Louise Welsh draws us into the half-light existence of cabaret performers in The Bullet Trick.
If your idea of a relaxing read is a thriller that keeps you awake all night, you need to go no further than home-grown talent. Louise Welsh's new novel, The Bullet Trick, is about a down-at-heel conjuror who gets sucked into the seedy glamour of the burlesque scene, with dangerous consequences.
The atmosphere of this novel... is intoxicating. Dark, seductive decadence and nostalgia nestle under a dirty blanket of grim expectation. The two strands of William's life... are spliced together with alternate chapters set before and after his nosedive. This serves to heighten the tension to near-unbearable levels... You want to do the impossible and look away, but to do so would be to miss what could be the best and most intelligent crime novel of the year.
Like her mesmerizing first novel, The Cutting Room, Louise Welsh’s Gothic noir thriller, The Bullet Trick, delivers both the erotic tingle and the frisson of revulsion some of us feel when exploring a decadent subculture. Chalk that up to a few things that make Welsh one of the most exciting new writers in the game: a gorgeous style that can even capture the surreal beauty of a sleazy club on the bad side of town; a protagonist who maintains a certain innocence as he pursues the more unsavory aspects of his trade; and genuine sympathy for the lost souls who have stumbled into an underworld of vice and can’t find their way home.
— The New York Times
William Wilson's stage magic career has tanked, girls sneer at him and he hits the bottle too often for someone whose livelihood depends on steady hands. Out of desperation, he makes two ruinous mistakes: he picks a policeman's pocket and then picks up Sylvie, an American burlesque dancer in Berlin with dangerously intimate connections to the criminal underworld. The seriousness of these errors becomes slowly, agonizingly clear through a series of suspense-building flashbacks-set in contemporary Berlin, London and Glasgow-that show just how low a mostly decent man can sink, especially when a pretty woman is dragging him down and the glimmer of redemption always dances just ahead. In this successor to her debut (The Cutting Room), Welsh nails the dialogue perfectly, capturing the self-deprecating hope of washed-up men and women hunting for that one big break and the pity and scorn heaped upon them by those who are better off. It's best to read this lurid tale in private, and wash your hands afterward. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Welsh, winner of a Crime Writers' Association award for her first novel, The Cutting Room, offers another irresistible mystery. This time around the protagonist is William Wilson, a magician who has fallen on hard times after inadvertently involving himself in a criminal cover-up in London. He tries to resurrect his career in a Berlin club, but something goes wrong there as well. The novel alternates between unraveling what happened in Berlin and in Glasgow, where a shell-shocked, guilt-ridden William takes refuge, intent on drinking himself to death with the help of a package full of mysterious "blood money." Readers will keep turning pages to find out what went down in Berlin that destroyed his will to live, what fallout will catch up with William from the London debacle, and whether he will pull himself together to perform again. While the resolutions of these mysteries are ultimately a bit of a letdown, getting there is great fun. Welsh has a flair for language, a knack for capturing the seediest and sexiest of hotspots, and a convincing male perspective. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
In the sleazier corners of Berlin, London and Glasgow, a down-on-his-luck magician sorts out two killings-and his obsession with a femme fatale-in Welsh's follow-up to her debut, The Cutting Room (2003). William Wilson is the kind of crowd-pleasing conjurist who made his career performing well-worn stunts like sawing ladies in half and reading the minds of club patrons whose wallets he's filched. Which is to say he's an old-school hack in low demand. So when his agent assigns him to perform at a miserable London bordello for the retirement party of a police honcho, he doesn't have much reason to say no. But as in any self-respecting noir, Wilson's in a heap of trouble practically the second he walks through the door; the owner of the bar and his lover, an old acquaintance of Wilson's, have some mysterious documents they'd like Wilson to hang on to, and Wilson later learns that the two died at the end of that evening in a murder-suicide. Or was it a double murder? Realizing those documents make him a hunted man, Wilson shoves off for Berlin, where he puts together a bawdy, Grand Guignol-style cabaret act with the help of a dancer named Sylvie-whose inscrutable Marlene Dietrich chilliness naturally drives Wilson wild. Shifting between Wilson's Berlin adventure and his return to Glasgow to solve the crimes, the book requires the reader to keep up with a lot of different plot threads, but the characterizations are often too thin to inspire the effort. A B-list magician is a brilliant idea for an accidental gumshoe-there's a cheapness to Wilson's parlor tricks and deceptions that meshes perfectly with the cynical worldview of great noir. But the dialogue here doesn't have the tough-talkingsnap that defines the genre, and flabby, exposition-heavy chapters don't help either. James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler produced plots that were just as convoluted and overheated as this one-but they also knew the value of concision. An eerie but underfed whodunit.
