Ian Rankin & Inspector Rebus (15 page)

‘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

‘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

S
o 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.

‘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.