A QUESTION OF BLOOD
An Inspector Rebus Novel
By Ian Rankin. Little, Brown & Co. 406 pp. $22.95
Ian Rankin's latest Inspector Rebus novel starts with the incorrigible John Rebus in even hotter water than usual -- he's in a hospital with severe burns on his hands. He says he scalded them when drawing a hot bath -- an explanation that even his friends find laughable -- but there is a darker scenario in view. A burglar named Fairstone had been stalking Rebus's dear friend Detective Sgt. Siobhan Clarke, and one night Rebus went to the stalker's apartment for a chat. The problem is that not long after Rebus left -- with, he insists, his host drunk but healthy -- someone tied the fellow to a chair and set the place on fire. Even those who know and love Rebus fear the worst, and he is suspended from duty pending an investigation.
Meanwhile, a horrific crime has shocked Edinburgh. A veteran of the Special Air Service, an elite commando unit, has invaded a private school, where he shot and killed two teenage boys and wounded a third before taking his own life. Although Rebus is officially suspended, he manages to play a major role in the investigation. Since he once served in the SAS, his colleagues hope Rebus can help explain the why of the killings. One theory is simply that SAS combat training left the shooter a human time bomb waiting to explode -- and some of Rebus's colleagues fear he's another.
Between Rebus's investigation of the school shootings and the department's investigation of Rebus, Rankin has an abundance of plot to spin, and he does so with his usual skill. But it is not plot alone that has made Rankin one of England's most popular crime novelists. This series's strength starts with Rebus himself, who after 14 novels has emerged as the baddest of the bad boys of modern crime fiction. He is fiftyish, overweight, alcoholic, a chain smoker, surly, short-tempered, divorced, estranged from his family, a loner, a nut about obscure rock-and-roll groups, hostile to all authority and possibly psychotic. Needless to say, women love him -- ladies love outlaws -- and his police colleagues tolerate him because he's an ace detective.
Rankin does not write easy books. To follow this novel's plot we must keep straight 15 or 20 characters who are significant pieces of the puzzle; fortunately all are nicely sketched. Besides Rebus, the most important of them is Siobhan Clarke, who is some 20 years his junior. In the three Rebus novels I've read, she's been his friend but not his lover, although that never seems out of the question. Mostly she wants to learn police work from him, and she plays a maternal role in his life, now and then cleaning up his filthy apartment and in this novel driving him about, lighting his cigarettes and otherwise helping him cope with hands that are bandaged and painful in the extreme.
Last week I spoke of the smooth narrative in Peter Robinson's new novel. I wouldn't call Rankin's narratives smooth -- gritty, ragged and unruly are words that more readily come to mind. Rankin has texture. He is a hungry writer -- he soaks up the world around him in all its ugliness, absurdity and occasional beauty and spews it out at us. He's one of those writers like Whitman or Dylan who reach out and try to embrace everything and don't worry about occasional loose ends.
Here's a more or less typical paragraph from "A Question of Blood," as Rebus and another detective set out on a trip:
"Dawn had brought milky sunshine to the capital, but Rebus had known it wouldn't last. The sky had been too hazy, blurred like a drunk's good intentions. Hogan had decided they should rendezvous at St. Leonard's, by which time fully half of Arthur's Seat's great stone outcrop had vanished into the cloud. Rebus doubted David Copperfield could have pulled the trick off with any more brio. When Arthur's Seat started disappearing, rain was sure to follow. It had started before they reached the city limits, Hogan flipping the wipers to intermittent, then to constant. Now, on the M74 south of Glasgow, they were flying to and fro like the Roadrunner's legs in the cartoon." You could cut that paragraph and not lose a thing as far as plot is concerned. Yet that rich, offhand mix of weather report, humor, local color and pop culture is part of what makes Rankin distinctive.
I lent this novel to a friend whose tastes run to Joanna Trollope and Anne Tyler, plus the occasional mystery by one of the grand dames of English crime fiction. "Is this one of your violent guy-books?" asked my skeptical friend. Turned out she loved the novel -- the humor, the sarcasm, the "atmospherics," the way Rankin uses musical tastes to delineate character. Rankin does write violent guy-books, of course, but with such skill that anyone who appreciates good writing should enjoy them. It is odd and unfortunate that he has not yet achieved a following here equal to the one he enjoys in the United Kingdom. "A Question of Blood" is the most impressive of the Rebus novels I've read -- it can certainly bear comparison with the best of today's American crime writing -- and, for those who have not yet met the inspector, it's a good place to start.
