Ian Rankin, “Dead Souls”

I’ve come rather late to the Inspector Rebus series for someone aspiring to write a mystery novel. With “Dead Souls” I’ve also managed to start at the wrong end - it’s the tenth in the series, and it’s extremely good. I’ll certainly hunt a good deal more Ian Rankin off friends’ bookshelves, out of libraries and - dammit - pay for it when I must.

In some ways this may seem a “typical” traditional detective novel (that is, one not solely concerned with serial killers and forensic science). It’s certainly bleak. It features a male detective, estranged from family and lovers, just about fending off alcoholism and haunted by dead friends. Rebus is short-tempered and a hard man who pulls some rather vicious stunts to get at those who breach his code. It also has that detective fiction staple: a strong sense of place. A bleak, parochial post-coal-industry Edinburgh rises from the page, the cliffs of Salisbury Crag and Arthur’s Seat brooding over the novel from the outset.

Rebus, though, is a good deal more than an identikit clone of the hard-boiled detectives whose stock has little varied or improved since Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Rebus, as his name suggests, is an enigmatic cipher. He has a certain emotional complexity, and if his motives and changes of heart are at times a little opaque to the reader, they are to Rebus as well. He grows in the course of the novel - something Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, already complete, would never have done. Rebus’ growth, though, is not a Hollywood revelation - it is incremental. He starts the novel effectively unable to communicate with his lover, by its end he is doing a slightly better job. His views on a convicted paedophile move from the visceral to a fractionally more sophisticated ability to see him as human, though still repugnant.

However, his rather homophobic treatment of a person who is probably an accessory to manslaughter complicates my sympathy for him. His actions though do not always receive the approval of his close colleague Siobhan Clarke, and her silent censure is sometimes implicitly that of the author.

The novel concerns a few of the age’s criminal preoccupations: runaways, multiple murderers, and paedophiles. It’s also prepared to take a fairly long hard look at those who abuse children (in any sense), and abusers who were themselves abused as children. Its themes are very much concerned with how we are shaped by our past, by our parents – perhaps even our genes. Still, this is very much a detective’s view of the world: historical, working backwards from completed events to discover causes.

With such themes it is hardly surprising that a sub-plot concerns Rebus’ attempts to locate the missing son of a high-school girlfriend, someone who represents the road not travelled. There is also a convicted multiple killer being deported from the United States back to Scotland, a man who is also seeking a brutal reconciliation with his past. Then we have the past sins of convicted paedophile being visited upon him again, while in the background a prosecution is under way into abuses committed many years ago in a children’s home. Rankin teases these plot lines along, letting them develop and tantalisingly crisscross as the book unfolds. It is deft, experienced craftsmanship, the effect is compelling and often sinister.

The hook that really caught me was the opening sequence: a first-person prologue from a suicide about to leap from the cliffs at Salisbury Crag - a man with an unparalleled and final view of the city which Rankin and Rebus know well.