Ian Rankin & Inspector Rebus (6 page)

The one thing I do take from the cut segment is the extension of the first-person voice. There’s something very striking about Rebus narrating the story. An intriguing glimpse
into his mind: ‘He could have put me out of action in about ten seconds dead, literally. I wanted to be like him.’

This, where Rebus reflects on the trained killer that is his SAS boss, clearly shows a different side to the character we know by novel 17 – not a laid-back cynic but a man who was a born fighter and battled hard to get where he did in the Armed Forces and then the Police Force.
OK, perhaps being a loose cannon compromised his career somewhat, but Rebus had his own moral code: he was true to himself. His principles were almost right for the Police Force and being a bit left of centre was acceptable in order to get the job done. And there is Inspector Rebus, a man at the outset nothing like his creator.

My parting thought regarding the self-narrative part of
Knots and
Crosses
: now that Rankin has whetted our appetite for a first person story in the Rebus series, why doesn’t he write a large tome in the first person? Rebus in retirement, maybe an autobiography (sic), surely that would expose more of the inner man, not unlike Jackie Leven’s song
The Haunting of John Rebus
, perhaps with the same melancholy overtones. Isn’t it time Rebus opened up and faced his
demons? Surely alone in retirement the voyeur loses his protective clothing: the job that kept him so busy he didn’t have to look at himself.

Knots and Crosses
was a thrilling first outing for Rebus, stark, real and a good, entertaining read. Rankin admits that Rebus is a little too well-read in the story, thinking more ‘like the student/novelist who created him’ and listening to jazz rather
than rock music. Yes, Rebus was a little stuffy to begin with, but every good copper has his pretences.

I find it hard to criticise
Knots and Crosses
in its first edition, because it doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is: a good cop novel. It seems to achieve many things by default.

And what does Rankin think of it? When I talked to him about the book (on two or three occasions in
interview), he always highlighted the fact that the reader missed the connection between the novel and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde – something he tried to rectify with the next novel in the series
Hide and Seek
.

Rankin probably had a higher opinion of the general reader than he should have given them credit for (especially in England).
Knots and Crosses
intentionally looks at the split personality
of Edinburgh, from the tourist areas to the more scary backwaters that visitors rarely see. Rankin took the character of Deacon Brodie – one of Stevenson’s influences when writing Jekyll and Hyde – cabinet maker by day, gentleman thief by night – but people didn’t reach that far into the book to detect that particular strain of schizophrenia. Indeed it would be something he would have to make
more obvious with the next Rebus novel and he did.

Rankin dedicated
Knots and Crosses
‘To Miranda without whom nothing is worth finishing’. Rankin married his student girlfriend in 1986 and they went off to live in London for four years where he worked at the National Folktale Centre. This became the interim period for him. The books weren’t bestsellers at this time, Rankin writing in his diary
that when
Watchman
was released the world was unmoved. It would take several more years and several more Rebus novels for him to give up the day job (approximately the eighth book,
Black and Blue
).

After London, the family moved to rural France for six years, living in an old farm house. But his adopted city called from afar and the Rankins moved back to Edinburgh, where they live to this day.
Like Stevenson, Rankin moved around a lot, but unlike Stevenson he eventually moved back home, home being Edinburgh – his adopted home for ever more. That’s an important point to understand: Rankin’s heart lies in his home country, not a far off island.

‘Their destination was the Old Town, for Miss Brodie had said they should see where history had been lived…’

Muriel Spark,
The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie

‘Edinburgh slept on, as it had slept for hundreds of years. There were ghosts in the cobbled alleys and on the twisting stairways of the Old Town tenements, but they were Enlightenment ghosts, articulate and deferential.’

Knots and Crosses

A
fter
Knots and Crosses
was released (by The Bodley Head), Rankin looked to Scottish novelist Allan Massie for some reassurance.
He did this because he believed that he should have written an academic work not a piece of crime fiction. Yes, he still felt guilty for writing commercial work. Massie was quick to guide his charge: ‘Who would want to be a dry academic writer when they could be John Buchan?’ Again the sober words of the older, academic figure were great reassurance to Rankin. Perhaps nowadays Rankin is
settling down to be the wise old figure of academia himself. His TV shows lend themselves to the persona of the serious thinking man rather than the laid-back crime novelist, and his participation in magazine programmes such as BBC2’s
Newsnight Review
enforce this. That said, the man you can meet occasionally in the Oxford Bar, in the backstreets of Edinburgh’s New Town, is one of the most convivial
of companions you’d chance to meet, so maybe he has a long way to go before the cobwebs start to cling!

Writing crime fiction did concern Rankin in the early days. Not unlike the horror genre, the crime genre has a pulp quality that is hard to shrug off. Even the two-billion-selling Agatha Christie is open to criticism. So prolific, Christie laid herself open to the criticism of ‘formula’ writing
with her aristocratic whodunits. However, Rankin would happily concede that Christie didn’t write his kind of crime fiction at all, stating clearly that there was no time for the reader to form a bond with her murder victims before they got killed off! A point well made, but Rankin has killed people off pretty quickly himself, completely absorbing himself in the criminal investigation itself
– or rather Rebus doing so – as much as either Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple before him.

The key thing here is that Poirot and Marple were not police officers. They had their own individual – methodical – way of doing things but they rarely had people to answer to, and the constraints of police procedure that Rebus has to adhere to is an important factor in giving credibility to the Rebus series.
That said, if Rankin found Rebus too bogged down in red tape he immediately made him ignore the rule book!

Rankin did make his job more difficult by making Rebus a complex character, but in a strange way that made him more endearing and a little less like his creator. Perhaps the complexity of the character has resulted in some continuity errors in certain books but even Dickens did that and
as Rankin has had some of his earlier work – such as
The Flood
and
Watchman
– re-edited and re-issued them with special Introductions, he can probably now do the same with the whole of the Rebus series, tweaking them for posterity.
³⁶

What Rankin – and possibly his publisher – fails to fully appreciate at the moment, is the importance of the Rebus series to both crime fiction and Scottish literature.
As a collection, it has been released during a major technological evolution within the Police Force – which is interesting from a cultural point of view – with the advance of computer systems, databases, the Internet, the introduction of the mobile phone and complex DNA testing. The early Rebus novels showcase the primitive Police Force of the mid-1980s, while the latter books highlight the
technological advances made since then. The books will stand as a social comment written in real time during this exciting 20-year period. Does that imply that returning to the Rebus series in the future could be a mistake? Yes, or at least, water down the impact. He could quite happily make an appearance in any other Rankin novel but not as the central character.

Although this book is all about
an author and his creation, it must be noted that it is the interest in police procedure and the underbelly of Edinburgh that has brought us to this point. Throughout the 1990s and into the Millennium, the general public both north and south of the border have been fascinated by emergency services series, both fact and fiction. The grim reality of life is good entertainment if it doesn’t concern
you personally and what is refreshing is the overall message that these TV shows convey: a positive attitude towards the hard work, dedication and professionalism of the emergency services. Frederick Forsyth has said that since
Dixon of Dock Green
the British people ‘have empathised with the Police Force and that has endured through programmes such as
The Bill
and into crime-stopper programmes
such as
Crimewatch
.’
³⁷

So how is all this relevant in regard to the early Rebus novels?

It shows that by default Rankin stumbled into the ever-developing TV crime/emergency services genre (the irony being Rebus hasn’t truly made a successful transition from novel to TV!). Rankin had been putting tiny bits of himself – the areas he grew up in at least – into his books and was searching for the
right direction, even before
The Flood
, but it wasn’t happening for him. The audience wasn’t there.

The fact that it would take him the best part of five years to write a sequel for John Rebus, vindicates this happy coincidence. There was still a way to go…

‘Ye need a lang spoon tae sup wi’ a Fifer.’

Hide and Seek

I
n August 2004, as a bestselling author, Rankin returned to his hometown of Cardenden. He was there to open a new road: Ian Rankin Court. Behind some of the houses he noticed a stream – the Den – where he had been taken on a field trip while at Denend Primary School. The memories of the overgrown wilderness
made him reflect on how far he had come. Ian Rankin Court had been built where a builder’s yard once stood in his youth. He thought of his parents who didn’t own their own house; but these houses were commanding six-figure sums from the wealthy.

Rankin went back to number 17 Craigmead Terrace. The front garden had now gone. It had been replaced by a parking space but the street remained largely
unchanged. He, however, had changed. Marriage, children and moving homes several times, had moulded the man the boy could only have dreamed of, including a successful career as a novelist and TV personality. Yes, time changes, to misquote Bob Dylan, it moves on like a gentle stream, babbling away across the years. Rankin also reflected on the fact that Auchterderran Junior High was no longer a
school. It had disappeared just like his Sunday School church.

He toyed with his memories for a while, allowing the distance of his previous life to affect him, wash over him. Was this Ian Rankin’s former home? More to the point, was it John Rebus’s? The answer to both questions was yes, but Rebus had had a typical Cardenden upbringing, Rankin hadn’t. Rankin had escaped, Rebus hadn’t. So somehow
the truth was much stranger than the fiction created.

After his ‘personal journey’ (the sub-title to
Rebus’s Scotland
) it was time to go home to his new life and leave behind the mixed memories and influences of his formative years. Two years later he would be writing Rebus’s retirement novel
Exit Music
. My God, what a life that character had! ‘…you can always console yourself with a couple more
gins,’ John Rebus would observe in
Exit Music
and, for him, it was probably the only escape from a melancholy existence. Not so for Ian Rankin. His life had been an extraordinary journey, due to his perseverance with his dream of writing.

I find it interesting that there was a five-year break between the first two Rebus novels, and that journalist Jim Stevens was the first character to get a
sequel not Rebus. But the character ate away at Rankin enough to warrant a return, and a much better book it was too. Couple that with the fact that friends of his wanted to know more about John Rebus, and a little bit of luck – serendipity maybe – focused the way ahead. So in that respect Rebus became Rankin’s lucky break, writing about the life of a working class Fifer to escape the life of a working
class Fifer!

The first time we meet Rebus in
Hide and Seek
, he is at a girlfriend’s dinner party feeling most uncomfortable. Rebus isn’t one for making small talk. He has a serious outlook on life and doesn’t suffer fools – or pretentious book dealers – gladly. He knows he should make more of an effort for the sake of his girlfriend – Rian – but he can’t even manage that over the weekend. He
has neglected to buy a new suit for the occasion and a book he bought for her –
Doctor Zhivago
– he has decided to keep for himself. He has also neglected to remember that she is on a diet and doesn’t like lilies, which turns a gift of lilies and chocolates into a pretty bad move! He is forgiven, because after the guests have gone, he advances on Rian like a caveman and she somehow succumbs. Although
things would get worse in time, it is good to see that the archetypical male chauvinist still got a result!

Like many older officers in the Police Force – especially in films – Rebus is considered a bit of a dinosaur. He lacks airs and graces and does things his own way, based upon what was once a tried and proved formula; he has just got too experienced.

Rian, and probably his former girlfriend
Gill Templer, found Rebus’s quiet strength sexy to begin with but under that hard veneer is a man who is perhaps a little too unsophisticated for them, and selfish. Although a little disorganised in his home life, Rebus seems to appeal to attractive women. Maybe Siobhan Clarke, his partner in crime-fighting, finds him attractive for an older man. It must be Rebus’s manner which engages the women
but, like his ex-wife’s love for him, the novelty wears off!