What Book to Read?

The Impossible Dead (2011) is the second in Rankin’s new series about Inspector Malcolm Fox of ‘the Complaints’, or more properly the  Professional Ethics and Standards section of the Lothian and Borders Police. I enjoyed the first one, The Complaints (2009); see my post here. This one is even better.

Fox and his small team are investigating three detectives who may have covered up for a colleague who has been found guilty of misconduct, including demanding sexual favours of women he had arrested. As usual they meet with scant cooperation, but they are used to that. ‘I doubt there’s anything you can do that hasn’t been tried a hundred times,’ Fox tells an obstructive detective. ‘How come you hate cops so much?’ is the response. Fox can’t entirely ignore these barbs; he knows he is good at his job, but nevertheless worries that he isn’t doing ‘proper’ policing, and fears that he might not be able to. ‘Part of the appeal of the Complaints had been its focus on rules broken rather than bones … Did that make him a coward? … it was in his nature to avoid confrontation.’ Was he ‘Too scrupulous. Too willing to sidestep problems’? ‘You’ve not got anything to prove, Malcolm,’ says one of his colleagues. But he can’t quite believe it. Even his father has doubts. So when what seemed a straight forward case becomes complicated, Fox is anxious to pursue it, even though it goes well beyond his role as a complaints investigator, and becomes ‘proper’ detection.

How can a complaints case morph into a crime investigation? Rankin has used a device similar to the cold case scenario, where re-investigation of an old unsolved murder stirs up trouble in the present. In this case the death had been conveniently labelled suicide, but Fox quickly finds that this verdict is still in dispute. More deaths follow, for which the explanations seem too convenient. Has there been an official cover up? This is not action drama with a crisis on every page; it is a police procedural, with the slow following of leads and gathering of evidence. Not all of the investigation is fruitful, and the different threads can get a bit confusing. Fox is able to fit the pieces together because he is the only one who sees that they are all related – though there is a bit of luck involved. What he finds involves him in serious confrontation with authority and personal danger. ‘I can be a detective when I want to be,’ he finally says. ‘Just so you know.’ It is a clever and well put together plot.

One of the reasons I like Rankin’s books – in addition to his clever and complex plotting – is that they deal with crimes that grow out of the social, economic and political life of Edinburgh. In this case, present day power and influence are important, but the focus is on the history of the Scottish independence movement, the fringes of which for a brief time in the 1980s showed signs of becoming violent. The devolution of power to a Scottish Parliament in 1999 has all but obscured this history, but Rankin makes good use of it here. I like the story he tells about how in the early days of his writing, he would go into bookshops and surreptitiously move his books from the ‘crime’ section to ‘Scottish literature’. The setting of his work in Edinburgh is very important to the overall impact of his work.

If I have any complaint, it is that Fox is perhaps a bit colourless, especially when compared to the dynamic John Rebus, Rankin’s earlier Edinburgh detective. But this perhaps is Rankin’s intention; after all, he can’t just go on writing the same books. Fox is a sympathetic enough creation, whose home life is modest and somewhat troubled; his father is old and frail and his sister is rude and difficult. This is all in keeping with his feelings of self doubt and inadequacy. I think he perhaps overcomes these without much explanation; the motive is there, and we see how it happens, but maybe there’s a bit of ‘inside the head’ stuff missing here.

You can read more about Ian Rankin here, and a couple of favourable reviews here and here. I didn’t find any negative ones.