Ian Rankin & Inspector Rebus (9 page)

‘“You’re sure it was a hire car?” Watson asked

Holmes. Holmes thought again before nodding.’

Strip Jack

Of course the homage to Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson is there if you want it, and
the irony is that Watson is the boss and Holmes is the subordinate. Rankin is playing with great Scottish literature again but he can’t help it. The statue of Sherlock Holmes stood for many years around the corner from Princes Street (until they started putting the tram lines down in 2009) and Rankin would acknowledge Doyle every time Holmes and Watson – his Holmes and Watson – took centre stage
in his novels.

Strip Jack
was released in October 1992. It is a political novel about a local MP called Gregor Jack and it appears somebody wants to Strip Jack Naked – set him up, bring him down – which is why he is found in bed with a prostitute during a police raid at the start of the book. Rebus feels sorry for the man until Jack’s wife is found murdered and the novel takes a more sinister
turn.

The constituency of North and South Esk (a fictional setting in the novel) has parallels to North and South Edinburgh but there is more to it than that. The book is about boundaries, territorial/political, and personal ones too. It hits out at both Conservative and Labour parties and makes observations on the changing face of Scotland.

Strip Jack
was the fourth Rebus novel – released after
the first anthology of short stories (
A Good Hanging and other stories
, Century, 1992) – and it is clear that Rebus had fully developed in Rankin’s mind. He lived and breathed, made his own decisions and pushed his creator on to greater heights. But it wasn’t a dark novel, as Rankin admits in his Introduction to the anthology
Rebus: St Leonard’s Years
(Orion, 2001): ‘I think the … novel is one
of the lighter additions to the series.’

With a son, and the beautiful French countryside all around him, he must have felt more relaxed, despite the pressure of writing a quality book for his new publisher because, for me, that’s the reason why the story is lighter, perhaps more laid-back.

The story is less dynamic than the previous three novels in the series. It is a straightforward whodunit
but it doesn’t go anywhere until Liz Jack is murdered halfway through. The only saving grace is dear Mrs Wilkie, the OAP owner of a remote guesthouse who is practically senile and provides a few laughs at Rebus’s expense.

Perhaps the most important aspect of
Strip Jack
is Rebus’s sudden love of rock music, which coincidentally is matched by Gregor Jack: The Rolling Stones, and specifically their
album
Let It Bleed
(the album title will become a future Rebus book title). Suddenly Rebus’s musical taste matched that of his vinyl-junkie creator.

‘When Great London Road police station had burnt down, Rebus had been moved to St Leonard’s, which was Central District’s divisional HQ.’

The Black Book

T
he Black Book
was the first novel set at St Leonard’s police station and the first to feature Siobhan Clarke (Rebus’s soon-to-be sidekick). It also brought back Nell Stapleton from
Hide & Seek
and the blind man
Vanderhyde from
Knots and Crosses
(note the ‘hyde’)
.
Also it’s the first outing for Sword and Shield, a hardline offshoot of the Scottish National Party that returns in
Mortal Causes
(the following novel) in a bigger way.

The Black Book
was where Rankin really developed the working world of John Rebus, as he told me: ‘I know that I’d been reading
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
in which a young
man gets too close to the Devil for comfort and eventually is persuaded to kill. That’s basically the plot of
The Black Book
, isn’t it?’

Well, not quite! The book opens with the black humour we now expect with a Rebus novel. Straight away Rebus loses a lover, finds a useless brother and witnesses ‘the black comedy of life in a blood-soaked Edinburgh butcher’s shop’.
⁴³
All of this is dismissed
by Rebus as ‘just one of those weeks’ but things get steadily more complicated and exciting. Enter ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty. ‘I’d been reading Larry Block’s Matt Scudder books,’ Rankin told me. ‘And Scudder becomes friends with a really nasty gangster.’ So Rebus needed his contact with the underworld, his nemesis, his Professor Moriarty? ‘Let’s call “Big Ger” an “homage” to
⁴⁴
Block’s novels.

Surely
Cafferty is a little more complex than that? In one of my interviews with Rankin, for
Fleshmarket Close
(5 November 2004), he opened up a little more when I queried the big gangster coming down to London in his youth. ‘Cafferty’s an amalgam of several real-life Glasgow “gangsters”. I’ve definitely read accounts of how such real-life ’60s villains as Jimmy Boyle made the trip to London and did
strong-arm work for the likes of the Krays and the Richardsons. This may have been mentioned in Boyle’s own autobiography, or in one of the many true crime books written about the Glasgow underworld… I definitely came across the info somewhere. One of these days I’m going to write a short story – maybe a long story – about Cafferty’s early years, written from his point of view.’

A young Cafferty
book? Well, the path seems to have gone cold on that for the moment… but as for Glasgow-based gangsters assisting the Krays and Richardsons in the ’60s, ‘Scotch’ Jack Dixon and Ian Barrie are very good examples of Scots who came down to London to join the Kray firm, so there could be an interesting story there for ‘Big Ger’ – or rather Rankin.

But I have one more observation regarding the London
connection:

‘A handy lesson with “Big Ger” after you. He really makes people disappear, doesn’t he? Dumping them at sea like that. That’s what he does, isn’t it?’

The Black Book

This scene is straight out of the
supposed
history books, where Freddie Foreman, king of the London underworld, supposedly disposed of the body of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie as a favour to the Kray Twins, by giving
him a burial at sea. Giving ‘Big Ger’ the label of Scotland’s answer to Foreman is credible in the light of his involvement in the Rebus series after
The Black Book.

Rankin has mentioned the murder of McVitie a couple of times in his novels (
Tooth and Nail
and
Black and Blue
), and it is interesting that he uses Freddie Foreman’s alleged techniques as a consequence.
⁴⁵

One day, while drinking
in the Oxford Bar, Rankin was told about a hotel in Princes Street that burned down in mysterious circumstances and, along with the memories he had of the smell of the breweries in the west of the city, he brought together the essence of the story that would feature a brewing family, the mystery of the burned-down hotel, ‘Big Ger’, St Leonard’s and Siobhan Clarke.

This was the beginning of the
grown-up Rebus. Rankin would consider that that happened from
Strip Jack
, but I think not. The natural break comes at the beginning of
The Black Book
when we meet Rebus at his new desk at St Leonard’s. It is only there that the new beginning is complete, with important new characters and real-life Edinburgh pubs.

The Black Book
is also significant to us in as much as it reintroduces Rebus’s brother
Michael. Michael is looking up his brother in Edinburgh after serving three years of a five-year prison sentence for drug dealing, as a consequence of the events in
Knot and Crosses
(the detail of the court case and the infrequent prison visits Rebus makes are not given in any of the books, which is a bit of a shame).

Throughout
The Black Book
there are tensions between the Rebus brothers. This
isn’t the self-assured Michael Rebus we meet at the beginning of the first novel. This man has been humbled and is at the point of rebuilding his life, relying, like so many other less-than-entitled brothers throughout history, on his sensible sibling (sic) to pull his life back together again. Michael becomes a pathetic figure and Rebus has more than one argument with him.

This development of
character takes Rebus much further away from Rankin’s personal life, not because he doesn’t have a brother, but because he has never had to treat someone – or be treated – in such a way, and there is no obvious connection with the reality of Rankin’s life. This is another reason why
The Black Book
is the first ‘grown-up’ Rebus novel: the characters have taken on their own momentum. They really
begin to speak for themselves – not just Rebus but Patience (Rebus’s latest girlfriend), Holmes, ‘The Farmer’ Watson, Lauderdale, Dr Curt. The series is really one for the faithful fan by this stage.

Only if people were reading the books in order could they appreciate the way the characters interacted, the history they have shared with each other. In a more naive way, the same could be said for
Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. If they are read in the order they were written then the reader makes certain connections and cross-references, which they wouldn’t identify if they read the books out of sequence. Such is the consequence of reading series fiction: even through self-contained novels there has to be familiarity – synergy, continuity – between novels.

‘The past was certainly important
to Edinburgh. The city fed on its past like a serpent with its tail in its mouth. And Rebus’s past seemed to be circling around again too.’

The Black Book

The above quote echoes the legend of Edinburgh being built on the back of a serpent (also mentioned in
Mortal Causes
) but it also sums up the novel, in as much as it clearly shows that Edinburgh’s past is haunting the modern-day city, just
as Rebus’s past is haunting him. It’s like Rebus and his city are spiritually joined at the hip – as Rankin is with his adopted city? Maybe.

In a way,
The Black Book
attempts to wrap up much of the unfinished business of the series thus far and introduces a new real-life police station and real Edinburgh pubs too. This would naturally allow Rankin to explore and analyse
his
Edinburgh without
watering things down through pure fiction, which is what he had done before. The reality has stood him in good stead ever since, especially regarding police procedure, as he told me: ‘In the past I made most of it up. And the police officers started coming up to me and saying “I love your books but you got that little bit wrong.”

‘I started writing the books when I was still a student, and I
didn’t know how the police worked. I didn’t even know that there were 15 people in a Scottish jury, I thought there were 12, like
Twelve Angry Men
. I didn’t know that there were three possible verdicts in a Scottish court. You can have Not Proven as well as Not Guilty and Guilty. Not Proven means you think they did it but it hasn’t been proved to the jury’s satisfaction.

‘So there was a learning
process going on, but it became a lot easier when cops came up to me and said “I loved the books…” because I would say “What’s your phone number?” and I would start pestering them for information, and it’s got to the stage now where the police in Scotland are very friendly to me. They understand that Rebus is a maverick but they like the fact that this guy doesn’t follow the rules all of the time,
because in their ideal policing world they wouldn’t have to do all the paperwork, form-filling – they would be able to get on with the job that Rebus is getting on with.’

So the novels are fantasies for the police force? Certainly quality fiction, as Rankin enthuses: ‘The beauty of writing fiction about the police is you can leave out all the boring stuff. An inquiry will have lots of dead and
loose ends. You get none of that in a book – you can hint at it but you don’t have to put it all in. The problem with the cops who try and write books – and some do try with very good cause – is they don’t know what to leave out. They put too much detail in and the whole thing gets bogged down for the reader. It’s too realistic. The thriller is different. I used to write thrillers and people who
read thrillers have different expectations. They want to believe that they’re learning stuff and they are very techi-minded, so they do want to know how a Heckler Koch MP5 works. They want the nuts and bolts of it, every little detail. I gave it up because it was too much like hard work. Freddie Forsyth has got a lot to answer for!’

Despite all this, Rankin did have some fun with
The Black Book
(even though he admits that it is a darker novel than its predecessor). While in America spending the money of the Chandler-Fulbright Award, he visited New Orleans and entered a dive with an Elvis theme. It was here that Rankin conceived the idea of the Heartbreak Café in Edinburgh, an Elvis-themed restaurant with its ‘Love Me Tenderloin’, ‘King Shrimp Creole’ and my personal favourite ‘Blue Suede
Choux’.

It is irritating that critics underrate Rankin’s sense of humour. Despite the excellent – but dark – book jackets and the often grim subject matter, there is no doubt that Rankin’s books possess a keen sense of humour and, to be frank, it is something prevalent across the CID when dealing with tough – and often nasty – work. The old adage of ‘if you don’t laugh you’ll cry’, is an everyday
occurrence in such environments
.

‘Dark, dark, dark. The sky quiet save for the occasional drunken yell.’

Mortal Causes

T
here is a city beneath the streets in Edinburgh: a gothic subterranean cavern of intrigue and spine-chilling possibility. Rankin found such delights when visiting Mary King’s Close in Edinburgh’s Old Town (not too far away from Fleshmarket Close, which would provide
its own inspiration for a future book). As legend would have it, during the 1600s plague was rife in Edinburgh and the people of Mary King’s Close either died, or moved out and didn’t move back again. Then there was a fire, so each end of the close was blocked and eventually it was built upon – until such time when the people of Edinburgh could make it a tourist attraction and inspire a local writer
to write a novel about it! The book would be called
Mortal Causes.