A Good Hanging and other Stories

Ian Rankin is now the United Kingdom's bestselling crime writer. His 15 police procedurals featuring the dour Scottish Detective Inspector John Rebus are beginning, at last, to attract a devoted--and deserved--following in this country. St. Martin's has just published this, Rankin's 1992 collection of short stories, and I can't think of a better way to be introduced to John Rebus and his creator. Dubbed "Tartan Noir" by James Ellroy, Rankin's tales are set in Edinburgh. Not in the beautiful streets that tourists see (those cobbled sidewalks leading up to Edinburgh Castle), but in its dark, damp recesses where crime flourishes. That's where Rebus works. The crime and criminals there make Rebus's job a tough one, and they also offend his sense of decency and order. These 12 stories tell of mystery, suffering, and mayhem, which Rebus alone of all the detectives on the force, with his remarkable deductive skills, can solve. In "Being Frank," a homeless man, from his unique perspective on the park bench, is able to give Rebus the information he needs to break up a scam by local ne'er-do-wells. Crimes gone unsolved for 20 years, religious sightings, lovers crossed, and tales of revenge all come under the jaundiced eye of the very talented Rebus. Even 10 years ago, when he was writing these stories, Rankin was a writer of great gifts. Time has borne out this promise. So it is easy to predict that, once you have sampled these short cases, you will become one of the many readers eagerly awaiting another Rebus novel from this sensitive and enormously talented young writer. --Otto Penzler

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Playback

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

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Praise for Ian Rankin

‘Rankin weaves his plots with a menacing ease ... His prose is understated, yet his canvas of Scotland’s criminal underclass has a panoramic breadth. His ear for dialogue is as sharp as a switchblade. This is, quite simply crime writing of the highest order’
Daily Express

‘A series that shows no signs of flagging ... Assured, sympathetic to contemporary foibles, humanistic, this is more than just a police procedural as the character of Rebus grows in moral stature ... Rankin is the head capo of the MacMafia’
Time Out

‘Rankin has followed one success with another. Sardonic and assured, the novel has a powerful and well-paced narrative. What is striking is the way Rankin uses his laconic prose as a literary paint stripper, scouring away pretensions to reveal the unwholesome reality beneath’
Independent

‘Rankin strips Edinburgh’s polite façade to its gritty skeleton’
The Times

‘A teeming Ellroy-esque evocation of life at the sharp end in modern Scotland ... Rankin is the finest Scottish crime writer to emerge since William Mcllvanney’ GQ

‘Rebus resurgent ... A brilliantly meshed plot which delivers on every count on its way to a conclusion as unexpected as it is inevitable. Eleventh in the series. Still making waves’
Literary Review

‘His fiction buzzes with energy ... Essentially he is a romantic storyteller in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson ... His prose is as vivid and terse as the next man’s yet its flexibility and rhythm give it potential for lyrical expression which is distinctly Rankin’s own’
Scotland on Sunday

‘Top notch ... the bleakness is unrelenting, but it quite suits Mr Rankin who does his best work in the dark’
New York Times

‘The internal police politics and corruption in high places are both portrayed with bone-freezing accuracy This novel should come with a wind-chill factor warning’
Daily Telegraph

‘Detective Inspector Rebus makes the old-style detectives with their gentle or bookish backgrounds, Alleyn, Morse, Dalgliesh, look like wimps ... Rankin is brilliant at conveying the genuine stench of seedy places on the dark side of Scotland’ Sunday Telegraph

‘It’s the banter and the energy the immense carnival of scenes and characters, voices and moods that set Rankin apart. His stories are like a transmission forever in the red zone, at the edge of burnout. This is crime fiction at its best’
Washington Post

Bom in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel,
Knots & Crosses,
was published in 1987, and the Rebus books are now translated into over thirty languages and are bestsellers worldwide.

Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Ghandler-Eulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005. In 2004, Ian won America’s celebrated Edgar award for
Resurrection Men.
He has also been shortlisted for the Anthony Awards in the USA, and won Denmark’s Palle
Rosenkrantz
Prize, the French
Grand Prix du Roman
Noir and
the Deutscher Krimipreis.
Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay St Andrews, Edinburgh, Hull and the Open University

A contributor to BBC2’s
Newsnight
Review, he also presented his own TV series,
Ian
Rankin’s Evil Thoughts
. He has received the OBE for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh. He has also recently been appointed to the rank of Deputy Lieutenant of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons. Visit his website at
www.ianrankin.net
.

By lan Rankin

The Inspector Rebus series
Knots & Crosses
Hide & Seek
Tooth & Nail
Strip Jack
The Black Book
Mortal Causes
Let It Bleed
Black & Blue
The Hanging Garden
Death Is Not the End
(novella)
Dead Souls
Set in Darkness
The Falls
Resurrection Men
A Question of Blood
Fleshmarket Close
The Naming of the Dead
Exit Music

Other novels
The Flood
Watchman
Westwind

Writing as Jack Harvey
Witch Hunt
Bleeding Hearts
Blood Hunt

Short stories
A Good Hanging and Other
Stories
Beggars Banquet
Omnibus editions
Rebus: The Early Years
(κnots & Crosses, Hide &
Seek, Tooth & Nail)
Rebus: The St Leonard’s Years
( Strip Jack, The Black Book,
Mortal Causes)
Rebus: The Lost Years
(Let It Bleed, Black & Blue,
The Hanging Garden)
Rebus: Capital Crimes
(Dead Souls, Set in Darkness,
The Falls)

Non-fiction
Rebus’s Scotland

All Ian Rankin’s titles are available on audio. Also available:
Jackie Leven Said
by Ian Rankin and Jackie Leven.

 
A Good Hanging

 
IAN RANKIN

 
 
Orion

www.orionbooks.co.uk

 
An Orion paperback

 
First published in Great Britain in 1992 by Century

 
This paperback edition published in 1998
by Orion Books Ltd,

 
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,
London WC2H 9EA

 
An Hachette Livre UK company

 
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

 
Reissued 2008

 
Copyright © John Rebus Limited 1992

 
The right of Ian Rankin to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

 
Both the author and publisher acknowledge first
Publication of ‘Playback’ in Writer’s Crimes 22 (Macmillan).

 
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, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the copyright owner.

 
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

 
ISBN 978 1 4091 0773 6

 
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

 
The Orion Publishing Group’s policy is to use papers that
are natural, renewable and recyclable products and
made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging
and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to
the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

 
www.orionbooks.co.uk

Playback

It was the perfect murder.

Perfect, that is, so far as the Lothian and Borders Police were concerned. The murderer had telephoned in to confess, had then panicked and attempted to flee, only to be caught leaving the scene of the crime. End of story.

Except that now he was pleading innocence. Pleading, yelling and screaming it. And this worried Detective Inspector John Rebus, worried him all the way from his office to the four-storey tenement in Leith’s trendy dockside area. The tenements here were much as they were in any working-class area of Edinburgh, except that they boasted colour-splashed roller blinds or Chinese-style bamboo affairs at their windows, and their grimy stone facades had been power-cleaned, their doors now boasting intruder-proof intercoms. A far cry from the greasy Venetian blinds and kicked-in passageways of the tenements in Easter Road or Gorgie, or even in nearby parts of Leith itself, the parts the developers were ignoring as yet.

The victim had worked as a legal secretary, this much Rebus knew. She had been twenty-four years old. Her name was Moira Bitter. Rebus smiled at that. It was a guilty smile, but at this hour of the morning any smile he could raise was something of a miracle.

He parked in front of the tenement, guided by a uniformed officer who had recognised the badly dented front bumper of Rebus’s car. It was rumoured that the dent had come from knocking down too many old ladies, and who was Rebus to deny it? It was the stuff of legend and it gave him prominence in the fearful eyes of the younger recruits.

A curtain twitched in one of the ground-floor windows and Rebus caught a glimpse of an elderly lady. Every tenement, it seemed, tarted up or not, boasted its elderly lady. Living alone, with one dog or four cats for company, she was her building’s eyes and ears. As Rebus entered the hallway, a door opened and the old lady stuck out her head.