MASTER OF CRIME GOES LEGIT
Rankin’s novels worthy of place next to all-time greats
In the 1980s, Ian Rankin was at Edinburgh University working on a PhD thesis on Muriel Spark and supporting himself with a part-time job with the tax office. He began writing short stories that tended to be sensitive and perceptive, mostly about childhood in the old mining communities of Fife.
Some years later, he turned, sensibly, to crime.
Since then he has become the most successful crime novelist Scotland has ever produced. He made respectable Edinburgh dangerous, beautiful Edinburgh sinister. There are more than 20 novels featuring his policeman John Rebus and others featuring his other, very different, policeman, Malcolm Fox. They have been adapted for television and a tourist industry has grown up around them.
Rankin has now been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which means he has been received into Scotland’s intellectual elite. Or, if you prefer, Establishment. It won’t likely change him.
There are still people who look down on the crime novel. No crime writer has won the Man Booker Prize. For many, despite the example of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, as well as Rankin, crime fiction is still seen as genre fiction, and therefore inferior to the “straight” novel. It is still viewed with the sort of condescension that irritated Raymond Chandler 70 years ago when he complained of “that snobbism which makes a fourth-rate serious novelist, without style or any real talent, superior by definition to a mystery writer who might have helped re-create a whole literature” — which is, of course, what Chandler knew he had himself done. Some of that snobbery has actually withered, partly because the “straight” or “literary” novel is generally less highly regarded. Nevertheless, there is still a foolish feeling that the crime novel is somehow an inferior genre.
This is palpable nonsense. Many of the greatest novelists have crime at the centre of their work. Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian is a crime novel. Dickens’s Bleak House is a crime novel. So, of course, is Oliver Twist. Dickens indeed was fascinated, even obsessed, by crime and the criminal mind, as were Balzac and Dostoevsky. In the 1930s, André Gide, future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, declared (though he found it difficult to tell a story himself ) that Georges Simenon, creator of Maigret and author of scores of dark novels, was the greatest living novelist writing in the French language. That fine novelist Nicholas Freeling even claimed that “in prose fiction, crime is the pre-eminent, and often predominant, theme.” This may be an exaggeration, but not much of one.
Today, as Rankin recognized early, the crime novelist has one advantage denied to authors of the straight or literary novel. Unlike them, he can range over all levels of society, for crime breaches the barriers of class. These barriers mean that the modern literary novel is too often confined to the horizontal, because, to be realistic, it will tend to deal only with one layer of society, with people all leading much the same sort of life. But crime permeates society. It runs through it from top to bottom, and may make connections between them.
Rankin’s Rebus has investigated members of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish financial establishment, and found links between them and organized crime. He has disentangled relations between wretched immigrants, professional criminals and respectable members of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, recently, Rankin has had Rebus — and Fox — delving into past crimes that cast dark shadows on the present.
Rankin’s Edinburgh is a place of such shadows and secrets.
The city has always had a dual character: classical and romantic, elegant and sordid, rational and passionate. Robert Louis Stevenson was alert to its split personality. The only surprise is that he set his quintessentially Edinburgh novella, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in London, not his native Edinburgh. Nobody who knows Edinburgh has ever believed that Jekyll and Hyde didn’t walk its airy Georgian streets and the dark, fetid alleys and closes of the city’s Old Town. Rankin’s Rebus knows them both, has investigated modern versions of the respectable physician and his sinister alter ego.
Some authors identify with their characters. When Chandler saw Philip Marlowe as a “soiled Galahad,” he was projecting himself on his creation. But there has always been a tension between Rankin and Rebus. Apart from their taste in music, they have little in common. And yet Rankin has sometimes spoken of seeing Rebus as the brother he never had — a brother of whom he might have been somewhat in awe and even afraid.
There is violence in Rebus: He is on the side of the law, but is uncomfortable with not only his superiors, but with all the pillars of the community. Rankin has tried to retire him, but can’t get away from him. More recently, with Fox working in distrustful collusion with Rebus, Rankin has introduced a new source of tension. If Rebus represents excessive Scotland, Fox, a recovered alcoholic, is the epitome of buttoned-up, selfregarding Scotland. We can hope they are still bound together in the novels to come. Neither, however, is likely ever to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.