Ian Rankin's 'Complete Rebus Stories': Satisfying, tight, entertaining
Ian Rankin published his first John Rebus novel in 1987, and the Scottish crime fiction writer's 20th, Even Dogs in the Wild, is due out in the United States next year. Until the appearance of that saga - which will also feature colleagues Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox, along with the can't-stay-retired detective Rebus himself, Rankin fans have this trove of 31 stories.
The Complete Rebus Stories
nolead begins By Ian Rankin
Little, Brown. 597 pp. $35
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Reviewed by
Dan DeLuca
Ian Rankin published his first John Rebus novel in 1987, and the Scottish crime fiction writer's 20th,
Even Dogs in the Wild
, is due out in the United States next year. Until the appearance of that saga - which will also feature colleagues Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox, along with the can't-stay-retired detective Rebus himself, Rankin fans have this trove of 31 stories.
The oldest story in The Beat Goes On dates to 1990, and one of the newest, "Dead and Buried," which kicks off the collection, is set even farther back, in the mid-1980s, when the not-yet-grizzled Rebus is still finding his way as a young detective. A would-be mentor tells him most police work takes place in uncertain areas as gray as a November Scottish sky: "See, being a cop isn't about just getting to the truth - it's knowing what to do with it when you arrive. Making judgment calls - some of them at a moment's notice."
Throughout The Beat Goes On, we see Rebus making those calls in sharply observed, economically written stories that often wrap up more quickly and neatly than do Rankin's character-driven novels. Still, the cumulative effect is to fill in, in satisfying fashion, Rankin's portrayal of the world-weary, obsessive, and ultimately lovable Rebus, always as keen to solve puzzles as his name indicates.
These stories also give Rankin the chance to deepen his rendering of Edinburgh throughout the calendar year. There's a killing at the late-summer Fringe Festival and crimes in the holiday season, with titles like "No Sanity Claus" (a title inspired by a Marx Brothers routine), giving Rebus the opportunity to brood amid Christmas cheeriness.
In the novella included here, "Death is Not the End" - a title nicked from a Bob Dylan song - a missing-person inquiry takes Rebus back to his small-town beginnings to mull what might have been. It was later reworked into the novel Dead Souls.
Other stories experiment with narrative, sometimes starting off in a criminal's voice, for instance, before Rebus enters the frame. "The Passenger" works as an homage to Edinburgh novelist Muriel Spark, and "A Three Pint Problem" refers to the number of ales in the Oxford Bar it takes Rebus to get to the bottom of a puzzle, a nod to Sherlock Holmes' three-pipe habit.
For Rankin fans used to a regular diet of Rebus, this collection makes up for the year off the author took after the 2013 novel Saints of the Shadow Bible. For the uninitiated with short attention spans interested in sampling one of the finest crime fiction practitioners going, it's an excellent place to start.
Dan DeLuca is The Inquirer's music critic.
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@delucadan