First Fiction

The Cutting Room

Louise Welsh

Canongate: 296 pp., $24

“The industrial age had given way to a white-collar revolution and the sons and daughters of shipyard toilers now tapped keyboards and answered telephones in wipe-clean sweatshops.” This is the kind of tossed-off, eye-opening aside that makes Rilke, the amateur sleuth of Louise Welsh’s first novel, not your average gumshoe. Rilke is an antiques dealer by trade and an acerbic social observer by habit. He’s a middle-aged gay Glaswegian who enjoys the occasional anonymous tryst, and the view from his auctioneer’s rostrum is pretty bleak: Dying dowagers, desperate cross-dressers, seedy adult-video merchants, pint-swilling punters and no-nonsense cops.

The Brits are obsessed with the grayness of life in a former superpower, and “The Cutting Room” fixes itself among a formidable modern pantheon that includes the novels of Ian McEwan and A.L. Kennedy, films like “Trainspotting” and the nihilistic comedy of “The Office.”

Rilke moves amid the shopworn detritus of proud old Britain like one of those smooth-talking, slightly creepy appraisers on “Antiques Roadshow.”

It makes for a fascinating juxtaposition as our dissolute hero combs through Georgian silver and other assorted stuff of Empire on his way to confronting a thoroughly modern mystery: While cataloging the impressive estate of the late Mr. McKindless, Rilke uncovers a cache of home-grown porn that includes a stack of all-too-convincing snuff pics. Who is this girl with the slashed throat? Are these macabre tableaux real? And were these black-and-whites snapped in the ‘50s or just last month?

Rilke, of course, veers dangerously away from the job at hand -- managing the McKindless auction -- and into a heedless pursuit of information (he canvasses a nude model and a porn trafficker). “Strange to feel more for the dead than for the living,” he tells us, as he threatens to become permanently unraveled -- or knocked off by an angry porn mob.

Rilke’s investigation is rewarded with his worst fears, making “The Cutting Room” a gritty tour of Glasgow’s demimonde and a brutal fable for the age of Blair.

*

Inamorata

Joseph Gangemi

Viking: 336 pp., $24.95

In this seductive tall tale of Jazz Age ghostbusters, a four-man team from Scientific American sets about investigating a resurgence of spiritualism: It’s the Roaring ‘20s, but Victorian tastes in the paranormal -- from seances to spirit writing -- are making a comeback, even as the juggernaut of modern science surges ahead.

The rather contentious squad of debunkers consists of Fox, a jowly, underhanded editor from the magazine; Flynn, a bibulous, chain-smoking reporter from the New York Times; Richardson, the upstanding Princeton mathematician; and McLaughlin, the aging Harvard psychologist and the team’s staunchest skeptic.

Enter Martin Finch (short for Finnochiaro), a Harvard post-grad with a flair for putting leggy Radcliffe girls under hypnosis. When McLaughlin’s health forces him to withdraw, Finch takes his place, just as the team encounters its most impenetrable case yet: that of Philadelphia’s Mina Crawley, the so-called Witch of Rittenhouse Square, lauded by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for her skill as a spirit medium. Finch discovers that Mrs. Crawley, the comely wife of a distinguished surgeon, has talents beyond summoning her brother Walter back from the grave. She’s sweet and seductive, she has a terrible secret life, and she just might be a fraud.

There’s much to be learned here, from how to pronounce “Schuylkill” (“skookle”) to what to do if you’re hosed down with teleplasm during a seance (get the stuff to a lab). Like a Quaker City version of “The Alienist,” “Inamorata” is both a gazetteer of bygone Philly -- Gangemi expertly coaxes the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel and Wanamaker’s from the hereafter -- and a good-natured plumbing of the lowlife depths, from flophouse junkies to innuendo-hurling ghosts. In the end, Finch and his bumbling associates wrap up the Crawley case, “albeit on a note of inconclusiveness.” It’s a fittingly mischievous verdict for a novel whose paranormal subject matter -- hustlers and hoaxes -- never seems to go away.