by Craig Cabell
‘The book is full of outsiders, absolutely chock-a-block, whether it’s Rebus who is the perennial outsider – the ex-SAS guy who hasn’t quite fitted back into society – or it’s teenagers who refuse to come out of their bedrooms and only have relationships with people on the internet. Everybody is cut away from everybody else and there are small communities who are breaking up because of this, because of that lack of interaction. They prefer to send somebody a text message, sit in front of a TV or computer and we’re all getting very isolated, so A Question of Blood is a book about isolation. And the opposite of that is family ties, which is why I introduce one of Rebus’s cousins as one of the victims. And that’s interesting because Rebus has completely thrown his family away; he hasn’t seen them for decades. And when it comes to it, they are still there and there are still memories, but where Rebus thought that they were close, it turns out that they really weren’t at all. The memory can lie.’68
A Question of Blood opens with a shooting at a private school. Two 17-year-olds are killed by an ex-Army loner who has gone off the rails. On the surface there is little to investigate as the loner turned the gun on himself after killing the teenagers, but Rebus and Siobhan find themselves investigating more than the ‘why?’ of the case. There are personal issues/connections for Rebus: Army and family…
‘With this book I was very interested in people coming back from the first Gulf War,’ Rankin told me. ‘There were a lot of stories about mainly American squaddies coming back and suddenly not being able to cope with their family life and turning to violence. There was a lot of violence against wives, there were a lot of murders of spouses and a few suicides, and at the same time there had been a few high-profile suicides in the British ex-forces. For example, the guy who took off in a light aeroplane and jumped out – he had written a book called Free Fall, which was about the crack-up he had after leaving the SAS. He tried to kill his wife at one time, he tried to commit suicide, he got into drugs.
‘I’ve always been interested by the outsider, the person who doesn’t fit back in to [a conventional lifestyle]. You can’t really leave behind the forces. It doesn’t matter if you’re just an electrician in the RAF or you’re a trained killer in the SAS – when you leave and go back onto civvy street, you don’t just switch off. You’ve still got a lot of that mentality, that training, a certain amount of baggage you carry around with you. It’s difficult to switch off. And the Army investigators in the book have flagged up Rebus as a potential time bomb because he screwed up big time when he was training for the SAS. And now he’s gone into a stressed job with violent confrontations from time to time, so they’re expecting him to go off the deep end. He’s looking into the suicide of a guy and the investigators are looking into him! It’s wheels within wheels.
‘Once you start a story, you think it’s quite a small intimate story, but then you say, “Oh, this will be interesting”. When I started plotting the book, I had no idea the Army investigators would come into it until I started plotting it out. It was then that I thought that the Army would send somebody along; it wouldn’t just be the Police Force. And bringing them in and creating Rebus’s mistrust of them added a whole new dimension to the story, which wasn’t there when it was dreamed up!
‘I think Rebus joined the Police Force because it allowed him to be a voyeur – it allowed him to look into other people’s lives rather than look into his own. So it’s a way of him warding off his own problems… But somebody who is well balanced and spends their life doing the right thing isn’t very interesting to read about! We’re into villains; the good guys aren’t that interesting. Is there such a thing as evil? Or are people just misguided, or chemically imbalanced? What I try to do with a book is put the reader in the situation where they say, “Shit, would I do that?” How far would you go to protect your kids? Would you commit murder? Would you go off the rails? How far could you go off the rails? I think the best crime fiction right now is asking very big questions about the world we live in. I think the literary novel is almost totally ignoring major issues; they’re backward-looking books, almost historical. They’re not looking at the here and now.’
There are many serious issues in A Question of Blood. I was interested to learn where the story really started for Rankin. ‘The thing that kicked this book off was a woman who asked me at an event [Resurrection Men promotion], “Mr Rankin, why do you never write about private schools?” Now there are tons of private schools in Edinburgh and I didn’t have a Scooby what they were like, so I found out. And that was the first nugget that started the book. And all through the year I collect little bits of news, put them in a big folder and come October I look through them and see what interests me and where I can take it. And between now and then, somebody could come up to me in a pub and tell me a good story and suddenly I’m away again. But that’s how it happened for A Question of Blood.’69
To me, Siobhan Clarke and the story content seemed more important to Rankin this time round. Rebus is almost treated in a comic way with his damaged fingers. And what is important to us for this book, it seems again that Rebus was moving further away from his creator and Rankin’s energy was being poured more into Siobhan Clarke, the person he seems to – at this stage – empathise with more.
‘“Siobhan!” he yelled. She raised a hand, waved it… And was picked off the ground by Rebus, his hug enveloping her
“Ow, ow, ow,” she said, causing him to ease off. “Bit bruised,” she explained, her eyes meeting his. He couldn’t help himself, planted his lips on hers. The kiss lingered…’
A Question of Blood
CHAPTER NINETEEN
REBUS AND HIS NEMESIS GET OLD
‘Rebus’s eyes narrowed. “You know something, don’t you?”
“Not me, Rebus… I’m happy just sitting here and growing old.”’
Fleshmarket Close
Fleshmarket Close continued the thread of big issues started with A Question of Blood. Illegal immigrants, racial attacks, rape and two skeletons – a woman and an infant – found buried beneath a concrete cellar in Fleshmarket Close!
It is quite apparent that Rankin wanted to tackle ever bigger themes in his novels. During my A Question of Blood interview, he called himself ‘a political writer’ and he probably adopted that style to an increasing extent from around Let It Bleed/Black and Blue, becoming stronger and stronger and peaking with A Question of Blood, Fleshmarket Close and The Naming of the Dead. No longer did Rebus have anything to do with Rankin, other than a love of ‘spit and sawdust pubs’, something Rankin expanded upon in my Fleshmarket Close interview.
‘There’s one scene in the book where Rebus takes a girlfriend to The Oxford Bar, because she has insisted on seeing what it is like, because she thinks she can tell what he is like from what his local is like. And when they get there, Siobhan is there and Rebus is mortified because Siobhan has taken over the bar. She is the one with all the people around her, she’s the one making people laugh and doing all the chatting, and that’s his job, it’s his bar. There’s a lot of tension in that scene, because he’s pitched up with a girlfriend and Siobhan doesn’t like the idea that he has a girlfriend and he doesn’t like the fact that she is in his pub.’70
All of this happens not because Siobhan fancies Rebus, but because Rebus’s girlfriend is an outsider. The police go around in little gangs and suddenly a woman comes in who is not part of the group and that’s why Siobhan doesn’t like her.
Another hurdle Rebus – and ostensibly Rankin – had to face in Fleshmarket Close was leaving St Leonard’s. In real life, St Leonard’s ceased to have a CID unit in 2003. Rankin found this out during his promotion round for A Question of Blood and told me at the time that he had received a text from a policeman of his acquaintance who told him about it, so instantly that had to be worked into the next novel. This allowed the prospect of retirement to raise its head but despite his trusty sidekick outplaying him in his local bar and the many other jokes that hit Rebus since at leas
t Resurrection Men (being sent to boot camp, having his fingers burned – things that provoked laughter and/or ridicule), he stuck tenaciously to the cases that came to his desk like a barnacle to the underside of an ancient barge. His tenaciousness, his single-minded determination throughout, smacks of that displayed by his creator: the single-mindedness to become a writer in the first place, the tenaciousness, the never-say-die attitude, and the quality of the writing of the series – especially during the early days – when Rankin had to do other jobs to subsidise his living.
So although there was little to make comparisons of between Rebus and Rankin in the text, the overall mind-set was still there. Maybe that’s endemic in all writers and their creations: fiction is dictated by the personality of the writer. Where an Oscar Wilde character will stop in the park and smell a rose on the way to work, a Rankin character will stop off at the local pub. Some of the genetic make-up will rub off. Taking this analogy further, it is strange how many siblings who haven’t seen each other since childhood grow up and follow similar career paths, or make the same decisions with regard to relationships – it’s in their genetic make-up.
With Fleshmarket Close, Rebus is feeling his age somewhat. To a degree this is forced upon him as he enters the new police station at Gayfield Square:
‘I’m one of the lucky ones, Detective Sergeant Clarke was thinking to herself, by which she meant that she at least had been given a desk of her own. John Rebus – senior in rank to her – hadn’t been so fortunate. Not that fortune, good or bad, had had anything to do with it. She knew Rebus saw it as a sign from on high: we’ve no place for you; time you thought of chucking it in.’
Rebus doesn’t let the buggers grind him down and tells Siobhan on the phone that he quite likes the new station really, especially when everyone has gone home, because he can have any desk he wants! The workaholic in Rebus wins through, but the retirement issue comes up again through his taste in music. His new batch of CDs include Jackie Leven, Lou Reed and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, while Siobhan’s choice includes the sprightly Snow Patrol and Grant-Lee Philips!
Another interesting scene is where Rebus turns up at Cafferty’s house, a large detached house on a dimly lit suburban street. Cafferty has an outside jacuzzi and although it is quite late, he is still lounging in it, listening to music, without a care in the world. Although Rebus doesn’t admit it, he must be jealous. He is roughly the same age as Cafferty, has worked hard on the right side of the law, even put this gangster away, but here he is with more creature comforts than he damn well deserves and, just to rub it in, he tells Rebus: ‘I love it out here, this time of night. Hear the wind in the trees, Rebus? They’ve been here longer than any of us, those trees. Same with these houses. And they’ll still be here when we’ve gone.’ Cafferty is enjoying his life and Rebus is working his backside off. Cafferty rams this down Rebus’s throat: he notes that he gives generously to charity and is happy, but Rebus – once retired – will be sitting in his flat with a scrap book of Cafferty cuttings.
While Rebus has his banter with Cafferty – and anyone else who comes down the pipe – the story continues. The discovery of the bodies at Fleshmarket Close is just another dark adventure from Edinburgh past; more important is the theme of racial tension. In fact it is the vehemence of the hatred within the racial tension that is important, and allows me to make a comparison to Knots and Crosses. Where I had criticised Rankin for underplaying the bad language of the SAS flashback scenes, I can’t do the same for the racial tension scenes in Fleshmarket Close. They are powerful and full of tension and showcase the incredible journey as a writer Rankin had made throughout the Rebus series.
Rankin’s success had allowed him to give up the day job and work full time on the novels. As the Rebus series came towards its conclusion – two books left to go at the time of Fleshmarket Close – Rankin told me that he had signed a two-book contract that would see him complete the series with one book a year. Yes, time was indeed running out for Detective Inspector John Rebus. Obscurity was just around the corner, while Rankin had progressed to having his own jacuzzi – although not purchased through ill-gotten gains – and living in a large, loving house.
Could Rebus change his predictable outcome? Perhaps not. Perhaps the old adage was true: a policeman’s lot is not a happy one, and the poor Fifer who moved to Edinburgh for a better life retires lonely.
‘By the way, Cafferty in Fleshmarket Close lives in my house… and last night I disturbed six intruders in the back garden. They were pissing about with Cafferty’s jacuzzi – but not pissing in it, thank God!’
Author interview 5 November 2004
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE G8 UNPLEASANTNESS
‘I need to write a short story and a long essay before
I commence the next Rebus. It’ll have G8 as its backdrop, and that’s about as much as I know.’
Author interview, 11 August 2005
As the books are set in real time, real events will inevitably be included to add to the reality, such as the 7/7 London bombings, the 2012 Olympic bid and George W. Bush falling off his bicycle whilst waving at police officers (Siobhan asking,‘Did we just do that?’).
The title of The Naming of the Dead refers to the ceremony that Clarke’s ageing left-wing parents attend, where a sampling of the names of the dead from the Iraq War is read out. But there are other lists too: the list of victims created by Rebus and Clarke as they try to unravel the crime and also to John Rebus’ evocation of grief in naming the many of his own friends and family who have died in the course of his life (particularly his brother Michael, whose death overshadows the opening chapter).
So the ‘naming of the dead’ is a body count conveniently placed near the end of the series? No, nothing so bland, but it does provide a pause for thought on a much larger canvas: loss in its many guises – loss of love, friendship, youth, anger, hope. The facades of the characters melt away. They let their barriers down, so the reader can see who’s really dead: those who fought in wars, in the Police Force, and our own families. For me personally, it is one of the very best novels in the Rebus series, because ‘the naming of the dead’ is there if you want it – and most of us do – but it is not rammed down one’s throat. The writing is brilliantly understated. It normally is, but this one just hits all the right buttons for me. The main story is not hampered with over-sentimentality and Rebus is as off the wall as he always has been.
By the end of the book, Clarke realises that she has grown closer to understanding Rebus:
‘“It’s not enough, is it?” she repeated. “Just… symbolic… because there’s nothing else you can do.” “What are you talking about?” he asked, with a smile. “The naming of the dead,” she told him, resting her head against his shoulder.’
Siobhan increasingly fears that she is becoming more like him and consequently doomed to a similar fate:
‘“Obsessed and sidelined, thrawn and distrusted. Rebus had lost family and friends. When he went out drinking, he did so on his own, standing quietly at the bar, facing the row of optics.”’
Siobhan knows her time with Rebus is coming to an end. And Rebus? Rebus is becoming more inward-looking, perhaps worrying a little more about his inevitable retirement. But no, no, Siobhan is not like Rebus. She wouldn’t allow that to happen, but she may have picked up a few of his bad habits and how that will finally affect her future career remains to be seen.
Maybe the same people who wanted to hear more about Rebus after Knots and Crosses will want to hear more about Siobhan, but it’s certainly to her that the future belongs, not to Rebus.
The book isn’t just about the relationship between the characters: there’s G8 too, along with other topics that were important to Rankin. ‘How could I ignore the G8? It was the biggest thing to happen in my hometown in a generation; every cop in the city played a part. It was ready-made for Rebus to come stomping all over it. Besides, the books had been becoming more overtly political, and by using the G8 I
could offer a few further observations.’
Like Strip Jack, Let It Bleed, Black and Blue and most of the others since Resurrection Men, The Naming of the Dead is a political novel.
How do the decisions made by the powers that be affect Scotland? Not just Edinburgh but the bigger picture? Where has Scottish industry gone? Where have the once vibrant mining towns gone? Indeed where have the busy shipyards, such as Rosyth, gone? Is it just ‘progress’ that has shut all this down? Was it just progress that wanted Scottish oil to fuel a war imposed by the British government? The one important point that The Naming of the Dead opens up for me is how little a voice Scotland has had in shaping its future over the past hundred years or so. It seems as though – and perhaps this is the optimism in Rankin’s writing – that with G8 coming to Scotland, it was as if their collective voice was now beginning to be heard, that the Scottish Parliament suddenly had importance on the world stage.
‘… First Minister of the Scottish Parliament was on the tarmac to greet the world leaders.’
The Naming of the Dead
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE