Ian Rankin & Inspector Rebus

by Craig Cabell

  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…

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HIDE AND SEEK

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

  Hide and Seek

  In 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 It had been replaced by a parking space but the street remained largely unchanged.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!

  In Hide and Seek we find that Rebus is slow at writing to his daughter Samantha, something which must have affected the girl as she has decided to write to him less often as a consequence. Rhona – his former wife – is a painful memory. He doesn’t want her to find out that his recent relationship with Gill Templer has failed and that he had been promoted to Gill’s level: Detective Inspector.

  But is all of this anything to do with the real message of the novel?

  The children’s game Hide and Seek was the inspiration for Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. Rankin, like Stevenson, wanted to imply that the face hidden behind the hands of the childhood game was the sinister alter ego.

  Rankin thought the comparison was obvious and perhaps it was to anyone doing their PhD in literature. Nobody, however, noticed or cared too much! ‘Each book I publish is another small failure,’ Rankin has recently said and with the public ‘not getting’ the connection between Knots and Crosses, Hide and Seek and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Rankin seems vindicated in this belief.

  It’s not that he didn’t put enough clues in the text. There are quotes from Jekyll and Hyde throughout Hide and Seek; Rebus actually reads the book at one point. Heriot Row – Stevenson’s childhood home – is referred to, a suicide note is a quote from Henry Jekyll’s counterpart, character surnames from Stevenson’s novella – Poole, Enfield, Carew, Edward and Hyde, Utterson (a lawyer no less!) – are used throughout. But there is more going on than that. As Knots and Crosses would doff its cap to Scottish literature past, so would Hide and Seek, taking on fellow Scot Conan Doyle’s Holmes, Watson and even Stapleton (from The Hound of the Baskervilles).

  In so many ways Hide and Seek was a re-write of Knots and Crosses but that was fine, because what Rankin was achieving with these two books was a breaking down of the tourist veneer of Edinburgh. He was exposing the crime, deprivation, hardship, blood, sweat and tears behind the tourist trap of the castle area and Princes Street. He wanted to show the Hyde of the city – not an individual person – behind the Jekyll and clearly it would take more than one novel to do that. In fact, it took the whole Rebus series to scratch the surface. It is – in retrospect – as though Rankin was attempting one perfect novel that would encapsulate Edinburgh and become his contribution to the great Edinburgh novels, in his eyes those being Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Heart of Midlothian and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. What he failed to realise was that his contribution was a whole series of books that built in stature and each within it chipped away at the tough veneer that had grown up around Edinburgh throughout the 20th century: Hogmanay, the Edinburgh Festival – even G8 (but more about that later).

  ‘Hyde’s Club. Named after Robert Louis Stevenson’s villain, Edward Hyde, the dark side of the human soul. Hyde himself was based on the city’s Deacon Brodie, businessman by day, robber by night. Rebus could smell guilt and fear and rank expectation in this large room.’

  Hide and Seek

  Rankin’s Rebus series was his Edinburgh-based version of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Characters jump in and out of Rebus’s life through t
he string of books as easily as in Powell’s. We even have a character, Rian, who Rankin tells us, was the same character who appeared in The Flood. So even the books outside the series help people Rankin’s fictional world of John Rebus.

  Apart from possibly friends and family, nobody would identify any of this in Rankin’s work to begin with. Maybe this niggled him slightly at the time – especially the Jekyll and Hyde aspects, which he laboured on – but he had alienated many readers in higher education through Rebus in Hide and Seek: Rebus had a strong dislike of graduates who came into top jobs not knowing their arses from their elbows. The contradiction here is that Rebus didn’t make it through the ranks himself, as he admitted to character Tony McCall!

  McCall is a fellow inspector and kindred spirit: he has the ingredients for a failed marriage in the making to complement Rebus’s already divorced status.

  Even though Rebus is only in his mid-forties in Hide and Seek, he is almost isolated from his daughter Sammy (Samantha), at odds with his ex-wife Rhona, and bad in bed with his ‘girlfriend’ Rian. He is unfit, unkempt and frankly a bloody shambles, but still he manages to star in a further 15 novels, two anthologies of short stories and one novella (20 books in all). But still – in 2009 – Rankin will say, ‘There’s some unfinished business.’ So the complex John Rebus still lives and breathes somehow: he hasn’t killed himself off yet!

  Rebus is the catalyst of Rankin’s fame but more importantly he is the city guide who helps Rankin explore his fascination with Edinburgh and no other guide will do. In a way, Rebus is the Grim Reaper of the city: once he has exposed enough of it, the facade begins to crumble and the inner degradation is exposed in a much more comprehensive way than Trainspotting (because it has developed over a whole series).

  I get the sense that Rankin is searching for the perfect Scottish novel to complete his canon, but he probably won’t do it because he writes on too big a canvas. That is not a criticism, it’s an observation based on the amount of books he has written trying to expose the real Edinburgh.

  His fascination for the city and, ostensibly, for the Scottish people as a whole, has made him more inward-looking but perhaps that’s OK because he is the only person doing it. He is the only person chipping away at the veneer, the only person doing it in an engaging, semi-academic way and assisting students as readily as writers and teachers once assisted him. He remembers where he comes from and this is ingrained into him.

  If I overanalyse his first two Rebus novels for a moment, I would suggest that there is some guilt regarding the friends he left behind in Cardenden when he escaped to Edinburgh University, and that part of that guilt is featured in every Rebus novel: ordinary people in ordinary lives who are unfairly treated. In a bizarre way, Rankin evokes the moral scruples of Charles Dickens: a young man made good who has the poor and destitute voices firmly in his head and heart. OK, maybe I’m pushing the analogy a little too far but I like to think that I’m at least half right on this point. There is an affiliation there, maybe not even that – an awareness, at least. When I asked him what he liked about Scotland, the first thing he told me was ‘the people’ and that is very telling. He is in every sense of the phrase a ‘people person’.

  ‘As a child, he had stolen from shops, always throwing away whatever he stole. Ach, all kids did it, didn’t they? … Didn’t they?’

  Hide and Seek

  I do feel that the rough, working-class teenage years Rankin endured forged a socially aware novelist in his soul, a person we wouldn’t perhaps accuse Rankin of being until at least Let It Bleed and the breakthrough novel Black and Blue. These two novels, along with A Question of Blood and Fleshmarket Close form the heart of his darker, angrier, inner voice. They are more politically and socially aware. To continue the Dickens analogy, they are his Hard Times, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend and A Tale of Two Cities.

  So in summary: Knots and Crosses and Hide and Seek, although they were never intended to be the start of an important series of Scottish literature, were the perfect foundation to build upon. In retrospect, Rankin would have made Rebus younger than 40 to begin with but, if he did, perhaps readers would not have loved the character as much, for the angry young man is not always as endearing as the complex, grumpy 40-something John Rebus became.

  At the end of Hide and Seek Rebus is disillusioned. Corruption is rife throughout the powerful and influential in Edinburgh and ordinary people – good people – have been hurt deeply – permanently. So Rebus writes out his letter of resignation but tosses it towards the bin as Gill Templer knocks on his door. Does she want to get back with her ex-lover? He hopes so but as time will dictate, he will be disillusioned once again, the corrupt will continue to rule the city and he will continue to play his own small part in trying to thwart them. The sad fact is, by Exit Music, Rebus understands that he’ll never beat the system or the city, realising that he was just another cog in the huge mechanism that is human life.

  ‘To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching books.’

  The Secret Teachings of All Ages

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE WOLFMAN

  Rebus’s story continued with Wolfman, a book that became an interesting breakthrough novel for Rankin, for he would write about London instead of Edinburgh. Why was that? Simply, Wolfman was written in London in 1990 and would take on influences from Rankin’s current surroundings. He moved to a maisonette in Tottenham in 1986 with his wife, where they would stay until 1990, when they moved to France for six years.

  Rankin needed a steady job and applied to become a hi-fi journalist. He knew nothing about hi-fi but he could write, so suddenly he was letting everyone know what hi-fi to buy! When he talks about the job now he makes it sound mundane, and perhaps it was, but it was still writing, and to practise a little journalism wasn’t a bad thing.

  According to Rankin’s diary, he started Wolfman on 11 March. ‘I’ve started, half-heartedly, a new Rebus novel… it’s going to be called Wolfman, if it ever gets off the ground.’

  His sense of apprehension comes from the fact that he knew he had a lot of research to do before getting the book off the ground. That said, the London setting allowed him to use common Scottish words and introduce them to a London audience, as Rebus would find England’s capital city difficult to get to grips with. Conversely the unsympathetic London coppers have trouble with the accent, not to mention their own prejudices against ‘the Jocks’. If Rankin endured this prejudice himself when in London is not clear; suffice to say he lacks sympathy with the city throughout the novel.

  Wolfman is significant for other reasons, too. It’s the first outing – albeit in cameo appearance only – of Morris Gerald Cafferty, the gangster who rules Edinburgh. ‘Big Ger’ would start making his name in the Rebus series from The Black Book onwards, to the extent that he took on Professor Moriarty significance – always there to tease Rebus (not always from the foreground) as he makes his investigations.

  With Wolfman set in London, one could suggest that Rankin was writing outside his comfort zone, but he had lived there for a few years before starting to write the book and had left for France before final proofs and publication. More significantly, Wolfman was challenging for Rankin because the book was about a serial killer – the Wolfman of the title – and it therefore developed into Rankin’s most graphically horrific title as a consequence. His editor at the time thought the book would benefit from a few cuts, so the horror aspect was played down, or rather left to the reader’s imagination. Rankin complied and learned a very important lesson as a writer: letting the suggestion of horror play on the reader’s mind.

  Wolfman was a commercial novel because Rankin wrote it to try and break into the massmarket. On publication of the book he would proudly claim that he was now a ‘professional author’. Couple that with the fact that he had recently won the Chandler-Fulbright Fellowship Prize in America, where he was sponsored to spend appr
oximately six months, and things were looking good for the young man. Then, when life couldn’t get any better, Rankin’s wife Miranda announced that she was pregnant with their first child.

  With his confidence building, Rankin pushed the character of Rebus in Wolfman a bit further, as he told me: ‘I didn’t know Rebus at all in book one – he was really only a means of leading the reader from one place to another. By the end of book two, I felt maybe he was going to be around for longer than I’d intended, so book three allowed me to flesh out his character. By this time, I’d also grown in confidence as a writer, so I stretched myself a little, and some of this went into the character.38

  We do get a few more nuggets of character description regarding Rebus in Wolfman. At one stage he is regarded as tall. His chin is a little saggy for a man in his early forties, but he does have a strong handshake. He doesn’t have a very muscular chest. His gut and backside have taken the weight, not his chest and arms. Also, he has a strong personality. In Wolfman he gives as good as he gets from the London Police Force and never lets his focus slip from the hunt for the serial killer.