What Book to Read?

In Exit Music (2007), Detective Inspector John Rebus retired from the Lothian and Boarders police force, and Rankin got on with creating a new series about Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox. In The Complaints (2009) and The Impossible Dead (2011) Fox has some things in common with Rebus, but is in other ways his opposite, being a member of the Professional Ethics and Standards section of the Lothian and Borders Police, which investigates police malpractice. Inevitably, Rankin couldn’t resist bringing them together, and Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012) is the result.

Rebus is back as a civilian working on cold cases in the Serious Crime Review Unit – (SCRU: it has to be a joke). He is approached by a woman whose daughter disappeared some years earlier and who has a theory that the disappearances of several other young women in the intervening years are related to it because all of them happened near one Scottish highway, the A9. No one has taken her seriously, but now another young woman has gone missing on the same road. Rebus thinks it’s worth taking a further look.

Rebus retains his strained relationship with the Edinburgh crime boss Big Ger Cafferty, whose life he saved. A family friend of the girl at the centre of the new case is also an Edinburgh crime figure. Rebus’s contact with these two men is exactly the sort of thing that attracts the attention of SCRU and Malcolm Fox, and he is soon investigating Rebus, of whom he is deeply suspicious. ‘John Rebus should be extinct, Clarke. Somehow the Ice Age came and went and left him still swimming around while the rest of us evolved,’ he says. ‘I know a cop gone bad when I see one. Rebus has spent so many years crossing the line he’s managed to rub it out altogether.’ Rebus’s protégé Siobhan Clarke is rising up the ranks; she is torn between Fox’s view and loyalty to Rebus. ‘Fox was right, of course: Rebus was the loosest of cannons, and no constabulary had room for those any more.’ She knows how difficult he can be: ‘You can be a real bastard sometimes, John,’ she says. ‘It has been said,’ he admitted. ‘And believe me, I’m not proud of the fact.’ ‘Thing is, though, you are proud of the fact.’ She looked at him again. ‘You really are.’ She knows that he is old fashioned by modern police standards; he can scarcely even use a computer. ‘You’re vinyl, we’re digital,’ she says. But she knows that his contacts on the street, including Cafferty, are crucial to how he works: ‘kicking up all the sand and sediment, then studying what effect it had and what was uncovered in the process.’ She gets the chance in the story to decide where her loyalties lie.

Even without a badge, Rebus is the same as ever: solitary, disrespectful of authority, going his own way, working his hunches. But poor old Fox comes off much worse; whereas in the two previous books, he has been an sympathetic character, here he is shown as narrow and vindictive, disapproving almost as much of Rebus’s life style as anything else. ‘Fox had ceased to take alcohol because he was an alcoholic, while Rebus continued to sup for the exact same reason. Somehow, though, Rebus still functioned, while Fox seldom had.’ Rankin can do what he likes with his own characters, but it does seem a bit unfair to favour one creation so markedly over another.

The Rebus stories usually involve crimes that reflect society, but this time Rankin says he has written a ‘road’ story. ‘Rebus had always thought of roads as simple, mute entities, but he knew differently now – they had individual identities and foibles. They pulsed with life.’ And so does the story. ‘When you’re on the road,’ Rebus says, ‘there’s always a destination, and you know you’re going to reach it one way or another.’ But I’m perhaps less happy with the destination reached this time; it remains very open ended (like a road?). This is partly because of Rebus’s civilian status; he can no longer just arrest someone. It’s probably also because Rankin is keeping his options open as to Rebus’s future (and Fox’s). It is made very clear that Rebus’s way of doing things is now frowned on, even if it gets results. Even SCRU is being disbanded in favour of a centralised Scottish cold case unit. And there is a changing of guard even among the crime bosses. Where will all this leave Rebus? We’ll have to wait for the next book to find out.

You can read more about Rebus on Ian Rankin’s interesting website here. My reviews of the Malcolm Fox books are here and here.