WHY, I ask Kaite Welsh, do you want to write crime fiction? “God,” the 34-year-old woman in front of me exclaims. “I wish I had a good answer to that other than the first and last man I fell in love with was Sherlock Holmes.”
It is a Monday afternoon at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and Welsh is enjoying being a full-time writer. After years working as a journalist and in Creative Scotland’s literature team she is now concentrating on writing her Sarah Gilchrist medical thriller series set in Victorian Edinburgh.
When did she give up the day job? “About a week ago. I decided I would like to sleep occasionally. Writing a crime series, being a journalist and having a full-time job doesn’t really leave you time to do anything else so I thought: ‘The writing’s going pretty well. Let’s stake my bets on that.’”
Well indeed. Her debut novel The Wages of Sin is a hugely entertaining slice of Victoriana, full of medical dissections and misogyny with excursions into the Edinburgh sex trade and university life. The result is a pacey, entertaining, unapologetically feminist take on crime conventions.
Welsh always wanted to be a writer. “My dad has a contract written in green crayon that promises him all of my royalties that I wrote when I was about seven. It’s not actually legally admissible. I’ve checked.”
The Wages of Sin is the first in a trilogy (Welsh would be happy to write more if she gets the chance though). The genesis of the book goes back to Welsh’s own undergraduate days at Edinburgh University. She would walk past plaques to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and to Sophia Jex-Blake, one of the first women to study medicine at Edinburgh (although she was refused a degree), and think there is a story there.
Years later that original inspiration coalesced into the figure of her heroine Sarah Gilchrist, a “new woman”, an Edinburgh incomer with a murky reputation who is one of the first female medical students at the university. As this is crime fiction, you will not be surprised to learn that she gets involved in a murder investigation, one that takes her high and low through Edinburgh’s streets and society.
For Welsh it was the mixture of Victorian repression and opportunity that appealed. “Sarah’s world is fascinating because on the one hand all these exciting things are happening – women being able to have careers, being able to study at university – but at the same time they’re still so mired in misogyny and oppression, their lives are still so circumscribed in so many ways.
“And these palaces of learning are surrounded by the most awful poverty. You’ve got the university medical school and then not five, 10 minutes away, what were then the slums of the Cowgate. The juxtaposition was very interesting to me.”
Did Edinburgh really have opium dens back then? “There were opium dens around the city. I don’t know for sure there was one in Fleshmarket Close, but I wanted to use Fleshmarket Close as a setting, so, godammit, I made it up.”
In a way The Wages of Sin is the latest chapter of our obsession with Victorian values, of course. But our interest in the past, Welsh argues, is merely a reflection of our interests now.
“You can read reams and reams about 19th-century prostitutes, but what we’re really fascinated with is the reality of sex work today,” she argues. “That’s something that’s played on my mind a lot when I was writing Wages because it’s both about prostitution and people’s attitudes towards it. And I found mine changing dramatically over the course of the book.”
How so? “I began with a very paternalistic Victorian attitude. ‘These poor women must be saved. And if they don’t want to be saved it’s because they don’t understand they’re oppressed.’”
Now, Welsh says, she takes a much more pragmatic stance. “I don’t particularly like it, but if it has to happen it needs to be regulated. Which means it needs to be legalised.”
Welsh’s own Edinburgh history could best be described as a romance. She visited the city in her early teens and fell in love with it, returned as a student and then in 2014 left London to live in the Scottish capital.
She had started The Wages of Sin as a love letter to the city from a distance. Now she gets to do her research on the very streets she writes about.
“I have three Edinburghs in my head at any given time. The predominant one is Sarah’s. I’m always on the lookout for new settings; creepy little streets that terrible things can happen in. There are also my university days which overlay with hers quite a lot. The Cowgate wasn’t a slum, but it was full of bad nightclubs so I’ve done my time there. And then there’s the Edinburgh I live in now.”
She stays out in Trinity now. “A nice break from the bit I write about.” She shares her home with her wife Lola, who is originally from Motherwell and herself a writer. Welsh grew up on the Wirral, the recipient of what she describes as “a wonderfully Gothic convent education”. “I thought it was normal at secondary school to have a graveyard full of dead teachers. There’s a nun’s graveyard next to the hockey pitch, a chapel in the school and very gruesomely graphic crucifixes in every classroom. So it was perfect. The religion rolled off like water but it was wonderful for the imagination.”
Is Edinburgh a Gothic city for her then? “Definitely. You could put me down in Milton Keynes and I would find a way to make it Gothic … And I think I just got a book idea,” she laughs.
Welsh says she didn’t so much come out as “wander out”. “My perspicacious mother was pointing out since I was about 10: ‘It will be fine if you want to come out.’ I came out to my parents with very little fanfare when I was 13 or 14. Nobody was surprised. By the time I came out to the school I was seen as such a ranty feminist that nobody was shocked by that either, although one of my teachers at my leavers’ ball came up to my mother and said at university I’d find a nice man and go back to God.”
She and Lola got married in New York. Why did getting wed matter? “Maybe it was growing up with two very happily married parents – that happiness is the pinnacle of domestic life for me.”
After the ceremony they went to the Stonewall Inn (where members of the gay community rioted against police persecution at the end of the 1960s) “to raise a glass to the queers who came before us”.
“A drag queen offered us ecstasy as a wedding present which I thought was very nice, particularly given the fact she was drinking at 11am and I would assume didn’t have huge resources to be handing out ecstasy. It was a nice offer but I turned it down.”
Scotland has since caught up in terms of gay marriage with New York. It’s remarkable how much Scotland has changed in its social attitudes in recent years, Welsh suggests. By contrast, she says, England is looking a little regressive. Can she explain why? “God, far more intelligent people than me could tell you. I think it’s Rhona Cameron. Everyone loves Rhona Cameron.”
She’s joking, but only a little. Role models are important, she says. “When I was at school the only other out person I knew from the Wirral was Paul O’Grady – Lily Savage. He was the closest thing I had to a role model, which in retrospect explains a lot about my teenage makeup decisions.”
In a way, she says, bringing us full circle, this is why she is writing the Sarah Gilchrist books, to write women, including gay women, back into history.
“Sophia Jex-Blake lived out her life with her female companion and it’s far more likely than not that it wasn’t a platonic relationship. There is queer history and women’s history and the history of people of colour and trans people that get glossed over in what we think of history now, it’s that uncovering and telling those stories again that is important. History doesn’t look the way we think it does.”

The Wages of Sin by Kaite Welsh is published by Tinder Press. The author will be appearing at the Wigtown Book Festival on September 28.