Inspector Rebus makes heartening reappearance
Rankin lets his characters age in real time
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Or at least make a token gesture toward joining ’em.
That was my thinking when I decided to spend some time investigating the oeuvre of the late Stieg Larsson. I reasoned I’d feel a little less alienated when talk at social gatherings turned to books. Those, after all, were the books everyone was reading, and one hates to come across as a snob.
Alas, I found that for all their fascination as a sociocultural phenomenon (for example, the claim that Lisbeth Salander was inspired by Pippi Longstocking surely demands scholarly attention), those novels, as a strictly literary phenomenon, run into a serious roadblock: the writing, even allowing for the fact that they’re translated from Swedish, is atrocious. I’m talking about the special calibre of bad that sends you running back into the arms of the tried and true. That, for me, is where Ian Rankin comes in.
Standing In Another Man’s Grave (Orion, 356 pp, $24.99) is the 18th Rankin novel to feature Inspector John Rebus, the loosecannon melancholic Edinburgh cop whose ironclad integrity and old-school, lone-wolf genius for solving violent crimes is matched only by an intimate knowledge of his beloved city’s pubs. Rebus’s reappearance is especially heartening, because five years ago we thought we had lost him — not literally, though Rankin had entertained designs of killing him off Sherlock Holmes-style in the 2007 novel Exit Music
In his intervening absence, Rankin wrote two novels starring Rebus’s bete noire, the by-the-book Cold Case overseer Malcolm Fox. But Fox has lacked that certain charismatic something, and the author himself seems to have sensed as much. Fox does appear in the new book, but only as a thoroughly unlikable minor figure, a weaselly type bent on bringing Rebus down via the force’s new p.c. policy. It all bodes well for a few more Rebus instalments, as it’s hard to see how Rankin can go back to Fox as a focal point now.
Rebus, while very much still the man we last saw in 2007, has not been standing still. For one thing, he’s not an inspector anymore. He’s a civilian, helping with tricky cases on an ad hoc basis and angling to reapply to the force from which he’d been forced to retire at age 60.
Cynics who might think Rankin has brought back Rebus simply to placate fans are advised that there’s a real-life imperative here: Scotland has extended the mandatory retirement age for its police, and Rebus — estranged from his only child, single, and basically unable to think of anything else to do with himself — wants back in, legitimate fears that he might flunk the physical notwithstanding.
Here as elsewhere, a decision Rankin made back at the start of his crime-writing career goes on paying artistic and emotional dividends: he lets his characters age in real time. Rebus is now very nearly a senior citizen and he’s feeling every day of it, maybe even more given that he has never exactly taken good care of himself. So as he drives his superannuated Saab around the Highlands on the trail of a possible serial killer of young women, the suspense often comes as much from the fear that Rebus and/or his vehicle might not make it as from the sense of impending violence.
Anyway, with Rankin/ Rebus you’re not reading so much to find out whodunit — though, you definitely want to know — as to spend a few hundred blissful pages in the company of an old friend. For that reason, I would urge any Rankin neophytes to go as far back in the series as is practical and then proceed sequentially. It is, in the best possible sense, like reading one long novel.
Finally, for many Rebus devotees a motif in the series has grown into something of an obsession. I refer to Rankin’s practice of name-checking the musicians to whom Rebus turns for spiritual solace in times of greatest need, artists whose hard-luck personal narratives often run parallel to that of Rebus himself. (In this sense and others, Rankin is a brother across the sea to the American George Pelecanos.)
That tradition is extended in the new book with shoutouts to singer-songwriters Jackie Leven, John Martyn and Bert Jansch, three undervalued Scottish geniuses who died in the time since the last Rebus book. If readers in any significant number are inspired to delve into those artists’ work, Rankin will have crossed over from crime fiction paragon into the realm of secular sainthood.