by Ian Rankin
Hide and Seek gave me a second bite at Rebus’s cherry, if you’ll pardon the expression. The name Hyde is implicit in the title – in fact, the book’s working title was Hyde and Seek. I followed it up with a novel in which I dragged Rebus to London – where I was living at the time – so he could hate it as much as I did. And by then the damage was done: three books down, I had produced a series. And for as long as Inspector Rebus proved a satisfactory vehicle for my investigations into contemporary Scotland, that series would continue. I just hoped a readership would eventually follow.
IV
So where did Rebus come from? Well, from my subconscious, obviously, from a young man’s brain, filled with stories and strategies. But also from the books I’d been reading, the city I’d made my home, and the blood that had soaked into its pavements and roadways. Yet it still seems to me that he appeared as a bolt from the blue. I’ve looked at photos of myself in my student room in Arden Street, and have pored over my diaries from the time, seeking clues. The notes I jotted down prior to starting the novel shed very little light. I saw the book as ‘a metaphysical thriller’, but spent very little time delineating Rebus’s character. I wanted the story to contain lots of ‘puzzles and word-play’, wanted it to be ‘a very visual piece’, and decided it should be written in the third person: ‘don’t need to go too far inside the main character’s head’. Rebus was to be a cipher rather than a three-dimensional human being. From a rereading of Knots and Crosses I think it’s true to say that the reader feels more distanced from Rebus in that book than in any of the others which followed. There was a good reason for this: I wanted Rebus himself to exist as a potential suspect in people’s minds. Hence the momentary flashbacks, the hints of something awful in his past, and the ‘locked room’ in his apartment. He also at one point almost strangles a woman who has invited him into her bed.
Nice.
Through sheer force of will, however, he stuck around and grew into someone more fully formed, to the point where fans are now worried about his health, and find when they meet me that I fall disappointingly short of Rebus himself – I’m just not as damaged as him, as complex as him, or as dangerous to be around. I’m only the bloke who commits his stories to paper. What did become obvious to me early on was that a detective makes for a terrific commentator on the world around him. He has access to the highest in the land and the lowest, the politicians and oligarchs, as well as the junkies and petty thieves. In writing books about Edinburgh, I could examine the city (and the nation of which it is capital once more) from top to bottom through Rebus’s eyes. I was lucky, too – there’s no tradition of the crime novel in Scotland, so I could make my own path. And, back then, there were no crime novels set in contemporary Edinburgh, meaning that for a little while I had no competition. I’ve been lucky also in that Edinburgh and Scotland continue to change in interesting ways, giving me plenty of plots, while delivering up their secrets and mysteries only very slowly. I’ve been living in this city now for almost thirty years – on and off – and it continues to surprise me. Underground streets and chambers are still being discovered. Archaeological digs at the castle bring new truths to the surface. Exhibits long forgotten in the various museums turn out to have their own tales worth telling. As a subject, the city seems inexhaustible. This is, after all, a city of words. Where else in the world would you find the main railway station named after a novel (Waverley) and a vast edifice in the city centre celebrating that work’s author (the Scott Monument)? Robert Louis Stevenson brought his own imagination to his hometown. Arthur Conan Doyle was born here. Muriel Spark grew up here. Robert Burns made his name here. J.M. Barrie was a student here. Not to mention the likes of Carlyle and Hume . . . Right up to J.K. Rowling, Irvine Welsh and Alexander McCall Smith in the present day.
Rebus, too, is composed of words – millions of them – so you might think that by now I’d have got to the heart of what makes him tick, but he continues to surprise me, which is perhaps only apt for a man whose name means ‘puzzle’. For twenty years now, he’s been living inside my head, but sometimes it feels as though I’m the one living in his. When a psychoanalyst interviewed me at a book festival a while back, he wondered if Rebus represented the brother I never had, or maybe the life of adventure which I was never going to allow myself to lead. Both my parents had served in World War Two (my father in the Far East). One of my two sisters married a Royal Air Force engineer and spent much of her life thereafter travelling the world. As a kid, I once wrote to the Army asking them for information on joining up. But I was resolutely bookish, and all my adventures took place inside my head. Maybe the psychoanalyst had a point; maybe Rebus really is an extension of my own personality – doing all the dangerous stuff I’d be too scared to do, breaking rules and conventions, getting into fights and scrapes, and even coming up against the occasional deadly force. Some commentators have decided that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a book about the creative process and the division between our rational mind and the darker fantasies which we keep hidden from view. In which case, Rebus would be my Hyde, acting as a force of nature, saying the unsayable, doing things I could never bring myself to do – even though I could (and can) all too readily imagine myself doing them.
Sir Winston Churchill once called Russia ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. I’ve found the same to be true of Scotland and Edinburgh.
And of Detective Inspector John Rebus.
Also by Ian Rankin
The Detective Malcolm Fox Series
The Complaints
The Impossible Dead
The Detective Inspector Rebus Series
Knots & Crosses
Hide & Seek
Tooth & Nail
(previously published as Wolfman)
Strip Jack
The Black Book
Mortal Causes
Let it Bleed
Black & Blue
The Hanging Garden
Death is Not the End (a novella)
Dead Souls
Set in Darkness
The Falls
Resurrection Men
A Question of Blood
Fleshmarket Close
The Naming of the Dead
Exit Music
Standing in Another Man’s Grave
Saints of the Shadow Bible
Other Novels
The Flood
Watchman
Westwind
Doors Open
Writing as Jack Harvey
Witch Hunt
Bleeding Hearts
Blood Hunt
Short Stories
A Good Hanging and Other Stories
Beggars Banquet
Plays
Dark Road (with Mark Thomson)
Copyright
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Orion Books.
This ebook first published in 2014 by Orion Books.
Copyright © 2014 John Rebus Ltd.
The right of Ian Rankin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 5158 6
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Further Copyright Information
‘Dead and Buried’ © John Rebus Limited 2013
‘Playback’ © Ian Rankin 1990 (first published in Winter’s Crimes 22, Macmillan, 1990)
‘The Dean Curse’, ‘Being Frank’, ‘Concrete Evidence’, ‘Seeing Things’, ‘A Good Hanging’, ‘Tit For Tat’, ‘Not Provan’, ‘Sunday’, ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘The Gentlemen’s Club’, ‘Monstrous Trumpet’ © John Rebus Limited 1992 (first published in A Good Hanging, 1992)
‘Talk Show’, ‘Facing the Music’ © John Rebus Limited 2002 (first published in Beggar’s Banquet, 1992)
‘Trip Trap’ © Ian Rankin 1992 (first published in 1st Culprit by Chatto & Windus, 1992)
‘Facing the Music’ © Ian Rankin 1994 (first published in Midwinter Mysteries 4 by Little, Brown and Company, 1994)
‘Talk Show’ © Ian Rankin 1991 (first published in Winter’s Crimes 23 by Macmillan, 1991)
‘Castle Dangerous’ Copyright © Ian Rankin 1993 (first published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, October 1993)
‘In the Frame’ © Ian Rankin 1992 (first published in Winter’s Crimes 24 by Macmillan, 1992)
‘Window of Opportunity’ Copyright © Ian Rankin 1995 (first published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 1995)
‘No Sanity Clause’ © Ian Rankin 2000 (first published in the Daily Telegraph, December 2000)
‘Death is Not the End’ © Ian Rankin 1998
‘Tell Me Who to Kill’ © Ian Rankin 2003 (first published in Mysterious Pleasures, Little, Brown & Company)
‘Saint Nicked’ © Ian Rankin 2002 (first published in the Radio Times, 2002)
‘Atonement’ © John Rebus Limited 2005
‘Not Just Another Saturday’ © John Rebus Limited 2005
‘Penalty Claus’ © John Rebus Limited 2010 (first published in the Mail on Sunday, 2010)
‘The Passenger’ © John Rebus Limited 2014
‘A Three-Pint Problem’ © John Rebus Limited 2014
‘The Very Last Drop’ © John Rebus Limited 2010 (written to help the work of Royal Blind)