by Craig Cabell
Set in Darkness
Something that interests me deeply about Ian Rankin is his big watershed novel Black and Blue. For whatever reason, Rankin was more cavalier in his approach to Rebus during that book. He bounced him around Scotland, forcing him to experience many things and seeing how the DI coped with it. Rankin was under a lot of pressure in his life at the time and just for a change, he took an extra risk, pushed the envelope a little further and found the bestselling formula – the blueprint – that would shape the rest of the series.
My opinion is that Rankin is a bit of a reluctant maverick – a shy Mr Hyde if you will. At heart he is a sensible man, but every now and then he forces himself to make a change. In the Rebus series we first notice this with The Black Book and that ‘closer to reality’ way of writing (as well as the introduction of what would become two major characters). Then there was Black and Blue. So was Set in Darkness the next major step? No, not quite. It was the stepping stone that led to it though, and that book was The Falls – a book where Rebus has his first real taste of mortality against the youngsters and where we begin to like him more.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MIDNIGHT RAMBLER
‘The retirement party for Detective Chief Superintendent ‘Farmer’ Watson had commenced at six.’
The Falls
Before we move on to The Falls, there is a very important thing that we’ve just highlighted: the breakthrough novels in the series – the ones that have become benchmarks along the way, taking the author and character to new heights. Rankin considers Strip Jack to be the first of those, then perhaps Let It Bleed with its introduction of the three-pronged plotlines. Then there is Set in Darkness? The interesting thing is, the novels that follow all of these are the ones that truly make the difference: The Black Book, Black and Blue and The Falls, then later Fleshmarket Close and The Naming of the Dead.
Rankin enjoys tackling themes but not necessarily pushing the boundaries. So he manages to do it by default. The decisions to use real-life locations and pubs in The Black Book with the new characters was the first big break, then the refinement of the three-pronged plotlines and real-life case in Black and Blue, followed by a true, open-ended, macabre Edinburgh story…
‘The wind howled chilly and with a mournful cadence through the funnel-like closes, up the winding high street and round the castle rock, raising wavelets on the dull Nor’ Loch and shaking from the creaking trees such withered leaves as autumn had not taken long before.’
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Plague-Cella
We’ve discovered that the dark, gothic history of Edinburgh is the strong backbone to Rankin’s work. All of this would culminate after Rebus’s final novel in the series, Exit Music, with his first – ‘and last’ – graphic novel, the Gaiman-like Dark Entries (Vertigo, 2009). Dark Entries was a horror/fairy tale that Rankin said took him ‘full circle’, as he started out writing comic books as a child. It was also proof of Rankin’s fascination with the macabre, which is highlighted strongly in the Rebus series.57
One of the finest boogie tales in the series is The Falls. It ranks alongside Mortal Causes and Fleshmarket Close in its ability to mix the history of Edinburgh, the unseen present-day city, and a hint of fairy-tale darkness.
‘Like a lot of my stories, The Falls started with a bit of serendipity,’ Rankin explained. ‘Around the time of the opening of the Scottish parliament, there was some international media interest. There was a French TV crew in Edinburgh. They wanted to interview me and ask me a few questions about the parliament. I agreed and they suggested that we do the interview in the new Museum of Scotland, which had recently opened. When I got there, a curator was waiting to take us up to the place where we could film, and he said to me, “You should write something about the Arthur’s Seat dolls,” Now Arthur’s Seat is a big hill in Edinburgh and I can see it from my front window, but I told the curator that I had never heard of the dolls. He went on to tell me that they were on the fourth floor of the museum and I should go and see them, but I didn’t get a chance that day. I did the interview and went back home.
‘It started to niggle me. I thought, I don’t know what he’s talking about, so I went back to the museum a few weeks later and found the dolls. There are about seven or eight of them left but there were originally 17. They are wooden dolls, four to five inches long, dressed in clothes and inside well-made, tiny wooden coffins. They were found in a cave at Arthur’s Seat by some kids in 1836 and of course nobody knows what they were doing there.
‘Now during the whole series of books I’ve been trying to talk about the hidden Edinburgh, the Edinburgh the tourist never sees, but here was a bit of Edinburgh I didn’t even know about and a beautiful, open-ended mystery, which I could use as a storyline.
‘All of this happened some time ago and it just sat in the back of my mind until I worked out how I could use it. And then I got the idea of a girl being abducted, a little coffin being found in the present day and, to solve that crime, Rebus had to go back and solve the original crime, or at least give some explanation as to why the dolls had been left there.’58
The story of the dolls was perfect and reminded Rankin of another piece of serendipity that had occurred with the writing of one of his previous books in the series, The Hanging Garden: ‘When I was living in France I went to a place called Oradour-sur-Glane. It was a place where a real-life atrocity was carried out by the 3rd Company of the SS Das Reich regiment. It was about 40 or 50 miles away from where I was living and the village has been kept exactly the same since the atrocity occurred. An entire village. A thousand people. There is a stationary tram and then the church where the Germans killed all the women and children. There are bullet holes in the walls and it is such a powerful place. I felt such a feeling of injustice because nobody went there and nobody was brought to justice.
‘Well, the problem was how could I [incorporate] that in a novel set in modern-day Edinburgh. And it took me two or three years and then suddenly I thought, Wait a moment – what if there was an alleged Nazi war criminal in Edinburgh, and Rebus is alerted to this and has to decide a) is it the guy and b) if it is, is it worth prosecuting? And it brought in all kinds of moral questions. Then I moved back from France and found that there was an alleged Nazi war criminal living in Edinburgh, who was extradited to Lithuania to stand trial for his crimes – serendipity, as I told you!’59 And a touch of Frederick Forsyth too maybe (a la Odessa File), but the story is a good example of how a true story can wait for discovery and then have a relevance and impact on modern-day events and people.60
Rankin is very focused on the here and now and the technological advance of the world appertaining to the Police Force. As I mentioned earlier, the Rebus series was written in real time across a 20-year period when many technological advances were made, and this gives the series an added importance.
‘The internet is potentially a very dark force because there are no barriers, no moral guardians and, when you have children keen to go on the net, how far can you control that? And the thing about the internet game came up [The Falls], because there was a story I read a few years ago about a French student who was mad keen on Sword and Sorcery, Dungeons and Dragons and the internet. And he was found dead on a Scottish hillside. Just a body found. Desiccated, because it had been up there so long. And there was a gun found a couple of yards away, so the police concluded that the person had committed suicide and thrown the gun away as he shot himself in the head! But the parents found that it was their son eventually and one of the theories expounded at the time was that he somehow got involved in some very dark and devious internet role-playing game, which led to the Scottish hillside where somebody killed him off. It never went any further than that; but it came back in my mind as an intriguing possibility.
‘So the story inspired something that Rebus had no conception of and I wanted that. Rebus is in his fifties. He’s never been to university, he came straight out of the army and into the police and is now up against
all the younger officers who are completely internet friendly, because that is the way the police are going nowadays. They see the internet as a tool, which gathers more and more information that used to be stored by card index.’61
The Falls was a perfect opportunity for Siobhan Clarke to prove herself, for she could lead the virtual investigation.
‘Putting together a misfit team from the Lothian and Borders finest, Rebus takes the unpromising historical material and runs with it, leaving DC Siobhan Clarke to take her chances with the virtual Quizmaster. She’s young enough to know how to navigate the net, but is she old enough and wise enough to pick up the clues in such a complex case?’
The above is dustwrapper blurb for The Falls but it does encapsulate what was going on with the characters in the story. Suddenly Rebus wasn’t solving cases single-handedly. Rebus was being overtaken by events. New toys and new blood were coming in and suddenly he experiences more of an uphill struggle when completing his day-to-day inquiries and – this is another reason why The Falls is such a milestone novel in the series – it is the first book where Rebus begins to show his age.
In 2001, Rankin told me: ‘The police have HOLMES, which is the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. It is a software tool and, when there is a huge inquiry going on, it can find links between somebody who was interviewed six months ago and somebody who was interviewed last week about the same thing. So the system finds links between things you might miss.’62
So age suddenly becomes an issue and consequently this is where Rankin spiritually moves even further away from Rebus and begins to identify more with Siobhan. This isn’t really something new. We should have seen it coming in Mortal Causes:
‘So they [Clarke and Rebus] sat at Millie’s desk, like customers and assistant. Clarke, who liked computers, had actually picked up a couple of brochures.
“That’s got a twenty-five megahertz micro-processor,” Millie said, pointing to one of the brochures.
“What size memory?”’
Where Siobhan wins over a witness through a mutual interest in computers, Rebus sits on the touchline feeling the chill beginning to settle in.
Siobhan is suddenly the star of the show, most definitely in the novel that followed The Falls: Resurrection Men.
So what is left for Rebus? Frustration. In Resurrection Men Rebus loses his temper with Gill Templer (again!) and is sent to the Scottish Police College for retraining.
Resurrection Men was written quickly after The Falls, and the book was already in progress during The Falls publicity campaign, as Rankin told me at the time: ‘In the next book he’s going to police college. I know that because I’ve just started writing it. And he gets [knowing laugh, as if giving too much away], he gets kicked off a case for insubordination and sent back to college with a bunch of reprobates who are in their last chance saloon. And if they – and Rebus – don’t discover how to work as a team again – become team players – they’re going to get kicked off the force. So it’s a kind of Dirty Dozen operation.’63
Resurrection Men was an important title in the series, as it made clear that Rebus was being labelled a dinosaur and consequently left behind. It’s not just the fact that Rebus finds himself in his last chance saloon – Siobhan Clarke, his understudy, has been promoted and is coming more into her own, developing the case Rebus was taken off after his outburst against Templer. It seems that the world is moving on but John Rebus isn’t. In that regard Resurrection Men is a book about life’s rich career path and how the older officer is overshadowed by the thrusting young junior, full of good ideas and energy.
It is normally at this stage that the older officer becomes the sober voice of experience and grows old graciously. (As The Rolling Stones would observe, it’s a drag getting old!) Well, that wasn’t really going to happen with John Rebus, was it? Especially the ‘sober’ bit! But the voice of experience is in him, like it or not. As he goes through the unsolved cases given to him at college, he suddenly recognises one of the victims, Rico Lomax, a Glasgow thug who had few friends. Suddenly the whole college thing takes a macabre turn and when things couldn’t get more complex for Rebus, ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty is released from Barlinnie.
The final outcome is brought to a satisfying conclusion by Rebus using all his experience to solve the varied threads of the case(s) and working as part of a team with the young blood – the newly promoted Siobhan Clarke. It’s at this juncture that the two find a strong connection, not sexual, but an important bond that assists their ongoing career in the Police Force. Siobhan can learn from Rebus’s experience, maverick or not, while he will be helped with all the technology stuff and red tape. Ah, it’s a perfect match and perhaps a politically correct, modern-day Holmes and Watson as well!
Rankin told me that he ‘made all the cases up’ in Resurrection Men. ‘In my previous half dozen books I’ve used real-life unsolved mysteries as the kick-off point.’64
So was Rankin going back to his old style of total invention? ‘I do have to check things out,’ he said. ‘Two of my neighbours are lawyers and I go to them when I have any problems or queries… I have consulted advocates, and once attended a party given by a top law officer in Scotland, where I got to talk with judges, one of whom gave me his business card in case I ever needed to ask him anything.’65
No. The world had moved on for Rankin and Rebus. The books had become more effortless but not less satisfying, as the next four novels – the final four novels in the series – would testify.
‘We all get things we feel we don’t deserve… Most of us treat them as windfalls. Your career so far has been a success. Is that the problem perhaps? You don’t want that easy success? You want to be an outsider, someone who breaks the rules with only a measure of impunity?’ she paused. ‘Maybe you want to be like DI Rebus?’
Resurrection Men
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE YOUNGSTER COMES OF AGE
‘At the moment, Siobhan is staying just this side of the angels – she wants promotion after all, and knows there’s only room in the force for one maverick. She plays a clever game. I think she’ll go far.’66
Ian Rankin
So let us discuss Siobhan Clarke for a moment. What has been her role? Throughout the Rebus novels she has played a greater part and with A Question of Blood, she really gets the upper hand on Rebus after he literally burns his fingers. But what is Siobhan’s relationship with Rebus? Is it totally platonic? Totally professional? Or is there a degree of sexual tension? During the A Question of Blood promotional round, I asked Rankin these questions.
‘Siobhan has been called my insurance policy,’ he said, ‘because she is getting more to do in each book and in this new book I give her a position of physical power over Rebus because he gets his fingers badly burnt and she has to do everything for him, or nearly everything… I wanted her to refuse to light his cigarettes, for example! So he has to get strangers in the street to light his cigarettes for him. I liked the idea of him being in her power. Good doing the research for that actually: I went wandering around my house with my hands heavily bandaged. I tried to pick up a cup, make a telephone call. Could I open doors? Then somebody asked, “Can you pee?” and I thought, Oh, I never thought of that and disappeared again… it all comes across in the book!
‘But she [Siobhan] is a good example of a very minor character, just another colleague who helps in the police station, coming to the fore. Very quickly I found her absolutely fascinating, basically because she is a woman in a man’s world. The police in Scotland, especially CID, are very male-orientated.’67
A similar thing struck me and while reading A Question of Blood, I actually queried Siobhan’s sexuality. I put this to Rankin, who pondered for a moment. ‘Na, I don’t think she’s bisexual. I thought about her sexuality quite a lot. To begin with I thought about putting her and Rebus in a clinch, but that would be the obvious thing to do, because the two of them could get together as they are quite similar in many ways. Then I thought, no,
that’s kind of a middle-aged man’s fantasy, isn’t it? She’s half his age. So it’s much more avuncular: he’s more like her uncle. Near the end of the book there is a clinch, which leaves things a little open, and people will wonder what will happen next? But I don’t think anything will!
‘I have wondered if she’s lesbian, bisexual, I don’t know. I don’t think it really matters that much. She’s had some pretty bad relationships with men in the past: she chooses her blokes very badly. They turn out to be stalkers and criminal masterminds!’
But in 2003, was Rankin grooming Siobhan to take over from Rebus?
‘I do think she has got it within her to carry a series now, and I do feel fairly comfortable writing from her point of view. In the early books there weren’t many female characters, because I didn’t think I could do it. It was really only when female cops started saying that they liked Siobhan and Gill Templer and the situations I put them in. I was surprised and thought, All right, I’ll do a bit more of that then. And I can’t think of one male writer who runs a series of books with a female lead. Plenty of women do it but not men.’
So Rankin was keeping his options open regarding Siobhan Clarke and still is. ‘By the time of Naming of the Dead I knew Rebus was on his way out – 60 was approaching,’ he told me in July 2009. I was wondering how Siobhan would feel about this, and maybe I was sizing her up as a protagonist who could carry the series without her one-time mentor. Jury’s still out on that…’
A Question of Blood dealt with some really big issues, such as child abuse, and Dunblane, and in that respect it is probably the darkest novel from a social issues point of view. It is as hard and fast as a 1960s TV play. Rankin comments: ‘I think it all connects. I think that’s the thing with the Rebus series: it works on the assumption that a butterfly flaps its wings in South America and there’s a tornado in Europe. The way a small community deals with a big tragedy, whether it be Lockerbie or Dunblane or wherever, that fascinated me, because suddenly they have all these strangers coming into their world, cops and media. The locals don’t want them there but they’re inextricably linked to what has happened. So I wanted to look at that, I wanted to look at the families involved, the victims, which is why the killing has already happened at the beginning of the book. I wasn’t interested in that per se: I was more interested in the aftermath.