For Glasgow – with love and squalor: The Second Cut, by Louise Welsh, reviewed

Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can testify, having once had the temerity to behead a cat — in a novel, I mean —and then crucify the mutilated corpse upside down on a church door. As a general rule, if you kill a domestic pet in your crime story you should expect a hostile postbag of epic proportions.

But rules are meant to be broken. Which is why it’s a pleasure to find in Louise Welsh’s latest novel a stinking, maggot-swarming Jack Russell entombed in a chest with a tightly fitting lid. She’s an author whose stock-in-trade is the unexpected, which is also demonstrated by the variety of her fiction. Among her books are a historical novel about Christopher Marlowe, a chilling psychological thriller set in Berlin and a dystopian trilogy called Plague Times, based on the ridiculous premise that a hitherto unknown flu-like virus has devastated the UK.

In The Second Cut, however, Welsh brings her career back to where it started: to Glasgow, and a trouble-prone auctioneer named Rilke. In her first novel, The Cutting Room, Rilke stumbles on a snuff movie while valuing a dead man’s effects. Now, 20 years later, he’s back. He may be older and wiser, but he’s still wryly honest about everything, including himself: ‘I am too tall, too thin, too cadaverous to look like anything other than a vampire on the make.’

Rilke is the chief auctioneer of a well-established company owned by a friend. An old acquaintance, encountered among the guests at a gay wedding, gives him a potentially lucrative tip about a forthcoming country house clearance sale, and then winds up dead in a doorway after too much fun on a winter night.