Book review: Gamekeeper turns poacher as Rebus winds up in dock in Ian Rankin's latest novel

Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin’s fictional detective John Rebus is in the twilight of his career and the novels now have an elegaic, bittersweet quality.

Sat, 28 Jan, 2023 - 11:08

Catherine Kirwan

There's a shock for Rebus fans in the opening line of A Heart Full of Headstones: “John Rebus had been in court plenty of times, but this was his first time in the dock.”

As he’s remanded to HMP Edinburgh, albeit in an unshared cell and swapping stories with the prison guards, we take it that he’s not up for an unpaid parking fine on the Saab.

Whatever he stands accused of, it’s serious enough for him to be denied bail. And yet Rebus finds, “a simplicity to life in custody. Other people took the decisions for you”.

It reads like relief, and no wonder. In time, we discover just how bad his recent decisions have been.

From his first outing in 1987 with Knots and Crosses, and especially from the breakthrough Black and Blue in 1997, Rebus has been crime fiction’s North Star. But his light is fading and his health is failing. As a result, these later novels have an elegiac, bittersweet quality. The reader can’t help joining longtime former workmate and best friend Siobhan Clarke in recalling him as he once was.

Fear not, there’s life in the old dog yet. After an excursion to Scotland’s rural north coast in 2020’s A Song For The Dark Times, this novel sees Rebus back on the streets of Edinburgh in close combat with old adversary, Big Ger Cafferty, housebound and confined to a wheelchair but still capable of inflicting grievous harm. Cafferty asks Rebus to track down a former associate, to make amends for past wrongs supposedly. The reader doesn’t buy that story, and neither does Rebus, but he takes the job anyway. Or, perhaps, the bait.

Simultaneously, in intersecting storylines, Siobhan Clarke pursues a domestic violence case involving former policeman Francis Haggard, and Malcolm Fox, previously of The Complaints, continues his quest to root out dirty cops. Both strands connect to the notorious Tynecastle Station.

While Clarke is motivated by a strong sense of justice and, like her alter-ego Rebus, is incapable of leaving the job behind at the end of the day, Fox is more political, with his eye on advancement and how events will play out at Police Scotland HQ.

In addition, with Cafferty weakened, and Darryl Christie in jail, a new crop of organised criminals is filling the vacuum, taking advantage of opportunities provided by lockdown to explore new business models. And there’s Edinburgh, the series’ other lead character, as grizzled and grimy as you’d want it to be.

The plot is complicated, with a dizzying array of characters vying for our attention. Nevertheless, Rankin’s primary focus is clear. As stated in The Guardian recently, he believes that there are “big questions” for writers of procedurals: “in the current state of the world, how can you write about a police officer and make them the goody, when we look around us and see that so often the police are not goodies?”

So he puts Rebus in the dock, but to atone for whose sins exactly?

Rebus won’t go down without a fight, but the goalposts have shifted. Conduct once tolerated is being called out, previous actions reinterpreted.

Ian Rankin is as good and as relevant as ever, writing with renewed vigour as he holds his creation and, vicariously, himself up to scrutiny; inviting the reader to revisit the preceding books in the series with fresh eyes too.

We await the next Rebus novel with bated breath. And some trepidation.