
When Welsh returns to Bowery Auctions later with Rilke back on the floor, the point isn’t nostalgia. It’s escalation. Time passes, the city changes, the language updates — new ways to package vice, new ways to market virtue — but the engine keeps running. There’s always a demand for no-questions-asked cash. There’s always a buyer who wants the story without the stain. There’s always someone willing to do the laundering and call it work.
This is where I lose patience with how “Scottish crime” gets consumed. Readers want Glasgow as vibe: dreich weather, gallows humour, a body, a clever line. Publishers lean into it because it sells. The result is a genre habit of treating the city like an aesthetic: a photogenic bruise you can admire from a safe distance. Welsh’s work spits in that comfortable distance. She keeps yanking the camera back to the systems — property, policing, class, taste, the small clubs of power — and she won’t let you pretend the violence is random weather.
If you can finish a Welsh novel feeling entertained but unimplicated, you weren’t reading — you were shopping.
Welsh doesn’t offer you a clean moral exit. She doesn’t hand you a single monster to blame so you can close the book and feel superior. She makes you look at the respectable structures that keep harm possible: the market that turns everything into a commodity, the institutions that look away when the right people are involved, the culture that treats “good taste” as proof of innocence. Glasgow, in her hands, isn’t a character. It’s a pressure system. And if you want a postcard, go buy one. If you want the truth, stay where she drags you and don’t look for comfort.