10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (127 page)
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Authors: Ian Rankin
Rebus doesn’t seem to have kept in touch with many of his old friends; is this why he finds the bonds and the motivations that govern this group of tightly knit friends to be simultaneously perplexing and fascinating?
There’s more forensic evidence presented in
Strip Jack
than in previous Rebus books; how does Ian Rankin approach this?
Ian Rankin’s use of Scottish slang is taken to a new level. Does this cause a problem for readers unacquainted with the idiom?
Is it necessity or merely symbolic that
Strip Jack
ends with a fire that burns down the fictitious Great London Road Police Station?
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Late on in
The Black Book
, I mention a town in the USA called Bar Harbor. The reference may be fleeting, but it reminds me that a lot of the plotting of my novel was actually done in North America. Nineteen ninety-two for me comprised two momentous events. In February, my son Jack was born. And three months later, almost to the day, the family Rankin headed to the USA for an unforgettable six-month stay, made possible by America’s most famous crime writer, Raymond Chandler.
Flashback: early summer the previous year. A letter arrives at our dusty farmhouse in south-west France. We’d been living there full-time for just over a year – refugees from corporate London – and the place was beginning to take shape. I’d only nearly killed myself half a dozen times, falling off roofs, slicing into my boot with a chainsaw, electrocuting myself while rewiring the mains, and going head-over-heels in a bramble patch with a weed-whacker aiming to strip the skin off my face. But the house now had things like ceilings and a bath and rudimentary heating. The broken windows had been mended and the woodworm treated. We even had a sofa, so no longer had to haul the back seat out of the Citroën and into the living room of an evening.
We deserved a break.
It came – of sorts – in the shape of that letter, telling me I’d won the Chandler-Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction. The reward was a chunk of money (courtesy of Raymond Chandler’s estate), with the stipulation that it be spent during the course of a six-month stay in the United States. This was fine with me. I showed my wife Miranda the letter, and she showed me a little strip of card and asked me if I thought the tip was a blueish sort of colour. I said I thought it was, and she said she thought she was pregnant. And so it came to pass that my short-lived dream of a drug-and-drink-fuelled orgy of classic car-driving across America was replaced with something more wholesome. In May 1992, with Jack three months old (the minimum age at which British Airways would carry him), we set out for Seattle. We had friends there, and they gave us time (and space) to get acclimatised. Eventually, with the purchase of a 1969 VW camper van, we were ready for a drive which would last for the next five months and put another 15,000 miles on the VW’s already well-worn clock.
It was as I drove through the USA (and bits of Canada), that I started thinking of my next Rebus novel.
The Black Book
was the result. In it, there’s an Elvis-themed restaurant, situated near Edinburgh’s Haymarket Station. I would find the real thing, however, in a New Orleans backstreet. That place was a dive, but I liked the idea of it, and had a lot of fun thinking up menu items such as the
Love Me Tenderloin
. I also had the opportunity to do a lot of thinking about the series. I was sure in my mind now that it
was
a series, and there were changes I wanted to make. At the end of the previous Rebus novel,
Strip Jack
, I had burned down the fictitious police station where my hero had been based since book one. In
The Black Book
, I moved him to a real-life station on St Leonard’s Street. I also, for the first time, mentioned where he lived – a real street – and took him to the site of the authentic Edinburgh mortuary.
I had also learned lessons in economy. If there was a need for a certain character type in the story, and such a character had been used in one of the previous books, then why not bring them back to life, rather than go to the trouble of inventing some brand-new personality? So it is that people like Matthew Vanderhyde and Jack Morton come back into Rebus’s life. Rebus’s brother Michael reappears, sleeping at Rebus’s flat while Rebus himself has moved in with Dr Patience Aitken. However, I also had room for a new character, a foil for Rebus: Detective Constable Siobhan Clarke. Rebus already had a sidekick of sorts in the shape of Detective Sergeant Brian Holmes, and Siobhan entered the book as just another of Rebus’s colleagues, and someone who might work well beside Holmes. By story’s end, however, and by sheer force of character, she had usurped Holmes. I had found Rebus’s perfect working partner: someone who respected him but could still be infuriated by his reluctance to stick to the rules; someone confident enough in their own abilities to be able to give as good as they got. It was not in Siobhan’s nature to remain ‘just another colleague’; she seemed to have other ideas entirely.
Another, different kind of foil for Rebus had already announced his readiness in a previous book. Morris Gerald Cafferty – Big Ger – was Edinburgh’s premier gangster. Having existed for the length of a cameo in
Tooth & Nail
, Cafferty was to emerge in
The Black Book
as a fully formed presence, the epitome of moral and spiritual corruption. He may not enter proceedings until halfway through, but the effect is chilling. What I find most intriguing about Cafferty is the ambiguity he brings with him. He is very like Rebus in some ways, something he can acknowledge but Rebus never will. Both men are ageing fast, finding the changing landscape unsympathetic. They remind me of Cain and Abel, or two sides of the same coin.
Or Jekyll and Hyde.
In previous books, I had made copious use of Robert Louis Stevenson’s dark masterpiece, going so far as to use Hyde’s surname as a pun in the title of my novel
Hide & Seek
. However, it seems to me now that
The Black Book
owes a greater debt to another Scots gothic chiller: James Hogg’s
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
. In that book, an innocent is cajoled and seduced and psychologically cudgelled into committing a murder. Is his tormentor the Devil, or a cruel and devious psychopath? Maybe the malevolent voice is his own, the ravings of a man possessed. The issue is never settled: it’s left to the reader to decide.
I’ll leave readers of
The Black Book
to decide how closely I follow my predecessor’s course.
One last thing: you need to know that ‘lum’ is a Scottish word for a chimney. It’ll help you get one of my favourite bad puns in the series . . .
April 2005‘To the wicked, all things are wicked; but to the just, all things are just and right.’
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Prologue
There were two of them in the van that early morning, lights on to combat the haar which blew in from the North Sea. It was thick and white like smoke. They drove carefully, being under strict instructions.
‘Why does it have to be us?’ said the driver, stifling a yawn. ‘What’s wrong with the other two?’
The passenger was much larger than his companion. Though in his forties, he kept his hair long, cut in the shape of a German military helmet. He kept pulling at the hair on the left side of his head, straightening it out. At the moment, however, he was gripping the sides of his seat. He didn’t like the way the driver screwed shut his eyes for the duration of each too-frequent yawn. The passenger was not a conversationalist, but maybe talk would keep the driver awake.
‘It’s just temporary,’ he said. ‘Besides, it’s not as if it’s a daily chore.’
‘Thank God for that.’ The driver shut his eyes again and yawned. The van glided in towards the grass verge.
‘Do you want me to drive?’ asked the passenger. Then he smiled. ‘You could always kip in the back.’
‘Very funny. That’s another thing, Jimmy, the
stink
!’
‘Meat always smells after a while.’
‘Got an answer for everything, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are we nearly there?’
‘I thought you knew the way.’
‘On the main roads I do. But with this mist.’
‘If we’re hugging the coast it can’t be far.’ The passenger was also thinking: if we’re hugging the coast, then two wheels past the verge and we’re over a cliff face. It wasn’t just this that made him nervous. They’d never used the east coast before, but there was too much attention on the west coast now. So it was an untried run, and
that
made him nervous.
‘Here’s a road sign.’ They braked to peer through the haar. ‘Next right.’ The driver jolted forwards again. He signalled and pulled in through a low iron gate which was padlocked open. ‘What if it had been locked?’ he offered.
‘I’ve got cutters in the back.’
‘A bloody answer for everything.’
They drove into a small gravelled car park. Though they could not see them, there were wooden tables and benches to one side, where Sunday families could picnic and do battle with the midges. The spot was popular for its view, an uninterrupted spread of sea and sky. When they opened their doors, they could smell and hear the sea. Gulls were already shrieking overhead.
