The Wages Of Sin

By Kaite Welsh

Tinder Press, £16.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

THE University of Edinburgh’s medical school already has a place in the annals of detective fiction thanks to Professor Joseph Bell’s role in inspiring Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. Now it can boast another sleuth, in the shape of Sarah Gilchrist. Set in 1892, The Wages Of Sin is an enthrallingly Gothic murder mystery which takes place in an Edinburgh of gas lamps, dens of iniquity and terrible poverty. Women are now being admitted to the medical school, to undisguised hostility, and one of the new intake, Sarah Gilchrist, takes it upon herself to uncover the truth behind the death of a young prostitute whose body turns up in the anatomy theatre. What’s unusual about this novel is that the gruesome and dangerous investigation feels like a respite from Sarah’s everyday life rather than a disruption of it.

It’s probably fair to say that most women who wanted to study medicine in those days will have faced some opposition from their families. But Sarah has actually been cut off by her English mother and father and now lives in the house of her uncle, a wealthy brewer, in Edinburgh. Her dream of studying medicine has been realised, but only because her parents found it expedient to banish her. The foolish notion of becoming a doctor had brought enough shame on the family, but her rape by a house guest, followed by a spell in a sanatorium, was the last straw.

Kaite Welsh strips away any romance from the Victorian era, depicting it as a Taliban-like society in which a stupendous amount of energy is expended in policing women’s lives. Inside the school, it’s bad enough. The staff are predictably patronising towards the female students and the undergraduates play cruel pranks on them. Chaperones are ever-present, working away at their embroidery, even during dissections. Outside its walls, there is no aspect of Sarah’s life which is not managed by her aunt and uncle and, from a distance, her father. As a “fallen woman” (a term she uses against herself more than once), Sarah merits special supervision, to the most intrusive and degrading extent.

It’s no accident that the murder victim, Lucy, is a prostitute, and that brothels loom so large in this story. Victorian society, as portrayed here, is little more than prostitution writ large. Given the context, when Sarah’s aunt and uncle try to matchmake her with the scion of a rich family, it’s hard to frame it in any terms other than an attempt to pimp her out. Similarly, when her aunt lectures her about fallen women, we see only a person who willingly married for money morally censuring one who was taken by force.

The setting for this mystery is not just a flat backdrop but a busy, self-perpetuating system of exploitation, from which both the murder and its investigator emerge as natural by-products. Welsh adroitly joins all the dots, bringing a pleasing unity to it all. But it can be a tough read. The oppression and humiliation that Sarah has to endure in the course of an average day is relentless, which makes her shifts tending to the poor and her investigation of Lucy’s murder – which she embarks on with such rash, reckless amateurism that one fears for her safety from very early on – so liberating.

As the story draws to a close, we get the Sherlock Holmes reference we’ve been waiting for, and the scene is set for three more years of Sarah studying cadavers. Welsh’s first full-length work is a striking debut, and makes such a strong opener that the next in the series can’t come along soon enough.