Category: ian rankin

BLACK BOOK and BLEEDING HEARTS by Ian Rankin

I’m reading so much of this for work that this is practically becoming a Rankin blog. I will name it Blankin. Or Rog

I recently reviewed KNOTS AND CROSSES, the first Rankin book, and here in BLACK BOOK Rankin the genre writer is firmly established. Detective Rebus no longer has too much of an inner life, or any gross sex scenes. Plot-plot-plot, that’s what we like. The aforementioned plot centres around a fire in a hotel, the guilt felt by the perpetrator, and the attempt by Rebus to pin the fire on its instigator, local tough and long term nemesis Ger McCafferty. Bizarrely, Rankin still finds a role for a paedophile in this story. He is seriously well into paedophilia. Curiously Rankin also talks repeatedly about how pretty this fourteen year old girl is who has a minor role in the plot. Let’s not think about it.

BLEEDING HEARTS was written under the nom de plume Jack Harvey. Apparently the Rebus books were taking only three months to write (what a surprise) so Rankin decided while living in bucolic splendour in France, to write mainstream thrillers also. In this one the story cuts between a first person narrative (of the baddie, I think we are supposed to find this innovative), and a second person narrative of the detective hunting him (a fat New York private eye). There is a cult involved, and a stupid twist where the victim turns out actually to have hired the SPOILER ALERT assassin herself in order to commit suicide.

If you skipped everything since SPOILER ALERT as you are thinking of reading this book, I advise you to think again. There are long lists of gun types, and poorly drawn cult members, and worst of all our thirty five year old assassin is pursued by a twenty two year old beauty who is totally and unbelievably sexually confident and bizarrely interested in this weird old man who has obvious psychological problems.

What boggles my mind is how MANY books I have by men in their thirties and forties that feature heroes in their thirties and forties being pursued by nymphs in their twenties. I mean, seriously, wouldn’t you be embarrassed to publish such obvious wish fulfillment?

KNOTS AND CROSSES by Ian Rankin

I’ve read a number of Ian Rankin’s crime novels, which are all set in Edinburgh and feature Detective John Rebus as the central character. When I say, a number, I mean a LARGE number, and all have been read for work.

They are not as totally rubbish as most crime fiction.

KNOTS AND CROSSES was in fact Rankin’s first Rebus novel, and it is therefore interesting to read it last. Apparently, according to the author, he was attempting to write a modern Jeckyll and Hyde, and not a genre crime novel at all. This is odd, as in some ways it couldn’t be more genre:

-its about the murder of little girls (yawn)
-it features a hard drinking detective (sigh)
-it gets stupidly personal at the end (please)

In other ways however, it’s not especially genre. Rebus has complex emotional issues, and a full inner life, for example. For a while you are even supposed to think that he might be the murderer. He has a family life, he has gross sex scenes – he has all sorts of fallabilities that the Rebus of the later books, the genre Rebus, really does not.

It’s as if the hard inner seed of a genre writer is in the book, and it wants out. Rankin was a Literature Phd when he wrote it, and you can see it; but the genre writer is there, just waiting to cut himself out of all his early grad student constraints.