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It’s
late on a lost afternoon and the bijou Oxford Bar, a stone’s throw
from the asset managers and strippers of Edinburgh’s Charlotte
Square, is crowded. A
coven of middle-aged suits are supping intently in the bar that’s
been described as “a Scout hut for the over 30s”.
The “Ox”, boasts one of its regulars, is the only bar that
has an “emergency entrance”.
It is also one of several howffs frequented by John Rebus, the
hard-drinking, soft-boiled detective created by Ian Rankin, who has
also been known to drop in and partake of a glass or two, consequently
transforming the unprepossessing bar, with its fading prints of Robert
Burns and walls “the colour of a used cigarette filter”, into an
unlikely tourist attraction.
In
response the Oxford now has its own website, www.oxfordbar.com,
which offers a virtual tour of it’s cramped premises, highlighting
the pie machine (“built circa 1950”), “dead man’s corner”
(immediately below the Expelair fan) and the back room (“home from
home to a noteworthy journalist of an Irish persuasion”), which has
the seedy charm of a waiting-room in a derelict railway station. In his early novels Rankin restyled it the Sutherland Bar,
evoking in Hide And Seek, published 10 years ago, shades of the
contrary publican Willie Ross, whose whims included barring women and
Englishmen and anyone else he didn’t like the look of.
“No hot meals and no sandwiches,” Rebus is
told when he inquires after the lunch menu. “A pie then,” begs Rebus, “anything.
Just to wash down the beer.”
The barman is unimpressed. “We’re not a chippie,” he says. Rebus makes do with a bag
of egg, bacon and tomato crisps and packets of peanuts.
A
similar story, perhaps apochryphal, is told about a prominent QC who
breezed into the bar demanding the bill of fare and was promptly led
out into the street, whereupon he was asked by Ross to read the pub
sign. “Oxford Bar,”
said the nonplussed QC, plummily. “So where the f*** did you get the idea it’s a
restaurant?”
Rankin
no longer hides the Oxford Bar behind a pseudonym. In The Falls, his latest novel, he even allows Rebus to
savour a corned beef and beetroot roll and a Scotch egg, washed down
with a pint of IPA, a sure sign of more enlightened times. He has also contributed the beginning of a story for the
website: “The Fat Man was sparked out on the floor of the back
lounge. The Oxford
bar’s cleaning woman (yes, there is such a thing: you can trust me)
had found him when she arrived at nine that morning.” So life and fiction ineluctably merge, an ongoing dialogue
between Rankin, Rebus and Edinburgh, “a city of appearances and
division”, as the critic and novelist John Lanchester noted, “a
place of almost structural hypocrisy.”
Over
the course of a dozen or so novels and the past 14 years, Rankin has
become as synonymous with Edinburgh as Scott or Stevenson. From Knots And Crosses onwards, Edinburgh has developed as a
character in its own right, from the Aids capital of the world to a
born-again capital of a rejuvenated nation, “a schizophrenic city,
the place of Jekyll and Hyde sure enough, the city of Deacon Brodie,
fur coats and no knickers”. For
Rankin, defining Edinburgh is an obsession to which he returns again
and again, as if trying to nail down the real Edinburgh into
which the tourist buses never trespass; Wester Hailes, Oxgangs,
Craigmillar and the sink estate “Pilmuir”, an unholy fusion of
Pilton and Muirhouse.
The
past is ever present for Rankin. For brooding DI Rebus the city is a palimpsest, layer upon
layer of stories, which will eventually surface like hidden corpses. In The Falls, for example, the clue to the disappearance of a
young student is found at the Museum of Scotland where the so-called
Arthur’s Seat coffins are kept, found by children playing in a cave
in the 1830s. There were
17 coffins in all, eight of which survive. For Rebus it is another opportunity to dwell, as he does often,
on the bodysnatchers Burke and Hare. The latter testified
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against the former, who was subsequently
hanged and his body dissected. Burke’s
skin was used to make a pocket-book which can be seen in the museum at
Surgeon’s Hall. In Set In Darkness, Rankin’s 13th Rebus novel, a
body is found behind the fireplace at Queensberry House, the 17th
century building which is to be incorporated into the complex at
Holyrood which will house the Scottish parliament. Thus Edinburgh’s “bloody past” is grimly excavated.
Edinburgh’s
– and Scotland’s – inherent and eternal contradictions fuel
Rankin’s fiction. Most places can claim the cliché of contrast but
there are few places where they are so obvious as here. At times Rankin seems to overplay it, but who can blame him?
In a culture where extremes – Highland-Lowland,
Protestant-Catholic, Old Town-New Town, junkies-judiciary – are
always clashing, the material for a writer whose meat and drink is
crime and punishment is irresistible. Rebus himself is a mass of contradictions, “a believer
outwith his belief”, a Christian without a church, a man revelling
in Edinburgh’s duality. It
may be the 21st century, with women on top and G and T an
acceptable order in the Oxford, but for Rebus it is still essentially
the city that bred the idea of Jekyll and Hyde, of yeasty draughts and
unlit closes.
Rebus
first appeared in Knots and Crosses, published in 1987. His name was well-chosen, meaning “an enigmatic
representation of a word or name by pictures punningly representing
parts of the word, as in a puzzle or coat of arms”. It is the key to many of the mysteries which envelope Rebus
and is nowhere more pertinent than in his debut when he is on the
trail of a killer of young girls. However, the detective does not seem to have realised the
significance of this himself since he depends on an English literature
professor at Edinburgh University to point him in the right direction.
Taking
the first letters of the victims’ christian and surnames, the name
of the killer’s next target is spelled out: Samantha, the name of
Rebus’s 11-year-old daughter. It
is the first of several terrors she must suffer because of her
father’s job. By The Falls, she has just managed to get out of a wheelchair
and moves around with the use of crutches. She is now 24; who knows what further injuries Rankin has in
store for her.
But
that’s par for the course in a series which matures as it endures. Certainly, it would appear that Rankin did not intend initially
to produce a Morse or a Frost, let alone a Holmes or Watson. Before he wrote Knots And Crosses he was the author of just one
autobiographical novel, The Flood, set in his home kingdom of Fife and
published by Polygon in 1986 when he was 26. It had its origins in a short story which, Rankin said,
“raged out of control” about a teenage boy living in a Fife
village and dreaming of escape to Edinburgh. He gave it to his father, who dutifully read it then went back
to his James Bond and Where Eagles Dare.
It
made him think about what kind of a writer he wanted to be. Literature with a capital L seemed to limit his audience so he
embarked upon Knots And Crosses, an update of Jekyll and Hyde set in
1980s Edinburgh. “My idea was: cop as good guy (Jekyll), villain as
bad guy (Hyde),” Rankin wrote in an introduction to the reprint of
the first three Rebus novels. “So I wrote Knots And Crosses. I was living in a room in a flat in Arden Street so my hero,
John Rebus, had to live across the road. When the book was published, I found to my astonishment that
everyone was saying I’d written a whodunnit, a crime novel. I think I’m still the only crime writer I know who hadn’t
a clue about the genre before setting out.”
Not
only were Rankin and Rebus neighbours, they also shared many other
traits; a love of beer and spirits, high-class hi-fi systems (Rankin
is a former editor of Hi Fi News) and prog rock (Hawkwind!). But
despite Rankin’s insistence of naivety, Rebus
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has inherited a
hinterland of hang-ups and personality ticks from a host of other
literary sleuths, including Philip Marlowe, William McIlvanney’s
Laidlaw and even STV’s terse Taggart. When we first meet Rebus he is 41, separated from his wife
Rhona and seeing DI Gill Templer, a press liaison officer. An archetypal loner who chain-smokes, drives when drunk and
rarely has a fresh pint of milk in the fridge, he is dysfunction
personified. Where he’s concerned, nothing is simple, from his
relationships to his religion. Furthermore, in order presumably to
help unravel a tortuous plot, his brother, Michael, is a stage
hypnotist like his father before him, a career for which there could
not be many openings in Fife.
In
The Falls, Rebus is 14 years older but no wiser. He is still single but no longer seeing Gill.
She is now DCI and his boss, he is a humble DI with a drink
problem and edging ever closer to retirement. The latest in a long line of female bit players is Jean
Burchill, a curator at the Museum of Scotland, who has yet to be
subjected to his Beggars Banquet album. His old HQ at Great London Road has been replaced by a faceless
block at St Leonard’s on the south side of the city. But while Edinburgh may be embracing a chrome-plated,
smoked-glass future, Rebus reeks of a nicotine-stained, amber-nectared
past, pacing his beat like a cartographer forever redrawing maps,
marking changes minor and major en route. “Edinburgh, Inspector,” one character comments in The Black
Book, the fifth Rebus novel, “turn your back and they change the
name of a pub or the purpose of a shop.”
Novel
by novel, Rankin has provided an incomparable insight into Edinburgh
life, few areas of which he has left untouched. He is also adept at picking up stories from newspapers and
elsewhere, embellishing and adapting them to his own requirements,
whether it’s the Bible John case, or the influx of heroin in the
northeast, or gang wars in the west, Loyalist paramilitaries, or the
Gecas war crimes case. If
Rankin is to be believed, Edinburgh and Scotland are rife with violent
crime, transformed when daylight fades and night falls, an easy divide
between good and evil.
“There’s
more happening in Edinburgh than anyone knows,” says Rebus in the
early pages of Knots And Crosses. In hindsight it sounds prescient, but the four-year gap between
the first and second Rebus novels suggests that Rankin was not yet
convinced that this was the direction he wanted to pursue. In fact, he dashed off two other books between 1987 and 1991,
Watchman and Westwind. The
key to Hide And Seek is in its epigraph –“My devil had long been
caged, he came out roaring” – which was taken from Jekyll and
Hyde. But only one
reviewer, said Rankin, drew the connection between “Hide” and
“Hyde”. It may be, of
course, it was too obvious and awful a pun to be worth pointing out.
But
while it’s clear Rankin was serving his apprenticeship as a crime
writer it’s also apparent that Rebus and his demons were growing on
him. Since then there has
been barely a year without a new novel. For many, the watershed was Black And Blue, published in 1997,
for which Rankin acknowledges a debt to Andrew O’Hagan’s The
Missing. From being a
cult author, revered by the crime cognoscenti, he was suddenly in the
bestseller lists, jostling with the likes of Jilly Cooper, who he
often cites as one of his favourite writers.
At one point, almost every book in the Scottish
top 10 bestseller list was by him, with a youthful John Hannah playing
Rebus on television and a £1.2 million advance for his next two books
nestling in his pocket, the rise and rise Ian Rankin is assured. Last month it was announced that he has found time to script
a TV series starring an Armani-clad detective who – brace
yourselves! – prefers skinny lattes to large malts.Whatever will they make of that in the Oxford Bar?
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