When Arthur Freed,
producer of
Brigadoon
, stated, ‘I went to Scotland and found nothing there that looks like Scotland,’ he was expecting only the shortbread-tin pictures that make up a tiny piece of the history and character of the country. More importantly, he didn’t get to grips with the psyche of the place, its people today and their so ordinary lives.
And that’s why Rebus lived in real time: to remind the
world that unfulfilment and disillusionment are fundamental parts of everyday life on the council estates around the inner bubble of Edinburgh. If you really want to explore the underbelly of Scottish society, wander in to a youth club or job centre and count how many kilts and bagpipes you find.
‘“… Depend on it, the advice of the great preacher is genuine: ‘What thine hand findeth to do,
do it with thy might, for none of us knows what a day may bring forth?’ That is, none of us knows what is pre-ordained, but whatever is pre-ordained we must do, and none of these things will be laid to our charge.”’
James Hogg,
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Rankin and Rebus have aged together. Rebus is approximately 15 years senior to his creator but they have both
lived through the same technological advances (within the Police Force) and that keeps us looking at the comparisons between creator and creation. However, as both get older, they appear to drift further away from each other too…
‘My life has been a life of trouble and turmoil; of change and vicissitude; of anger and exultation; of sorrow and of vengeance. My sorrows have all been for a slighted gospel, and my vengeance has been wreaked on its adversaries.’
James Hogg,
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
W
hen one reads the basic story for
Set in Darkness
, one marvels
at how such a bizarre story is made plausible. Rebus and DI Derek Linford are seconded to the police liaison team for the new Scottish parliament. Rebus senses that ‘Farmer’ Watson is behind all this – yet again – but the Farmer isn’t without his justification. Linford is by-the-book from the off, while Rebus is his usual off-the-wall self and this clearly means that Rebus’s patience will be severely
tested before they even start. A corpse is found behind a fireplace in a parliament building. Suddenly Roddy Grieve, Labour MP, is found dead and, bizarrely, Rebus begins to suspect there is a connection between Grieve’s murder and the body in the fireplace. Add Siobhan Clarke witnessing the suicide of a homeless man who just happens to have £400,000 in the bank in the same name as the corpse
in the fireplace and you have the interlocking story from hell. And then ‘Big Ger’ is released from prison and things get even more involved.
Yes, I’m being slightly flippant but not without good cause. As we know, every novel from
Let It Bleed/Black and Blue
onwards has a series of threads that are all entwined to make a bigger picture of Edinburgh’s intricate life-in-crime, and
Set in Darkness
is no exception.
The story is made more credible when one learns of the bizarre chain of serendipity that led to the writing of it. Rankin was flying between cities during a publicity tour in America. While on the plane he picked up the in-flight magazine and found an article about walking tours in Edinburgh. Thinking that he knew all that there was to know about such things, he was surprised
to learn about Queensberry House, where there is a grisly legend about the master of the house spit-roasting and eating one of the servants (later bricking up the remains in the fireplace).
When back in Edinburgh, Rankin decided to check out the building, taking along a film crew who were keen to find out how Rankin constructed storylines for his Rebus series. Once at the house, which was part
of the new parliament complex, Rankin found to his amazement some archaeologists who had just excavated the old kitchen, which had a big metal facade in front of it. Rankin asked for the doorway to be opened, which it was, but no old corpse lay anywhere behind it. But that’s not to say that he couldn’t invent a complex story based around the legend.
OK, so we can see where the idea came from
but, more so, we can clearly see where Rankin’s ‘obsessive’ need to find the full story of an historic snippet of Edinburgh’s past comes from. He explores – investigates – in a similar way to Rebus himself: pulling the threads together, visiting the sights, meeting the locals – the people working in the building – until he makes the ultimate discovery. (Note: he was the one who asked for the ancient
seal to be opened and then the first to glimpse inside.) Rankin’s thirst for the story is as keen as a journalist looking for their scoop. And here lies a very important observation regarding Ian Rankin and Inspector Rebus: the way Rebus follows a path of inquiry is the same as way as his creator. Indeed, before he was aware of how the police carried out their investigations, Rankin followed what
he thought was a logical path of inquiry for Rebus. He later found that he wasn’t far wrong with his assumptions.
So the methodical way of investigating ‘stories’ became Rebus’s police procedure? Absolutely, and when the red-tape of police logging/reporting, etc. etc. came in, Rankin just ignored the whole thing and made Rebus a maverick, conducting his investigations in the same manner as the
ordinary man on the street might examine something that interested him.
So if Rankin is actually his creation Rebus, does that mean Rankin is a maverick too? Well, what is a maverick? Someone who refuses to play by the rules; someone who isn’t scared to cross the line of conformity.
Have we just described Rankin? Many would say no. Rankin is the academic wordsmith who searches Edinburgh and
Scottish literature for interesting stories and legends and creates something of a legend with his maverick cop John Rebus. But is that just the kindly Dr Jekyll side of Ian Rankin? Is Mr Hyde moving in and out of the darkness behind that pleasant exterior? Don’t forget, Rebus followed the normal career path of a boy from Cardenden, not Rankin. Rankin followed his dream of becoming a novelist, flying
in the face of the academic world he was plunged into at university. Every step of the way, he isn’t doing things by the book. He is slightly left of field each time. And would you say writing a bestselling series of books about a Scottish cop is the norm? No, it isn’t. It breaks the mould, it rewrites the annals of crime fiction, it makes us look again at the great crime novels and see where
Rebus – that multifaceted picture-puzzle of a man – comes from. And the answer is simple: from the natural instincts of the man who created him, Ian Rankin.
‘“Maybe,” Rebus replied, putting the bottle back to his mouth.’
Set in Darkness
Something that interests me deeply about Ian Rankin is his big watershed novel
Black and Blue
. For whatever reason, Rankin was more cavalier in his approach
to Rebus during that book. He bounced him around Scotland, forcing him to experience many things and seeing how the DI coped with it. Rankin was under a lot of pressure in his life at the time and just for a change, he took an extra risk, pushed the envelope a little further and found the bestselling formula – the blueprint – that would shape the rest of the series.
My opinion is that Rankin
is a bit of a reluctant maverick – a shy Mr Hyde if you will. At heart he is a sensible man, but every now and then he forces himself to make a change. In the Rebus series we first notice this with
The Black Book
and that ‘closer to reality’ way of writing (as well as the introduction of what would become two major characters). Then there was
Black and Blue.
So was
Set in Darkness
the next major
step? No, not quite. It was the stepping stone that led to it though, and that book was
The Falls
– a book where Rebus has his first real taste of mortality against the youngsters and where we begin to like him more.
‘The retirement party for Detective Chief Superintendent ‘Farmer’ Watson had commenced at six.’
The Falls
B
efore we move on to
The Falls
, there is a very important thing that we’ve just highlighted: the breakthrough novels in the series – the ones that have become benchmarks along the way, taking the author and character to new heights. Rankin considers
Strip
Jack
to be the first of those, then perhaps
Let It Bleed
with its introduction of the three-pronged plotlines. Then there is
Set in Darkness
? The interesting thing is, the novels that follow all of these are the ones that truly make the difference:
The Black Book
,
Black and Blue
and
The Falls
, then later
Fleshmarket Close
and
The Naming of the Dead.
Rankin enjoys tackling themes but not necessarily
pushing the boundaries. So he manages to do it by default. The decisions to use real-life locations and pubs in
The Black Book
with the new characters was the first big break, then the refinement of the three-pronged plotlines and real-life case in
Black and Blue
, followed by a true, open-ended, macabre Edinburgh story…
‘The wind howled chilly and with a mournful cadence through the funnel-like
closes, up the winding high street and round the castle rock, raising wavelets on the dull Nor’ Loch and shaking from the creaking trees such withered leaves as autumn had not taken long before.’
Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Plague-Cella
We’ve discovered that the dark, gothic history of Edinburgh is the strong backbone to Rankin’s work. All of this would culminate after Rebus’s final novel
in the series,
Exit Music
, with his first – ‘and last’ – graphic novel, the Gaiman-like
Dark Entries
(Vertigo, 2009).
Dark Entries
was a horror/fairy tale that Rankin said took him ‘full circle’, as he started out writing comic books as a child. It was also proof of Rankin’s fascination with the macabre, which is highlighted strongly in the Rebus series.
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One of the finest boogie tales in the
series is
The Falls
. It ranks alongside
Mortal Causes
and
Fleshmarket Close
in its ability to mix the history of Edinburgh, the unseen present-day city, and a hint of fairy-tale darkness.
‘Like a lot of my stories,
The Falls
started with a bit of serendipity,’ Rankin explained. ‘Around the time of the opening of the Scottish parliament, there was some international media interest. There was a
French TV crew in Edinburgh. They wanted to interview me and ask me a few questions about the parliament. I agreed and they suggested that we do the interview in the new Museum of Scotland, which had recently opened. When I got there, a curator was waiting to take us up to the place where we could film, and he said to me, “You should write something about the Arthur’s Seat dolls,” Now Arthur’s Seat
is a big hill in Edinburgh and I can see it from my front window, but I told the curator that I had never heard of the dolls. He went on to tell me that they were on the fourth floor of the museum and I should go and see them, but I didn’t get a chance that day. I did the interview and went back home.
‘It started to niggle me. I thought, I don’t know what he’s talking about, so I went back to
the museum a few weeks later and found the dolls. There are about seven or eight of them left but there were originally 17. They are wooden dolls, four to five inches long, dressed in clothes and inside well-made, tiny wooden coffins. They were found in a cave at Arthur’s Seat by some kids in 1836 and of course nobody knows what they were doing there.
‘Now during the whole series of books I’ve
been trying to talk about the hidden Edinburgh, the Edinburgh the tourist never sees, but here was a bit of Edinburgh
I
didn’t even know about and a beautiful, open-ended mystery, which I could use as a storyline.
‘All of this happened some time ago and it just sat in the back of my mind until I worked out how I could use it. And then I got the idea of a girl being abducted, a little coffin being
found in the present day and, to solve that crime, Rebus had to go back and solve the original crime, or at least give some explanation as to why the dolls had been left there.’
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The story of the dolls was perfect and reminded Rankin of another piece of serendipity that had occurred with the writing of one of his previous books in the series,
The Hanging Garden
: ‘When I was living in France
I went to a place called Oradour-sur-Glane. It was a place where a real-life atrocity was carried out by the 3rd Company of the SS Das Reich regiment. It was about 40 or 50 miles away from where I was living and the village has been kept exactly the same since the atrocity occurred. An entire village. A thousand people. There is a stationary tram and then the church where the Germans killed all the
women and children. There are bullet holes in the walls and it is such a powerful place. I felt such a feeling of injustice because nobody went there and nobody was brought to justice.
‘Well, the problem was how could I [incorporate] that in a novel set in modern-day Edinburgh. And it took me two or three years and then suddenly I thought, Wait a moment – what if there was an alleged Nazi war
criminal in Edinburgh, and Rebus is alerted to this and has to decide a) is it the guy and b) if it is, is it worth prosecuting? And it brought in all kinds of moral questions. Then I moved back from France and found that there was an alleged Nazi war criminal living in Edinburgh, who was extradited to Lithuania to stand trial for his crimes – serendipity, as I told you!’
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And a touch of Frederick
Forsyth too maybe (a la
Odessa File
), but the story is a good example of how a true story can wait for discovery and then have a relevance and impact on modern-day events and people.
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Rankin is very focused on the here and now and the technological advance of the world appertaining to the Police Force. As I mentioned earlier, the Rebus series was written in real time across a 20-year period
when many technological advances were made, and this gives the series an added importance.