With a smirk, Irvine Welsh watched the crowd react to James Kelman's reading at the New York stop of Norton's "Great Scots Tour" on a rainy May evening. When Kelman, a 1993 Booker Prize winner for How Late It Was, How Late, began to read from his new collection of short stories, Busted Scotch, you could have heard the six dozen trenchcoats drip.
It was either the collective concentration needed to fathom what Kelman was saying -- his thick Scots accent was undecipherable at first -- or the shock of the two words that kept ringing through, clear as a wee dram: "fuck" and "cunt." In all their glorious forms. As nouns, verbs and adjectives. As in: "daft cunt," "silly cunt," "cunty lad," "ye stupid fuck."
By the end of Kelman's story, an elegiacal tale of sorrow, the crowd, gathered on May 1 at Barnes &Noble on Union Square, was well warmed up for Duncan McLean's Bunker Man, a brilliantly creepy novel of suspense, and for Welsh's latest, The Marabou Stork Nightmares, which he performed like the headliner in a one-man play, putting on each character's accent, from plummy English twit to Glaswegian council-flat hooligan, with admirable finesse.
"It's been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, getting the three hottest names in contemporary Scottish literature to hit the road together," said Norton publicist Maya Rutherford of the five-city tour, which also stopped in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Austin. Editor-in-chief Gerry Howard told PW that the tour "certainly helped us advance the authors with bookstore owners, who never were more receptive in taking the releases in the quantities they did."
The idea for the tour was a natural, particularly since "they all know each other quite well -- Kelman discovered McLean, and McLean's Clocktower Press was Welsh's first publisher. They all share the same editor in London, Robin Robertson. For them, the tour was a lot like a reunion," Rutherford said.No speed signings here -- the Scots actually liked to chat up fans, with Welsh particularly prone to pull all-nighters with anyone who wanted to come along.Indeed, it wasn't clear who was having a better time: the Scots, the fans or the radio interviewers, who were on tenterhooks waiting for the inevitable four-letter slip. Told he couldn't use the f-word on National Public Radio, Welsh instead peppered his comments with the versatile c-word instead, apparently unaware that that wasn't exactly an innocuous alternative. "That was amusing," said Rutherford mildly.
The publicist also had the logistical challenge of trying to organize a tour around her charges' "passionate but divergent tastes in music." Welsh wanted to hang out with The Chemical Brothers (producers and performers of alternative underground rock) in San Francisco, and "Duncan would do anything I asked of him but absolutely had to get away for Bob Wills Day in Turkey, Texas. And I never had a rave as part of a tour before, either." The rave, organized by Alan Black, the head of the Scottish Arts Foundation in San Francisco, was partly in honor of the Scottish writers but mostly to celebrate the end of Tory Party rule in Great Britain.
"Not for one minute did I feel in control," said Rutherford. "But I've had scarier moments with the kind of writer who stays in his hotel room running up the pay-per-view tab."
