The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories (Rebus Collection) (62 page)

Rebus, too, is composed of words – millions of them – so you might think that by now I’d have got to the heart of what makes him tick, but he continues to surprise me, which is perhaps only apt for a man whose name means ‘puzzle’. For twenty years now, he’s been living inside my head, but sometimes it feels as though I’m the one living in
his
. When a psychoanalyst interviewed me at a book festival a while back, he wondered if Rebus represented the brother I never had, or maybe the life of adventure which I was never going to allow myself to lead. Both my parents had served in World War Two (my father in the Far East). One of my two sisters married a Royal Air Force engineer and spent much of her life thereafter travelling the world. As a kid, I once wrote to the Army asking them for information on joining up. But I was resolutely bookish, and all my adventures took place inside my head. Maybe the psychoanalyst had a point; maybe Rebus really is an extension of my own personality – doing all the dangerous stuff I’d be too scared to do, breaking rules and conventions, getting into fights and scrapes, and even coming up against the occasional deadly force. Some commentators have decided that
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
is a book about the creative process and the division between our rational mind and the darker fantasies which we keep hidden from view. In which case, Rebus would be my Hyde, acting as a force of nature, saying the unsayable, doing things I could never bring myself to do – even though I could (and can) all too readily imagine myself doing them.

Sir Winston Churchill once called Russia ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. I’ve found the same to be true of Scotland and Edinburgh.

And of Detective Inspector John Rebus.

Also by Ian Rankin

The Detective Malcolm Fox Series

The Complaints

The Impossible Dead

The Detective Inspector Rebus Series

Knots & Crosses

Hide & Seek

Tooth & Nail

(previously published as Wolfman)

Strip Jack

The Black Book

Mortal Causes

Let it Bleed

Black & Blue

The Hanging Garden

Death is Not the End (a novella)

Dead Souls

Set in Darkness

The Falls

Resurrection Men

A Question of Blood

Fleshmarket Close

The Naming of the Dead

Exit Music

Standing in Another Man’s Grave

Saints of the Shadow Bible

Other Novels

The Flood

Watchman

Westwind

Doors Open

Writing as Jack Harvey

Witch Hunt

Bleeding Hearts

Blood Hunt

Short Stories

A Good Hanging and Other Stories

Beggars Banquet

Plays

Dark Road (with Mark Thomson)

Copyright

AN ORION EBOOK

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Orion Books.

This ebook first published in 2014 by Orion Books.

Copyright © 2014 John Rebus Ltd.

The right of Ian Rankin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN
: 978 1 4091 5158 6

Orion Books

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper St Martin’s Lane

London
WC2H 9EA

An Hachette
UK
Company

www.orionbooks.co.uk

Further Copyright Information

‘Dead and Buried’ © John Rebus Limited 2013

‘Playback’ © Ian Rankin 1990 (first published in Winter’s Crimes 22, Macmillan, 1990)

‘The Dean Curse’, ‘Being Frank’, ‘Concrete Evidence’, ‘Seeing Things’, ‘A Good Hanging’, ‘Tit For Tat’, ‘Not Provan’, ‘Sunday’, ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘The Gentlemen’s Club’, ‘Monstrous Trumpet’ © John Rebus Limited 1992 (first published in A Good Hanging, 1992)

‘Talk Show’, ‘Facing the Music’ © John Rebus Limited 2002 (first published in Beggar’s Banquet, 1992)

‘Trip Trap’ © Ian Rankin 1992 (first published in 1st Culprit by Chatto & Windus, 1992)

‘Facing the Music’ © Ian Rankin 1994 (first published in Midwinter Mysteries 4 by Little, Brown and Company, 1994)

‘Talk Show’ © Ian Rankin 1991 (first published in Winter’s Crimes 23 by Macmillan, 1991)

‘Castle Dangerous’ Copyright © Ian Rankin 1993 (first published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, October 1993)

‘In the Frame’ © Ian Rankin 1992 (first published in Winter’s Crimes 24 by Macmillan, 1992)

‘Window of Opportunity’ Copyright © Ian Rankin 1995 (first published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 1995)

‘No Sanity Clause’ © Ian Rankin 2000 (first published in the Daily Telegraph, December 2000)

‘Death is Not the End’ © Ian Rankin 1998

‘Tell Me Who to Kill’ © Ian Rankin 2003 (first published in Mysterious Pleasures, Little, Brown & Company)

‘Saint Nicked’ © Ian Rankin 2002 (first published in the Radio Times, 2002)

‘Atonement’ © John Rebus Limited 2005

‘Not Just Another Saturday’ © John Rebus Limited 2005

‘Penalty Claus’ © John Rebus Limited 2010 (first published in the Mail on Sunday, 2010)

‘The Passenger’ © John Rebus Limited 2014

‘A Three-Pint Problem’ © John Rebus Limited 2014

‘The Very Last Drop’ © John Rebus Limited 2010 (written to help the work of Royal Blind)