The Falls

‘Rankin’s ability to create a credible character, delivering convincing dialogue to complement sinister and hard-hitting plots set against vividly detailed atmosphere, is simply awesome’

‘Rankin is streets ahead in the British police procedural writing field … our top crime writer’

‘His ear for dialogue is as sharp as a switchblade. This is, quite simply, crime writing of the highest order’

‘Rankin writes laconic, sophisticated, well-paced thrillers’

‘Ian Rankin bridges the gulf between the straight novel and the mystery with enviable ease’

‘First-rate crime fiction with a fierce realism’

‘Rankin uses his laconic prose as a literary paint stripper, scouring away pretensions to reveal the unwholesome reality beneath’

‘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 a potential for lyrical expression which is distinctively Rankin’s own’

Born 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 and 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 Chandler-Fulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005 and in 2009 was inducted into the CWA Hall of Fame. 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
.

Cover

Title

Dedication

Praise for Ian Rankin

About the Author

By Ian Rankin

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Afterword

Reading Group Notes

Copyright

Not my accent – I didn’t lose that so much as wipe it off my shoe, as soon as I started to live in England – but rather my own temperament, the prototypically Scottish part of my character that was chippy, aggressive, mean, morbid and, despite my best endeavours, persistently deist. I was, and always would be, a lousy escapee from the unnatural history museum …

Whenever I’m on tour, I’m always on the lookout for local music and bands I haven’t heard of. On my first trip to New Zealand, I was sitting watching TV in my Auckland hotel room and liked the snippets of music I heard on an advert for the latest album by the Mutton Birds. I didn’t know the Mutton Birds, but they seemed to be popular in New Zealand. At tour’s end, I found myself with an hour to kill at the airport and some spare currency. I bought the album at a CD booth, and listened to it back in Edinburgh. There are plenty of great songs on
Rain, Steam and Speed
, but one – ‘The Falls’ – really got to me. It was slow and haunting and mythic. The lyrics were all about invention: how we invent the world by means of our insatiable curiosity. I loved the song’s refrain – ‘There must be a story behind all that …’

There must be a story.

I was still recovering from jet lag when the French TV crew hit town. They were in Edinburgh to make a documentary about the Scottish parliament, and wanted to talk to a few of the doubters. I never did find out how they got my name, but it’s true that I was sceptical about the costings, the site chosen for the building, and the need for another layer of bureaucracy. (I’m more sanguine these days.) I’d agreed to meet them at the recently opened Museum of Scotland on Chambers Street. There was a spot on the lower ground floor that would provide the perfect backdrop to our conversation. As we walked into the building, a member of staff sauntered over. He’d recognised me, and had something he wanted to say.

‘You should take a look at the little dolls, Mr Rankin.’

I asked him which little dolls he meant. He winked, and told me to take the lift to the fourth floor. Plenty of people over the years have come up to me with their excited notions of plots for my next book. I’ve found precious few of them to be helpful or viable, but I was intrigued by these ‘little dolls’… which is how I made the acquaintance of the Arthur’s Seat coffins. They’re tucked away at the back of the fourth floor, in a section dedicated to religious belief and the afterlife. As soon as I saw them, I knew they would make a great story, especially as no one had come up with an incontrovertible interpretation of their meaning. In other words, there was a story to tell about them. Maybe fiction could provide a sense of closure which so far had been lacking from their history.

There must be a story behind all that …

My books have always been attempts to explain aspects of Scotland to both outsiders and natives. I like using ‘hidden’ stories – Mary King’s Close (
Mortal Causes
), cannibalism (
Set in Darkness
) – as my starting points. There are things you can say in fiction which can’t always be contained by history books. It’s true also that I take real-life unsolved crimes (such as the Bible John murders in
Black & Blue
) and extrapolate from them to say something about the world we’ve made for ourselves. Maybe that’s why I became so intrigued, soon after my experience with the Arthur’s Seat coffins, by the story of Emmanuel Caillet, a young Frenchman whose body had been found on a Scottish mountainside. No one could explain why he’d come so far from home in order to kill himself, or even
why
he would kill himself. One theory – no wilder than many of the others – had it that he was involved in an Internet role-playing game, and that this had led to his murder. The perils we face when going online have been well documented, of course. Cyberspace is the perfect haunt of creeps, charlatans and hunters. It’s a place full of shape-shifters.

Moreover, it’s a place beyond Rebus’s ken.

I knew that by using role-playing as the basis for a plot, I would be taking Rebus into new territory, to a place where he would feel utterly lost. In other words, it was a way of allowing Siobhan to show her mettle. This would be
her
case, an opportunity for her to prove she’s as capable a detective as her mentor, but with a different set of skills. Meantime, I would give Rebus a quest of his own, but with physical clues – the dolls – rather than hi-tech ones.

The Falls
is as much Siobhan’s book as Rebus’s. They share pretty well equal ‘screen time’, and are together only infrequently. Perhaps the point I was trying to make is that Siobhan doesn’t need Rebus any more. She’s happy to work with him, but as equals. I also promote Gill Templer (apart from Rebus, the only character to have survived from book one of the series), and retire ‘Farmer’ Watson.

Rebus himself seems to feel that the tectonic plates are shifting, that younger officers are moving into positions of responsibility while he remains a dinosaur. He can share his worries with Bobby Hogan, a colleague from the ‘old school’, but not with Morris Gerald Cafferty. I decided that Cafferty, criminal Edinburgh’s Mr Big, would be sidelined in
The Falls
. In past books, he had proven to be a useful foil: someone Rebus felt close to, but not in a good way. Cafferty tempts and teases Rebus, helps him out where no help is wished for. The two men are too alike not to have some respect for each other; but at any moment one of them is quite capable of destroying the other also. Cafferty could have been useful to me in
The Falls
, but I left him out as a favour to a mentor of mine, Allan Massie. Allan was writer-in-residence for a time at Edinburgh University, and helped me with my early short stories. He also introduced me to Euan Cameron, an editor in London who would eventually publish
Knots & Crosses
. I acknowledged my debt to both in the dedication page to
The Falls
, and alluded to another ‘series’ writer, Anthony Powell, when I stated that Allan and Euan had ‘set the ball rolling’.