Ian Rankin "Standing In Another Man's Grave"

A man, it is said, cannot serve two masters and I’d suggest a novelist cannot run two protagonists, especially when they’re as diametrically opposed as John Rebus and Malcolm Fox.

News Ian Rankin had brought Rebus back to life in or around the force brought back memories of a remark from Rankin that Rebus was working on cold cases as a civilian, although the retirement age had been lifted and there was a possibility of him rejoining after five years away from the force. If he did he’d more than likely come across Malcolm Fox from The Complaints who might, looking back on the plot line of The Impossible Dead, be inclined to turn a blind eye to some of the Rebus irregularities provided his nose was otherwise clean.

Fox, I thought, worked rather neatly in those two titles, a man doing his (unpopular) job against a background of resentment and defiance that bordered, at times, on overt rebellion. With those two stories largely told from Fox’s point of view and through his eyes an author’s setting himself an impossible task if he sets out to analyse the events surrounding the disappearance of Annette McKie, the most recent of a number of girls who’ve disappeared around the A9, one of Scotland's major arterial roads, through both sets of eyes.

It probably could be done, but not without getting in the way of the plot line in operation here.

Rebus might be back, operating on the fringes, but there’s one key element that’s going to work against him rejoining, and that’s an interesting change in the nature of his interaction with his nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty. At the end of Exit Music, with Cafferty in hospital, Rebus happens to save his life, exactly the sort of behaviour that would convince the watchdog that Rebus is bent. From his own point of view, of course, Rebus wants the final satisfaction of putting Big Ger away for a long spell, something that’s not going to be possible if he up and dies on you.

In any case Rebus now gets regular visits from the supposedly retired Cafferty, which is exactly the sort of thing that’s going to further arouse Fox’s suspicions. There’s also an interesting development involving Cafferty’s interaction with the family of the latest girl to disappear which isn’t going to make Rebus look too good from where Fox is sitting.

The Rebus-Fox interactions are, at this point, very much a side issue, By the end of this particular narrative, with Rebus having sorted out a string of cold cases and the latest disappearance you can see potential for this interaction to develop further, particularly with Rebus’ former colleague, Siobhan Clarke, moving up through the ranks.

As far as Fox is concerned, Rebus should be extinct ... Somehow the Ice Age came and went and left him still swimming around while the rest of us evolved and has spent so many years crossing the line he's managed to rub it out altogether.

The assessments running in the other direction are equally blunt. As far as Rebus is concerned, Fox could have been middle management in a plastics company or Inland Revenue, so while we mightn’t end up getting a full blown Rebus versus Fox and the ethics and standards division as Fox goes about ensuring Rebus doesn’t corrupt his former sidekick we’ve got an interesting and intriguing developing subplot for future instalments.

As far as this episode is concerned, the latest disappearance on the A9, the road where Sally Hazlitt was last seen twelve years earlier, has her mother Nina, perpetually ready to hear the worst about her daughter's disappearance, reminding the cold case department of her suspicion that the disappearances of a string of young women can be attributed to a serial killer on the loose.

The problem with the theory lies in an absence of sightings, bodies and viable suspects, which explains an ongoing reluctance to take Nina’s theory seriously, until she heads in to have another go and finds the police station almost deserted, except for one John Rebus, who has never been one to shy away from apparently lost causes.

Like his former colleagues Rebus is initially unconvinced, but goes as far as requesting the records concerning the cold cases, and comes to the conclusion that, yes, there may be a connection and contacts his former protégée Siobhan Clarke, now a Detective Inspector in the missing persons department investigating the latest disappearance.

Clarke knows enough about the man to give him some rein to chase down clues no one else wants to look at, but her long-standing admiration for Rebus's detective abilities is at odds with her own career prospects in the new-style, corporate police force, which is where Fox comes into the picture when Rebus manages to get himself temporarily attached to the missing persons department to help with the case.

There’s more to link the cases than the fact that all these girls disappeared along the same stretch of road. In the most recent cases photographs of the same country scene have been sent to mobile phones belonging to friends (and not always close ones) and relatives.

The search for that scene, which has to have some significance, sees Rebus travel the length of the A9 in his battered Saab, haring all over Scotland to Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness and the far north, unearthing buried secrets, tracking down those who have moved or retired to remote areas, bending and breaking the rules, arguing with his superiors, and displaying the Rebus single-minded doggedness in his quest for justice.

Alongside that investigation there’s a neat little subplot involving Cafferty, the up and coming underworld player who happens to be involved with the missing girl’s mother, and her brother.

Despite the time he’s spent on the sidelines Rebus works as well as he always has. He’s the same curmudgeonly dinosaur he always was, drinking and smoking more than most of us should, listening to his favourite folk and rock classics, not quite managing the reconciliation with his daughter as he continues to play by his own rules.

Rankin writes as well as ever, and, most interestingly, has things set up rather nicely for the next couple of episodes in an evolving series. Along the course of the investigation the cold cases unit is wound up, so there’s no comfort for him there if he doesn’t get back on the force full time.

The realignments in the Edinburgh underworld have interesting implications for the future as Rebus looks to clamber back on board the train, Fox looks to ensure that he doesn’t and Siobhan Clarke continues to be torn between career ambitions and long term loyalties. It’s a prospect that’s guaranteed to have the fans scanning the horizon for news of the next instalment.

Ian Rankin "Mortal Causes"

According to Ian Rankin the Rebus series stems from the author's desire to use the character to explore issues he wanted to write about rather than an interest in crime fiction as a genre and in Mortal Causes he's found an interesting sociopolitical issue to play around with.

Against the backdrop of the Edinburgh Festival this exploration of links between Scottish nationalism and Northern Ireland Loyalist paramilitaries might seem to be stretching things considerably, since you'd expect the Republican side off the Ulster Troubles to be a more likely fit with Scottish separatists, but if you can suspend that notion for a bit what happens here works fairly logically, though the plot line develops with the regulation quota of twists, turns, blind alleys and dead ends.

It's fairly obvious from the start that there's some Ulster influence in the murder in Mary King's Close that starts things off, with the IRA known to render enemies or traitors immobile for the rest of their lives with bullets to the elbows, kneecaps, and ankles. Having done that, however, in this case a seventh bullet has finished the victim off.

Things become complicated fairly quickly when the victim is identified as the previously unknown son of gangster 'Big Ger' Cafferty who might be behind bars but certainly isn't going to pass up any opportunity to exact revenge. An SaS tattoo seemingly links the body to Sword and Shield, a supposedly defunct Scottish Nationalist group and Rebus finds himself seconded to the SCS (Scottish Crime Squad) working with London-based Special Branch DI Abernathy, a scenario which coincides nicely with Rebus' tendency to follow his nose regardless of instructions from above.

That tendency is aided by his SCS colleagues' reluctance to let the newcomer in on the action, and in the end the whole secondment is a fairly adept bit of manipulation in the course of another, related, investigation.

There are also the usual related subplots along the way. The Rebus/Patience relationship continues across thorny territory, with its progress not exactly helped by a rash encounter with a randy lawyer with ambitions of her own.

Rebus' continuing contact with the Catholic priest he ran across in The Black Book throws in an additional subplot, involving a youth club at Pilmuir's Garibaldi Estate, which seems at first to be tangential but eventually delivers Rebus to the heart of the matter.

In the end, though, the story represents a fairly chilling exploration of the ways in which seemingly incompatible entities can cut deals with each other, and when Big Ger engineers an escape from jail to exact his own version of revenge he's also providing the fuel for Rebus continuing obsession with bringing him down.

Ian Rankin "Strip Jack" and "The Black Book"

With three Rebus novels under his belt and, presumably, the majority of the short stories that comprise A Good Hanging under his belt, you'd have to guess that Rankin knew he had the makings of an on-going series when he started on 1992's Strip Jack.

As the first of the stories collected as Rebus: The St Leonard Years Rankin admits in the foreword that the fourth Rebus novel is a conscious move out of a fictional Edinburgh into a real one. Up to this point, Rebus has been operating out of Greater London Road, but with that fictional location about to close he's moved over to the actual headquarters of the Lothian and Borders Police at St Leonards. However one wonders why, having read that comment and noted a map in the Reading Group Notes at the back of the book, it's impossible to locate most of the locations in the story on the aforementioned map.

If there's a bit of the anorak in that comment, let's just point out that, having noted the presence of a map in the book, one should be able to locate roughly where we are on it. Otherwise, why bother to put the map in there in the first place? You don't need massive detail, and you can read the Donna Leon novels, set in Venice with all its twists and turns in the back streets, without being too concerned by exact locations. He caught the vaporetto here, and got off there sort of thing…

Apart from that very minor quibble, there are a couple of emerging themes that get a fairly thorough going over in Strip Jack, with the main one being Rebus' attempts to dig around under the surface to find out what's actually going on where the movers and shakers who actually run the show are concerned.

Kicking off with a Saturday night raid on a discreet brothel operating in a fairly swish neighbourhood (one of the better streets of the New Town) largely occupied by Saab and Volvo driving  lawyers, surgeons and university professors, the plot immediately thickens when one of the punters caught in the cot turns out to be popular hardworking MP Gregor Jack.

Much of that thickening comes when those inside are escorted off the premises and have to run the gauntlet of the reporters and photographers who've seemingly been tipped off about the raid and the possibility of it landing a reasonably big fish.

No prizes for guessing the front page story in the Sunday papers.

Under normal circumstances the standard operating procedure in cases like this is to have the friends and family gather 'round the bloke under the floodlights, but in this case Jack's wife Elizabeth, a noted partygoer who's always been inclined to follow her own path, has gone missing and it soon becomes obvious that Jack's friends, most of whom share the same home town, have issues of their own.

Lizzie's body is found in circumstances that seem to match another recent death, and there's an obvious suspect, a drunk who brags about the first killing, is released for lack of actual evidence, gives a false address and vanishes while Rebus is preoccupied trying to track down a valuable collection of stolen books..

Mrs Jack's body turns up on property owned by actor Rab Kinnoul, a key member of the Jack social circle, and while Rebus starts out sympathetic to the MP's problems, it soon becomes obvious that someone out there is out to destroy him by stripping him of his good name and political standing in a real life equivalent of the Strip Jack Naked card game, which provides the book's title.


But while the aim seems fairly clear the key questions concern the who? and the why? Delving into matters Rebus discovers that Lizzie, the only child of mogul Sir Hugh Ferrie, has a well-disguised private life based around wild weekends at an isolated cottage and the investigation meanders through a labyrinth of red herrings, deceitful alibis, secret liaisons until a remark to Rebus' offsider Brian Holmes brings in the key element that slots everything into place.

Along the way there are the regular Rebus issues with the demon drink, Rebus' own inner demons and the on-going difficulty of maintaining personal relationships when you're a semi-obsessive sleuth working long and irregular hours.


Those issues run right through the series, but the interpersonal themes are a key component of the plot line of the fifth Rebus novel, 1993's The Black Book which introduces key character Siobhan Clarke and brings Big Ger, Morris Gerald Cafferty, who's been an incidental character up to this point in the series, to the forefront as Rebus' bete noir.

On the personal front, there's the on-going attempt to maintain the relationship with new female interest Doctor Patience Aitken, complicated by the fact that he's effectively moved in with her and has leased his flat to a group of students. That becomes an issue when, first, Rebus' brother Michael reappears on the scene, seeking accommodation.

He ends up in the box room at the flat, which means that Rebus, locked out of Patience's place after failing to arrive for dinner, ends up sleeping on his own sofa for a spell. That happens after an unexpected encounter with an old Army acquaintance, the dodgy Deek Torrance, who can get his hands on 'anything from a shag to a shooter'.

These things play out against a background where Operation Moneybags is aimed at taking down one of 'Big Ger' Cafferty's money-lenders and Rebus's colleague Brian Holmes is in a coma after being attacked in the carpark of the Elvis-themed Heartbreak Cafe.

Investigating the Holmes attack, Rebus interviews restaurant owner Eddie Ringan, Eddie's gay and business partner Pat Calder, and Brian's girlfriend, Nell Stapleton who mentions Holmes' notebook, suggesting that something in it prompted the attack.

One particular entry in the eponymous Black Book sparks Rebus' interest, a cryptic shorthand reference to a poker game on the night of the fire that burned down the Central Hotel five years ago. An unidentified body was found in the ruins, and the autopsy reveals a shot through the heart rather than the fire as the cause of death, and that the victim had suffered a broken arm at some point in time.

Piecing these things together takes time when you're supposed to be doing something else, but a glance at the list of those who were on the premises when the hotel burned down reveals someone Rebus knows well enough to chase down details in the form of the elderly Matthew Vanderhyde who may be blind but was at least on the premises.

As it turns out Vanderhyde was there to have a quiet word with 'Black Aengus' Gibson, heir to the Gibson brewery and subsequently reformed wild man. At the time 'Black Aengus' was in full wild man mode, though his family's influence has managed to remove his name from the official record of the incident.

Then, when Rebus discusses the matter with the newly-arrived Siobhan Clarke, who's been reading around the case, comes up with Tam and Eck Robertson, the 'Bru-head Brothers', who disappeared around the time of the fire and match part of the shorthand reference. Before they disappeared they were working for Big Ger, which suggests that Cafferty may have been there as well.

Sniffing around Big Ger, however, has its dangers. With the possibility of the attack on Holmes being related to the case, after Michael Rebus is found hanging by his legs from the Forth Rail Bridge and an attack on Rebus himself, her decides he needs protection, and when Holmes regains consciousness he's quick to confirm Rebus' suspicions and inform him that the source of the information was restaurant owner Ringan, who was was moonlighting at the Central.

From there things move rather swiftly, with the regulation twists and turns, apparent dead ends and although Rebus manages to put things together there's a nasty sting in the tail when the hand gun he buys for protection turns out to be the weapon used to kill the previously unidentified corpse from the fire.

All in all, with matters seemingly sorted there's the problem of managing a conviction, and when you look at it, failure to do so, given the circumstances in this story will be enough to fuel Rebus' on-going pursuit of Big Ger well into the future.