Ian Rankin & Inspector Rebus (11 page)

So was Rankin suddenly writing to a formula? No, that would be too harsh. What he did do was weave in two or three storylines – different strands – and carry the reader through many twists and turns before arriving at his final conclusion. If Rebus’s summing up was a little too far-fetched then this was simply because Rankin hadn’t fully developed
his new style.

Rebus’s story continued with a grand tour of Scotland. It would be another book that would take its title from a Rolling Stones album,
Black and Blue
, and Rankin would crack that new way of writing so well that his ultimate goal of recognition for his literary efforts would finally be fulfilled.

O
il, a central theme in
Black and Blue
, is sometimes referred to as ‘black gold’. Couple that with the phrase ‘The Boys in Blue’ (i.e. the Police Force) and you have the black and blue of the title.
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Black and Blue
was Rankin’s breakthrough novel: the one that made him an international bestseller, not just a recognised quality writer.

Shortly before the book was
released, Rankin returned from his six years in France. He and his family were renting a house in Edinburgh but had to vacate it when the family who owned it wanted it back for Christmas. Initially this wasn’t a problem as the Rankins spent Christmas in Belfast with Rankin’s wife’s family. They then spent New Year with friends in Cambridge. They moved around to other family and friends for a while,
and while in York visiting friends Rankin read a teaser in
The Times
. It announced that the best crime novel of 1997 had already been written and its identity would be released the following week. Rankin’s next novel was due for January release and he prayed that it was his book that the reviewer was raving about. It was, and by November, the eighth Rebus novel had picked up the Gold Dagger Award
for the best crime novel published in 1997.
The Times
had got it right. Rankin had now truly made it.

But it was largely due to Rankin’s experiences with writing ‘scripts’ before writing
Let It Bleed
that made
Black and Blue –
and Rankin – famous. There had definitely been a step up in the substance of the novels since
The Black Book
, and it wasn’t just because of Rebus’s move to St Leonard’s
and the introduction of ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty (although that didn’t hurt the series at all). It was to do with writing technique.

Rankin had learned the art of script-writing and the fact that two or three sub-plots were important to a story. He had tried out the formula in
Let It Bleed
and refined it for
Black and Blue
, and this to me is the reason why the series then took off. Rankin doesn’t quite
see it that way: ‘I think everything conspired to make
Black and Blue
a better book than my previous offerings. I got a strong central story and, thanks to James Ellroy’s object lesson, brought real-world
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crimes and stories into my fictional world.

In May 2005, Rankin admitted that
Black and Blue
had been ‘written in anger’. His son Kit had been born in July 1994, while he and Miranda were
living in France. There had been no signs of problems with the baby either during pregnancy or the first couple of months of its life, but by nine months it became clear that there were serious problems with Kit. Frustrated by his lack of grasp of the French language and the punishment God had inflicted upon him, Rankin let fly his anger at Rebus and the new novel he was writing.
Black and Blue
became longer, more intricate and menacing as a consequence. ‘The anger and all of that helped,’ Rankin explained. ‘I really felt focused… and Rebus becomes more of a believable human character – we begin to care about him.
⁴⁸

So the introduction of a disabled child spawned the bestseller Rankin had been dreaming of? No.
Black and Blue
was pure evolution: a sudden set of leaps up the ladder that
had started with
The Black Book
, then
Mortal Cause
and followed by
Let It Bleed
. Of course the series had been evolving since day one, but Rebus’s world had suddenly got bigger and more intricate, and characters were returning to the series, such as – with
Black and Blue
– Jim Stevens (the journalist) and Jack Morton (who had worked with him in
Knots and Crosses
).

We can also picture Rebus a
little more clearly now. He is ‘a couple of inches’ taller than DS ‘Dod’ Bain, who is 5ft 11in, and he is also out of shape – if we believe Jack Morton, who has given up the bad things in life for a new fitness regime! So Rebus is clearer in his creator’s mind suddenly, and does not have anything more in common with Rankin. Does this tell us anything in itself? Yes, perhaps. It tells us that Rankin
didn’t have to rely on his own personal background any more. The research he had done about the Police Force, Edinburgh and real life bad guys had made
Black and Blue
a real watershed novel for him. Rebus was suddenly the older man; Rankin had distanced himself somewhat and this distance had allowed the writer to bounce his character around a little more, take risks, become more creative.

Another
very interesting and important part of
Black and Blue
is the character Rebus is tracking down, Johnny Bible. It appears that this serial killer is a copycat murderer based upon 1960s killer Bible John. The point here is that Bible John really existed and was never caught by the police. Rankin decided to work this urban-gothic story into
Black and Blue
(this is what Rankin was referring to with
James Ellroy’s object lesson), thus adding a speculative but very thought-provoking sub-plot that would engage anyone remotely interested in the Bible John case.

Using Bible John was inspired but surely Rankin was concerned about using a real-life serial killer after the fictitious Wolfman had had his name painted on an underpass wall? I asked Rankin if copycat murders troubled him (i.e. people
basing their crimes on incidents in his book)? ‘I’ve discussed this a bit with other crime writers,’ he said. ‘We feel that the people who read crime fiction tend to be very well-balanced – lovely people to meet! It’s because reading is cathartic. All your fears and frustrations and any innate aggression are “earthed” by placing yourself in the shoes of these characters.
⁴⁹

Black and Blue
was
more than a stream of consciousness emanating from urban folktales. It must be remembered that Rankin’s social conscience was working hard nowadays, and the plight of Scottish industry/enterprise was something that stuck in his throat and hardened his stories. For me, this is where the anger comes in. Maybe the anger is also detected in some of the supporting ‘bad boy’ cast, as they are all a little
more vicious than usual. There’s Tony El, a man who likes to tie his victims up, put polythene bags over their heads and use power tools to torture them. Then there’s Malky – aka Mr Stanley Knife – who fills emergency rooms all over Glasgow with his ‘particular hobby’. Yes,
Black and Blue
is a more spiteful novel, and if we focus in on the statements about the decline of Scottish industry to the
viciousness of certain characters and the cavalier things that happen to Rebus – including being beaten black and blue – we can see where Rankin threw his anger.

Sometimes it is only when a writer gets angry that he produces his best work. To adopt a cavalier approach to writing (or in the case of the great Goon Spike Milligan, a completely unorthodox/abstract approach) is occasionally the only
way of breaking through the safety net. There are so many examples of this, from the ancient to the modern. It doesn’t have to be anger that provokes the best work: sentiment and tenderness work too. I’m thinking of a book like Campbell Armstrong’s
All That Really Matters
, where the author embarks upon a very personal story – not totally autobiographical – in order to touch his audience’s hearts.
Digging into emotions are the key to good writing and sometimes that is a very difficult thing to do, especially in crime fiction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle found it almost impossible to do in his Sherlock Holmes fiction, trying to add flowery prose through his narrator Dr Watson, only to realise that Sherlock Holmes dictated a sterile atmosphere of pure facts!

‘First there had been Bible John,
terrorising Glasgow in the late 1960s… And now there was Johnny Bible. The media has been quick with the name.’

Black and Blue

On reading
Black and Blue
, one is pulled into Rebus’s life and interest in the Johnny Bible/Bible John cases, but that is almost the sub-plot to the book, as Rebus is forced into moments of happenstance
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that pull him towards solving the case. It is an interesting
way of writing a novel and the fact that it takes a long time to sort the Johnny Bible murders against Rebus’ confusing life dictates and justifies the length of the novel. In fact, like
Let It Bleed
, things don’t end up that well for Rebus, and this makes the story so much more believable – because as Frank Sinatra observed, that’s life!

Rebus’s flaws/hang-ups are clearly showcased in the novel
too. The way he needs to fight a friend to release tension, the way he talks back to authority when
they
need to cross-examine
him
. There is a depth and believability about Rebus, as Rankin enthuses: ‘Rebus is a man who has used his psychological problems to good advantage in his working life.’
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And he is right. Rebus is a survivor. The fact that he had survived a tour in the Army, a breakdown,
and neither drank nor smoked himself to death, is highly commendable. Could we say a similar thing about Ian Rankin? No, not really. Perhaps his drinking habits have got the better of him in the past but he is no Rebus, that is for sure.

Has Rebus therefore been Rankin’s Dorian Gray? An interesting concept, but frankly one that doesn’t hold too much water. Perhaps if Rankin was a single man,
his life would have had less meaning and his books more, but even then I can’t see where Rankin would have pressed self-destruct after the end of the Rebus novels.

‘“Thing is, I’ve tried to learn from you, but I’m not sure you were the right choice. A bit too intense maybe, eh? See, whatever it is you’ve got, John, I just don’t have it.” A longer pause. “And I’m not sure I even want it, to
be honest.”’

Black and Blue
.

‘But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched by rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills.’

Robert Louis Stevenson,
Edinburgh – Picturesque
Notes

A
lthough the Rebus books sometimes take place outside Edinburgh, Rankin always brings the story back to the capital city for the more dark – macabre – moments of corruption and murder. A good example of this is the novella
Death Is Not The End
(Orion, 1998). Rebus travels to his hometown to help an old friend, Brian ‘Barney’ Mee, find his missing son Damon. It looks like a straightforward
missing person’s case (although Rebus is out of his jurisdiction) but suddenly a Hibernian football player is involved and the movers and shakers behind the disappearance are the money men back in Edinburgh. So Rebus is pulled back to his adopted city from his hometown and, as Rebus’s hometown is Rankin’s hometown, one cannot fail to draw the comparison that Rankin is constantly pulled back to
Edinburgh by skeletal fingers.

Too strong an analogy? Possibly, but what one must take into consideration is the fact that the passage of time sometimes doesn’t heal wounds – it shrouds them.
Death Is Not The End
is a great little story for illustrating this point. Rankin asks the question right at the beginning of the story: ‘Is loss redeemed by memory? Or does memory merely swell the sense
of loss, becoming the enemy?’ It’s a big question for such a little book, but he takes the idea deeper: ‘the language of loss is the language of memory… people leave our lives all the time: some we met briefly, others we’d known since birth.’

If we appreciate the title of the story in conjunction with the above quotes, we can see that death is not the end, because people have to live on after
their loved ones have departed. Memory is both saint and sinner and keeps feelings fresh, for good and bad reasons. When Rebus accompanies DC Siobhan Clarke to a Hibernian game, his mind wanders back to his father taking him and his brother to local Cowdenbeath games to show that they could still carry on as a normal family despite the death of Rebus’s mother. The teardrop of autobiography again
in the story: that path where Rankin’s and Rebus’s worlds definitely cross over.

So memories, memories, memories: Rebus visits his old school friend and finds that he has married one of Rebus’s old flames, a woman who appears more beautiful now than when she was younger and represents to him what could have been if they had got together. But Rebus – ever cynical – feels in his heart that it wouldn’t
have worked out. More memories, memories, memories but then present-day reality, for it is her son that Rebus is looking for: a lost person. And sometimes a lost person is never found and that is a fate worse than death for the people left behind. Do they mourn? Do they continue the search? Where does it end? Should it end?

‘The street was dead. He reached up and hauled himself over the iron
railings and walked a circuit of the cemetery for an hour or so, and felt strangely at peace.’

Death Is Not The End

There is ‘an echo in the bone’, as Diana Gabaldon would call it. And one can sense that mixture of ghosts, souls – both living and dead – in Rankin’s novella, all of them lost and yearning for salvation.

Rankin tries to tackle some big themes in
Death Is Not The End
. It was
based upon a conversation he had with a friend, Otto Penzler, and the theme of vanishing, but as usual the idea grew into a more socially aware thriller – perhaps too big an idea for a novella, as missing persons is a sensitive area for many families all over the UK and can’t be dealt with in 80 pages. There are many websites and helplines which try to help people locate loved ones who, on some occasions,
just get up and leave for work and are never seen again. The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) Missing Person Bureau (MPB) is one such organisation that ‘works alongside the police and related organisations to improve the services provided to missing persons investigations and increase effectiveness’.
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So a very serious subject and perfect for Rankin’s dark Edinburgh, but so underused
in the novella and crying out for novel-length exploration.