Ian Rankin & Inspector Rebus (7 page)

In
Hide and Seek
we find that Rebus is slow at writing to his daughter Samantha, something which must have affected the girl as she has decided to write to him less often as a consequence. Rhona – his former wife – is a painful memory. He doesn’t want her to find out that his recent relationship with Gill Templer has failed and that
he had been promoted to Gill’s level: Detective Inspector.

But is all of this anything to do with the real message of the novel?

The children’s game Hide and Seek was the inspiration for Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. Rankin, like Stevenson, wanted to imply that the face hidden behind the hands of the childhood game was the sinister alter ego.

Rankin thought the comparison was obvious and perhaps
it was to anyone doing their PhD in literature. Nobody, however, noticed or cared too much! ‘Each book I publish is another small failure,’ Rankin has recently said and with the public ‘not getting’ the connection between
Knots and Crosses, Hide and Seek
and
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
, Rankin seems vindicated in this belief.

It’s not that he didn’t put enough clues in the text. There
are quotes from Jekyll and Hyde throughout
Hide and Seek
; Rebus actually reads the book at one point. Heriot Row – Stevenson’s childhood home – is referred to, a suicide note is a quote from Henry Jekyll’s counterpart, character surnames from Stevenson’s novella – Poole, Enfield, Carew, Edward
and
Hyde, Utterson (a lawyer no less!) – are used throughout. But there is more going on than that. As
Knots and Crosses
would doff its cap to Scottish literature past, so would
Hide and Seek
, taking on fellow Scot Conan Doyle’s Holmes, Watson and even Stapleton (from
The Hound of the Baskervilles
).

In so many ways
Hide and Seek
was a re-write of
Knots and Crosses
but that was fine, because what Rankin was achieving with these two books was a breaking down of the tourist veneer of Edinburgh. He
was exposing the crime, deprivation, hardship, blood, sweat and tears behind the tourist trap of the castle area and Princes Street. He wanted to show the Hyde of the city – not an individual person – behind the Jekyll and clearly it would take more than one novel to do that. In fact, it took the whole Rebus series to scratch the surface. It is – in retrospect – as though Rankin was attempting one
perfect novel that would encapsulate Edinburgh and become his contribution to the great Edinburgh novels, in his eyes those being
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
,
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
,
Heart of Midlothian
and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
What he failed to realise was that his contribution was a whole series of books that built in stature and each within it chipped away at
the tough veneer that had grown up around Edinburgh throughout the 20th century: Hogmanay, the Edinburgh Festival – even G8 (but more about that later).

‘Hyde’s Club. Named after Robert Louis Stevenson’s villain, Edward Hyde, the dark side of the human soul. Hyde himself was based on the city’s Deacon Brodie, businessman by day, robber by night. Rebus could smell guilt and fear and rank expectation
in this large room.’

Hide and Seek

Rankin’s Rebus series was his Edinburgh-based version of Anthony Powell’s
Dance to the Music of Time
. Characters jump in and out of Rebus’s life through the string of books as easily as in Powell’s. We even have a character, Rian, who Rankin tells us, was the same character who appeared in
The Flood
. So even the books outside the series help people Rankin’s
fictional world of John Rebus.

Apart from possibly friends and family, nobody would identify any of this in Rankin’s work to begin with. Maybe this niggled him slightly at the time – especially the Jekyll and Hyde aspects, which he laboured on – but he had alienated many readers in higher education through Rebus in
Hide and Seek
: Rebus had a strong dislike of graduates who came into top jobs
not knowing their arses from their elbows. The contradiction here is that Rebus didn’t make it through the ranks himself, as he admitted to character Tony McCall!

McCall is a fellow inspector and kindred spirit: he has the ingredients for a failed marriage in the making to complement Rebus’s already divorced status.

Even though Rebus is only in his mid-forties in
Hide and Seek
, he is almost
isolated from his daughter Sammy (Samantha), at odds with his ex-wife Rhona, and bad in bed with his ‘girlfriend’ Rian. He is unfit, unkempt and frankly a bloody shambles, but still he manages to star in a further 15 novels, two anthologies of short stories and one novella (20 books in all). But still – in 2009 – Rankin will say, ‘There’s some unfinished business.’ So the complex John Rebus still
lives and breathes somehow: he hasn’t killed himself off yet!

Rebus is the catalyst of Rankin’s fame but more importantly he is the city guide who helps Rankin explore his fascination with Edinburgh and no other guide will do. In a way, Rebus is the Grim Reaper of the city: once he has exposed enough of it, the facade begins to crumble and the inner degradation is exposed in a much more comprehensive
way than
Trainspotting
(because it has developed over a whole series).

I get the sense that Rankin is searching for the perfect Scottish novel to complete his canon, but he probably won’t do it because he writes on too big a canvas. That is not a criticism, it’s an observation based on the amount of books he has written trying to expose the
real
Edinburgh.

His fascination for the city and, ostensibly,
for the Scottish people as a whole, has made him more inward-looking but perhaps that’s OK because he is the only person doing it. He is the only person chipping away at the veneer, the only person doing it in an engaging, semi-academic way and assisting students as readily as writers and teachers once assisted him. He remembers where he comes from and this is ingrained into him.

If I overanalyse
his first two Rebus novels for a moment, I would suggest that there is some guilt regarding the friends he left behind in Cardenden when he escaped to Edinburgh University, and that part of that guilt is featured in every Rebus novel: ordinary people in ordinary lives who are unfairly treated. In a bizarre way, Rankin evokes the moral scruples of Charles Dickens: a young man made good who has
the poor and destitute voices firmly in his head and heart. OK, maybe I’m pushing the analogy a little too far but I like to think that I’m at least half right on this point. There is an affiliation there, maybe not even that – an awareness, at least. When I asked him what he liked about Scotland, the first thing he told me was ‘the people’ and that is very telling. He is in every sense of the phrase
a ‘people person’.

‘As a child, he had stolen from shops, always throwing away whatever he stole. Ach, all kids did it, didn’t they? … Didn’t they?’

Hide and Seek

I do feel that the rough, working-class teenage years Rankin endured forged a socially aware novelist in his soul, a person we wouldn’t perhaps accuse Rankin of being until at least
Let It Bleed
and the breakthrough novel
Black
and Blue
. These two novels, along with
A Question of Blood
and
Fleshmarket Close
form the heart of his darker, angrier, inner voice. They are more politically and socially aware. To continue the Dickens analogy, they are his
Hard Times, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend
and
A Tale of Two Cities
.

So in summary:
Knots and Crosses
and
Hide and Seek
, although they were never intended to be the start
of an important series of Scottish literature, were the perfect foundation to build upon. In retrospect, Rankin would have made Rebus younger than 40 to begin with but, if he did, perhaps readers would not have loved the character as much, for the angry young man is not always as endearing as the complex, grumpy 40-something John Rebus became.

At the end of
Hide and Seek
Rebus is disillusioned.
Corruption is rife throughout the powerful and influential in Edinburgh and ordinary people – good people – have been hurt deeply – permanently. So Rebus writes out his letter of resignation but tosses it towards the bin as Gill Templer knocks on his door. Does she want to get back with her ex-lover? He hopes so but as time will dictate, he will be disillusioned once again, the corrupt will continue
to rule the city and he will continue to play his own small part in trying to thwart them. The sad fact is, by
Exit Music
, Rebus understands that he’ll never beat the system or the city, realising that he was just another cog in the huge mechanism that is human life.

‘To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching
books.’

The Secret Teachings of All Ages

R
ebus’s story continued with
Wolfman
, a book that became an interesting breakthrough novel for Rankin, for he would write about London instead of Edinburgh. Why was that? Simply,
Wolfman
was written in London in 1990 and would take on influences from Rankin’s current surroundings. He moved to a maisonette in Tottenham in 1986 with his wife, where they would stay until 1990,
when they moved to France for six years.

Rankin needed a steady job and applied to become a hi-fi journalist. He knew nothing about hi-fi but he could write, so suddenly he was letting everyone know what hi-fi to buy! When he talks about the job now he makes it sound mundane, and perhaps it was, but it was still writing, and to practise a little journalism wasn’t a bad thing.

According to Rankin’s
diary, he started
Wolfman
on 11 March. ‘I’ve started, half-heartedly, a new Rebus novel… it’s going to be called
Wolfman
, if it ever gets off the ground.’

His sense of apprehension comes from the fact that he knew he had a lot of research to do before getting the book off the ground. That said, the London setting allowed him to use common Scottish words and introduce them to a London audience,
as Rebus would find England’s capital city difficult to get to grips with. Conversely the unsympathetic London coppers have trouble with the accent, not to mention their own prejudices against ‘the Jocks’. If Rankin endured this prejudice himself when in London is not clear; suffice to say he lacks sympathy with the city throughout the novel.

Wolfman
is significant for other reasons, too. It’s
the first outing – albeit in cameo appearance only – of Morris Gerald Cafferty, the gangster who rules Edinburgh. ‘Big Ger’ would start making his name in the Rebus series from
The Black Book
onwards, to the extent that he took on Professor Moriarty significance – always there to tease Rebus (not always from the foreground) as he makes his investigations.

With
Wolfman
set in London, one could
suggest that Rankin was writing outside his comfort zone, but he had lived there for a few years before starting to write the book and had left for France before final proofs and publication. More significantly,
Wolfman
was challenging for Rankin because the book was about a serial killer – the Wolfman of the title – and it therefore developed into Rankin’s most graphically horrific title as a
consequence. His editor at the time thought the book would benefit from a few cuts, so the horror aspect was played down, or rather left to the reader’s imagination. Rankin complied and learned a very important lesson as a writer: letting the suggestion of horror play on the reader’s mind.

Wolfman
was a commercial novel because Rankin wrote it to try and break into the massmarket. On publication
of the book he would proudly claim that he was now a ‘professional author’. Couple that with the fact that he had recently won the Chandler-Fulbright Fellowship Prize in America, where he was sponsored to spend approximately six months, and things were looking good for the young man. Then, when life couldn’t get any better, Rankin’s wife Miranda announced that she was pregnant with their first
child.

With his confidence building, Rankin pushed the character of Rebus in
Wolfman
a bit further, as he told me: ‘I didn’t know Rebus at all in book one – he was really only a means of leading the reader from one place to another. By the end of book two, I felt maybe he was going to be around for longer than I’d intended, so book three allowed me to flesh out his character. By this time, I’d
also grown in confidence as a writer, so I stretched myself a little, and some of this went into the character.
³⁸

We do get a few more nuggets of character description regarding Rebus in
Wolfman
. At one stage he is regarded as tall. His chin is a little saggy for a man in his early forties, but he does have a strong handshake. He doesn’t have a very muscular chest. His gut and backside have taken
the weight, not his chest and arms. Also, he has a strong personality. In
Wolfman
he gives as good as he gets from the London Police Force and never lets his focus slip from the hunt for the serial killer.

‘Her job had become merely that: a job. Maybe one day Rebus would feel the same way. But he hoped not.’

Wolfman

The above line sums up all of Rebus’s heartache. He always gets totally
immersed in the seriousness of the cases he works on and, because of that, he loses every other aspect of his life: wife, child, less serious friendships, and becomes an alcohol-loving, junk-food-consuming, rock ‘n’ roll victim. Maybe that’s going a bit too far, but was it all worth it, particularly when we note that Rebus has ‘more ambition than ability’? Also Rebus has baggage from his brief army
career; one can appreciate that drink kept many of those haunting demons at bay but he’s still a workaholic.

‘… a quarter to five, everyone in the outer office had already quit for the day, but Rebus hardly registered the fact. His mind was elsewhere.’