It Started With a Cough: words with Louise Welsh

“Typically, people would die over a period of time. It might be some days. But if a flea injected you in an artery, you’d fall down dead in the street.”

As early afternoon sunlight slips into the living room of the novelist Louise Welsh’s top floor Glasgow flat, we discuss the plague over freshly brewed coffee and chocolate biscuits. It’s a touch surreal to discuss death in such a comfortable setting. The best-selling author of The Cutting Room is a vivid, intelligent presence, with an infectious enthusiasm for her work that makes you warm to her instantly, even if she is describing the terrible effects a viral outbreak could have upon an unexpectedly fragile society. 

Death is a Welcome Guest is the second in Welsh’s Plague Times trilogy, set in a post-pandemic Britain that has been effectively destroyed by the aftermath of such widespread sickness. Her portrayal of the symptoms of 'The Sweats' is based on chilling and meticulous research. “Reading about the influenza outbreak after the First World War,” she says, “There were accounts of people dropping dead in the street then, as well.” 

She coughs a few times as she speaks. Welsh assures me she’s recovering from a cold, but it’s hard not to feel a little nervous amidst all this talk of deadly disease. After all, The Sweats’ initial symptoms are flu-like, making it hard to know that you’re infected until it’s too late. 

This is the first time Welsh has attempted a sequel to any of her novels. She describes herself, in literary terms, as “a serial monogamist. I go from one book to the next, and while I’m there, I’m there really intensely.” She pauses. “And then I go away. Onto something else that I’m totally and utterly engaged with.” She relishes challenging herself with fresh places, approaches and ideas, and a trilogy is something she has never attempted before. “Can I do this? Can I extend a world over more than one book?” She is adamant that there will only ever be three novels in the sequence. “However enjoyable it is, when it comes to the third; that will be the end. I can see the progression quite clearly in my mind.” Despite the challenge, however, she has clearly enjoyed revisiting the world she so compellingly crafted in the first novel of the trilogy.

The new book follows on from 2014’s A Lovely Way to Burn, but it introduces a new cast of characters and a subtly different take on a country brought to its knees by a terrible disaster. “I think the world is the connection. The world and the pandemic. Stevie [the heroine of the first novel] does feature fleetingly, so the books do intersect.”

This time, Welsh follows the fate of Magnus McFall, a stand-up comedian who is arrested after trying to prevent a sexual assault and being mistaken for the perpetrator. He is transferred to the secure wing of a local prison as The Sweats break out, and forced to share a cell with a man named Jeb who seems reluctant to talk about the reason he’s been put in prison. “I wanted [Magnus] to hook up with somebody he couldn’t trust. I think under these circumstances… he would be so lonely.” The two men couldn’t be more different in physicality, attitude and psychology. Magnus is resolutely normal; a person with ambitions who might or might not achieve them. Jeb is tougher, more worldly, and a man of secrets. The book could be seen as a post-apocalyptic literary take on the buddy-movie, but as ever, there’s a great deal going on beneath the surface. Welsh has an enviable ability to take apparently simple ideas and weave in a subtle complexity that allows the reader to find deeper meanings in the space between the words. 

“I started this book thinking about the penal system, the way that people are treated in jail" - Louise Welsh

Magnus and Jeb spend the first part of the novel locked up in prison, increasingly aware that something is going wrong in the world outside. But the screws tell them nothing and increasingly ignore the welfare of the prisoners under their protection. There’s a sense of isolation to this early part of the book that truly builds the suspense. But Welsh had other, more subtle, ideas about what she wanted to achieve with this early prison setting. “With the first book I was thinking very much about the health service, about corruption, about drug companies owning these drugs and making money from them… drug trials that are not publicised. I started this book thinking about the penal system, the way that people are treated in jail.” It’s clear that it’s something she gave a great deal of thought to. The unfairness of the system – Welsh is quick to clarify that she is not criticising those who work within it – sometimes seems designed not so much to rehabilitate offenders but “make them feel more dislocated from society.” Her thoughts on prison, and her desire to use it in part as the setting for the opening of this novel emerged from two radio programmes she hosted, including one with the title How To Go To Jail, With Louise Welsh (the comma, she notes, is extremely important).

During her research, she also examined events in New Orleans prisons during Hurricane Katrina: “There were prisoners there who drowned because the jails were not a priority.” Thinking about this in the context of an event such as The Sweats influenced the novel’s powerful opening third. 

Welsh is known as a crime writer, but her work frequently defies that classification. Death Is a Welcome Guest uses elements of the speculative novel in its examination of a meaty 'what if?' question, leaving more traditional crime elements until later in the narrative. She doesn’t mind the description, however. “I don’t feel constricted or inhibited by it.” Neither of her publishers have ever attempted to push her towards writing a straightforward procedural or investigative novel. “I think there’s a great amount of skill involved in that, but for some reason that’s not what I’m drawn to doing… the genres that appeal to me have something that a lot of sci-fi, horror or crime typically possess. Which is a fast pace, a strong narrative… the quest element… high jeopardy and strong characterisation.” All of these qualities are apparent in Welsh’s work, but especially in this latest novel, which mixes high concept with deep characterisation and thrilling pace. The elements of the crime novel are superbly handled, but it’s her skill at portraying a fractured world that stays with the reader.

Part of that world is informed by the idea that certain things we take for granted – the internet, mobile phones, public transport – are suddenly, conspicuously, absent. There’s a historical precedent for this, Welsh remarks: “When the Romans leave Britain, they take all of that brilliant stuff that they brought with them.” Leaving the indigenous population with a small problem. “They’ve got these bathhouses, and they’re asking, 'Do you know how that works?'” She tells me about pots in the museum of Scotland that demonstrate attempts to recreate Roman artistry. None of them seem quite right; the skills are no longer present. Something is missing. In her fictional world, The Sweats have not just taken people, but essential skills and infrastructure that might be irreplaceable.

But all is not lost. Welsh allows hope to leak subtly and believably into her strange, new world. “There’s always hope,” she says, thoughtfully. “I guess I believe in the indomitability of the human spirit. Dreadful things do happen, but people will, hopefully, survive.”