WATCHING THE DETECTIVES:

John Rebus

Rather be the Devil, by Ian Rankin

384 pages, Orion

Review by Pat Black

Rebus is off the force, but still on the case, in Rather be the Devil.

There were fears that when the inspector finally turned in his warrant card, we’d seen the last of him. But as he nudges his golden years, Rebus still likes to carry out inquiries in his own way – it’s just that while in retirement, he isn’t exactly following the letter of the law. He never did anyway.

I will admit that I found Rebus hard to get into at first. The first three novels in Ian Rankin’s long-running series were okay, but nothing special – it was only when I got an omnibus edition featuring Let It Bleed, Black And Blue and The Hanging Garden that I recognised how good they had become.

Black And Blue – which sees Rebus going after Glasgow’s true-life serial killer Bible John, while a copycat murderer stalks Edinburgh – is one of the finest modern Scottish novels, period. Twenty years after that Tartan Noir landmark, Rankin’s books are enviably smooth, fine-tuned machines. The lesson for muggles is: You do something for long enough, and you enjoy what you do, then you will get good at it. You might even become the best.

This is the 21^st Rebus novel. I felt Rankin painted himself into a corner by having his inspector age in real-time, but he’s sticking to it, and even using time’s relentless work as a means of opening up new and interesting territory. Now retired, in his sixties and not in the best of health, Rebus spends his time looking into old, unsolved cases.

One of these dates from the late 1970s, and concerns Maria Turquand, the wife of a wealthy businessman who was strangled in Edinburgh’s Caledonian Hotel on the same night a big touring rock band was in town. There were lots of suspects, but little evidence, and the killer was never caught.

The case gnaws at Rebus. So does something else – an intrusion on his lung, subject to tests. Rebus calls this Shadowy internal foe Hank Marvin, and refers to it almost affectionately, but he’s worried about it. After a lifetime of cigarettes, bacon rolls, real ales and neat Scotch, a series of health kicks are under way for this classic central belt male. He attempts a diet, he’s canned the booze and the ciggies, and he’s even flirting with exercise in step with a new pet dog – but you get the feeling that horse has all but disappeared over the hill.

Rebus speaks to a fellow former cop who worked on the Turquand case, who is now earning pin money as a bouncer. The day after their chat, the retired policeman bobs up in the Water of Leith, quite dead, totally murdered.

Next up, Darryl Christie, a young pretender to “Big Ger” Cafferty’s gangland throne in Edinburgh, has been given a solid beating. This raises fears among Police Scotland’s finest that the two men’s armies might be gearing up for a turf war. Like Rebus, Cafferty is more or less retired, but suspicion comes the ageing Mr Big’s way - despite the fact that known flake and troublemaker Craw Shand has confessed to carrying out the doin’.

We’re not finished yet. There’s another plotline, concerning a businessman connected to Christie who has disappeared, along with a big chunk of cash which the police suspect was being laundered for some shady people from former Soviet territory.

Closing in on thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, we seem to have gone back to using eastern Europeans as a trope for “indescribably bad people” in fiction. Is this racist? It’s certainly a cliché. I’ve done it myself, I have to confess. “Aw naw – it’s McGlutsky! The baddest comrade in town! You’ll know him by his hard consonants!”

It’s not on the same level as the “yellow peril” racism of Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless (is the latter the green peril, in fact?), but it rests in the same wall-mounted unit. Next thing you know, we’ll be worrying about hard Glaswegians. We have to be wary of cliché, and that’s true of big or small writers, whether they’re producing candy floss or filet mignon. I guess Sax Rohmer and others had no idea how terrible their work would appear to readers 100 years later (though they caused a fair stink at the time).

Before the Wall came down, a very wise teacher of mine said in response to a gag someone made at the expense of the Soviet Union: “It’s all propaganda. Focus on the people.”

In Rankin’s defence – and my own – Russian and Ukrainian gangsters  exist, all right, and dirty money and power linked to property owned by people from these places are an issue in British society; no doubt about that either. We might blame capitalism at this point, assume a sage expression, and withdraw.

Looking after the Darryl Christie and dirty cash inquiries are Malcolm Fox, last seen haunting Police Scotland’s internal affairs department, and series stalwart Siobhan Clarke, a detective working at the recently unified force’s Gartcosh nerve centre with a team who don’t take kindly to newcomers.

I have to admit, at one point I was struggling to remember what the Gartcosh team were supposed to be investigating.

Ian Rankin has stated that he doesn’t write these stories to a detailed plan – reasoning that if he can fool himself, he can fool the reader. In some of the older books, this haphazard method really shows. Hide & Seek, his second novel, was a 200-page search for a plot, rather than a series of clues for Rebus to follow in order to solve a mystery. In this, an old observation about the series comes into play: that they’re not really crime novels, more of an anatomy lesson dissecting Scotland’s dark, divided heart. I wondered at the time if Rankin knew himself where he was going with it when he started writing; it seems not.

Now, though, the books are tightly and convincingly plotted. If Rankin truly does just wind himself up and go, carrying all this stuff in his head, or discovering it as he travels, then it’s a remarkable skill. Any one of the plot strands in this book would have made a decent case alone. Rankin untangles this spaghetti junction of storylines and protagonists with a deft hand.

Deliciously, Rebus and Fox don’t really get on. The internal affairs guy is a straight shooter, while Rebus rarely colours inside the lines. Fox is also easy to wind up, which Rebus mercilessly exploits. However, Fox is an excellent copper, and the two men recognise each other’s strengths, and help each other out. Clarke, while certainly no mother hen, keeps the pair of them in line. Fox and Clarke are also fond of each other, and there’s surely a situation brewing there.

The principals are all compromised in some way. Rebus is almost pally with Ger Cafferty, his crime lord nemesis. This put me in mind of Smiley versus Karla in John Le Carre’s work – there’s a bit too much respect on the part of the good guy, whereas the baddie will simply do the dirty without any hesitation. In order to bring down Cafferty for good, Rebus will surely have to sink to his level. Elsewhere, Fox is badly exposed by a family member with a problem, while Clarke has been caught on camera after getting out of control on a night out.

Rebus has a few things to worry about as his clock begins to run down – chiefly “Hank Marvin”, lurking somewhere in his chest cavity – but he’s still the same snarky, natural-born Scottish cynic we’ve all grown up with.

The former inspector is a curious character. I sometimes forget that he is meant to be a tough guy, having joined the police after leaving the SAS. But I never think of him as the type to bust heads or get into scraps, even when he does.

Rebus is actually a flyman – crafty, full of tricks, outsmarting people first and foremost because he enjoys it. Someone you can’t really trust. Rebus seems more of a natural thief or mountebank than a policeman or a guardian. He’s closer to Craw Shand than Ger Cafferty, on the masculinity spectrum.

Everything ties off nicely, and (a curious effect you get with e-readers that don’t give you a percentage count) the book seems to finish all too soon despite being a good length.

It’s an excellent read. Fans will be well pleased. There’s a new one of these every year – with another due out in a matter of weeks, in fact. What more can you ask for?

WATCHING THE DETECTIVES:

DCI Tom Barnaby

The Killings At Badger’s Drift: A Midsomer Murders Mystery 

by Caroline Graham 

288 pages, Headline

Review by Pat Black

True story: A few years ago, my then-girlfriend moved into a nice block of flats in a pretty market town.

She hadn’t yet got her parking permit for the site, but left her car in an unmarked open bay the night before moving in. She wanted to quickly double-check everything was in order on the itinerary – you know, no bodies sprawled in the lounge, no gold bullion packed into the cupboards, no ancient burial chambers lingering under the bed. This task took her about 10 minutes.

When she got back to her car, she found that someone had placed nails underneath the front tyres.

No parking permit, you see. Not the done thing, dear. If you should get a double puncture, crash and hurt yourself, why, that’d be your own bally fault, wouldn’t it?

Malice in pleasant, even twee settings is a staple of the English murder mystery, and Caroline Graham’s first Midsomer Murder is absolutely packed with it. The Killings At Badger’s Drift introduces us to DCI Barnaby and his sidekick, Troy, as they investigate the suspicious death of an elderly lady who was out looking for a rare bloom in the woods around the titular village.

The lonely eccentric, Miss Simpson, stumbles upon something naughty in the great outdoors that the two participants would rather she hadn’t.

Barnaby’s initial suspicions are proven correct when the post-mortem shows that Miss Simpson was poisoned with hemlock.

We are introduced to a full cast of suspects, all with deep and sometimes deadly secrets. There’s a local rich bloke in a big house, preparing to marry a beautiful young woman far too hot for him; there’s a louche, snobby artist who lives in an unlocked cottage out in the woods; and there’s a bizarre mother-and-son duo who creep everyone out. Could the late Miss Simpson’s friend, Miss Bellringer, a competitor over botanical curiosities, have anything to do with it? And what about the death of the disabled aristocrat’s previous wife, shot dead in a hunting accident?

It’s all connected of course, in an engaging puzzle beautifully designed to catch out people who don’t pay close attention, like me.

The story wasn’t quite as cosy as the initial murder leads you to believe. While death by hemlock is very Golden Age, there’s a subsequent murder that’s much more Video Nasty. If I was Barnaby I’d have checked Jason Voorhees’ movements on the day of the killing.

In fact, Jason would happily live in Midsomer (or Badger’s Drift, in this first story in the series; “Midsomer” was invented by Anthony Horowitz, who first scripted the TV adaptation). A peaceful, bosky setting would suit Jason to the hem of his hillbilly killer dungarees, and his distrust of strangers and barely concealed psychosis would also fit like a glove.

A leather glove, unscrewing a lightbulb, in the middle of the night.

Like the first Morse mystery, this story is grubbier than expected. It seethes with lust, infidelities and sleaze. Even the sober, no-nonsense DCI Barnaby finds himself in a local brothel as part of his inquiries – complete with a classic “he made his excuses and left” gag.

Barnaby is from the Adam Dalgleish stable of sturdy, reliable and somewhat priggish English policemen. You can trust him; he commands great authority and lets his temper escape now and again, and you can bet the hapless uniformed coppers around him jump to the beat, on the double.

He seemed more like a former military man, a good Tom who attended Sandhurst or similar and blusters through life, expecting everyone he encounters to snap to attention at his every utterance. I can’t be sure I liked him, or at least, I can’t be sure I’d have a pint with him. I’d have a pint with Morse any day of the week, and I can see myself sharing a mint julep with Poirot somewhere smart and shiny, my collars clean and my hair slicked into a brutal centre parting. But Barnaby’s a perfect fit for the series; the type of guy you would want guarding you as you sleep.

Not literally, like. You know, standing over your bed, and that. That’d be odd.

The most interesting element in the book was how Barnaby and Troy interact. The sidekick role is a thankless one in detective stories, probably starting with Dr Watson. They get their time in the spotlight, and the odd chance to save the hero or shoot the bad guy, but they are doomed to live in the shadow of their intellectual superiors. This can be done in a subtle fashion, with give and take between the principals and even a sense that the underling might be the better man (like Morse and Lewis), but it’s overt in this story.

This was refreshing – similar to how Barnaby appraises a frank, opinionated woman he interviews in this story. He likes a bit of that. It can be energising to meet someone who doesn’t mince words or motivations, every now and again, Barnaby muses.

But not all the time.

Troy is young, naïve and actually quite thick. He’s not bad in a tough situation and he’s an excellent driver, but Barnaby can barely conceal his contempt and basic dislike for the detective sergeant. Troy tries to impress his more senior colleague, but quite often makes the wrong call or leaps to the wrong conclusion – giving Barnaby a chance to play a stronger hand and show him up.

I pitied Troy. He was every greenhorn who ever tried to flex their muscles, only to be swatted aside.  Most of us have been there…

Here’s hoping he gets a better crack of it in later books.

Like many fictional detectives who made a successful transition from the page to our tellies, it’s difficult to dissociate Graham’s Barnaby from the one who became familiar to millions, played by John Nettles. The actor – who first found fame as another TV detective, Jim Bergerac – even provides a foreword to this story. You can probably find Nettles’ performance as Barnaby somewhere on the schedules to this very day. Although he’s long left the role, the show goes on (Tom Barnaby retires, and is replaced by his cousin – John Barnaby… how Parish Council can you get?). It’s been running for 20 years, there’s a new series on its way, its popularity is undimmed, and it will most likely overtake Taggart as the longest-running detective drama on British TV.

There is much cosiness in the setting – perhaps that intriguing blend of sweet and sour is Midsomer’s secret recipe? We’ve all wished we lived in a chocolate box village at some point in our lives, usually after we hit 30.

During a tough time in the past, I once surprised myself by blurting out: “Ye know, just one night, I wouldn’t mind sitting in my jammies with a takeaway and watching Midsomer!”

Despite the bodies hitting the ground every 200 yards or so, you’d settle for life in the village. There’s something comforting in Barnaby’s return home to his beautiful house after a tough day interrogating suspects. He has some comfort food, and rests his head on the bosom of his super-nice/bad-cook/perfect-homemaker/amateur-dramatics-every-Tuesday wife. I can relate to that.

Er, I’m not saying I want to nuzzle his wife, I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea… I guess some couples are cool with it, though, strange things can and do go on in nice quiet villages, you better believe it… but you see what I mean.

Midsomer’s also a big hit around the world. It’s shown in 200 countries. Do they watch it in China? Iran? Borneo? Lapland? What is it they like about it?

I reckon people dig that clipped, precise, calculated English malice. It’s so proper. Evil, but perfectly-presented.

A self-diagnosed cultural expert with lots of unsolicited opinions on writing once said to me: “Don’t waste your time writing detective stories. Everyone writes them.”

Correct. But everyone reads them, too.

WATCHING THE DETECTIVES:

Inspector Adam Dalgliesh

Cover Her Face, by PD James

288 pages, Faber & Faber

Review by Pat Black

What do the English do better than anyone else? That’s a question for our age.

I’ll start the bidding with “country house murder mysteries”. Cover Her Face, PD James’ debut in the Inspector Adam Dalgliesh series, is a perfect example of the genre. It was first published in the early 1960s, but its spiritual home is England between the wars.

The novel’s basic framing follows an exact template for this type of story. There’s a country manor; there’s a well-to-do family; there are secrets, lies, animosities and jealousies; of course, there is a body; and then, an inspector calls.

A maid for the Maxie family, Sally Jupp, has been murdered in her bed. She was strangled in the night, but it seems she was drugged first. It looks as if the killer could only have gotten in and out via a window. There’s little evidence to go on, but Scotland Yard’s man, Inspector Adam Dalgliesh, is sure of one thing: the killer was someone staying at the house that night.

There’s a fair cast of characters to choose from, within and without the Maxie family, all with a motive for killing the young, unmarried mother. There’s number one son Steven Maxie, the doctor, who proposed to the girl the night before she was killed - to everyone’s surprise. There’s his sister, Deborah Riscoe, nee Maxie, who confessed to hating the girl because “she has a child, and I do not”.

There’s Mr Maxie, the family patriarch – confined to his bed, but is he as much of an invalid as he seems? Then there’s Martha, the no-nonsense housekeeper who takes a dislike to the beautiful intruder on her patch. Felix Herne, a rakish, sardonic figure and friend of the family who was tortured by the Gestapo during the war, was also staying there that night. He’s so memorable and stylish, and so involved in the investigation, I imagined that he might have been the detective in an earlier draft of the story. Nigel Havers would have been a good bet to play him on the TV, at any stage of his career; Hugh Grant actually did play him in a radio adaptation.

Beautifully, there’s even a vicar, Mr Hincks. With this addition, you feel as if you’re reading a novelised version of Cluedo. These beats are so familiar that they’re cosy. This is a book to curl up with in your dressing gown as you sup a nice hot cocoa, despite its central subject of foul murder.

However, PD James writes in deadly earnest; this is no pastiche or parody. For the first few chapters she outlines the family and other satellite suspects, establishing motive and opportunity for the crime. The story really catches light when Adam Dalgliesh appears on the scene. He’s tall, dark and handsome, but also douce and somewhat humourless. What the inspector might lose in charisma he makes up for in method. Dalgliesh always has control.

There are sly moments – particularly the part where some of the characters make inquiries of their own, taking on the role of investigator as they try to clear up the various mysteries and sub-plots connected with the crime. Whose ladder was left outside the dead girl’s window? Who was the mysterious man seen hanging around the house during the village fete earlier that day? Why did Steven Maxie propose to a girl he hardly knew? And does the unknown father of Sally’s baby have anything to do with her death?

There’s also something I’ve noticed in many detective novels – a part where one or more of the characters dismiss some theory or other as being unrealistic, as if it was part of a whodunnit. “This isn’t some silly crime novel,” they say – resisting the urge to turn and wink at the camera, no doubt.

At the top I asked what the English could do better than most. Ironically, Dalgliesh has a very similar name to a Scottish footballer who was arguably the most famous of them all in the 1970s and 80s: Kenny Dalglish. Just as with the spaceman Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dundee United’s tough-tackling midfielder of the 1980s and 90s, it’s hard to resist drawing parallels between the two similarly-named heroes. So I won’t.

Like his near-namesake, who was famous in the shirts of Celtic and Liverpool, Dalgliesh shields the play well, before spinning and dispatching his finish with lethal accuracy. But unlike Kenny Dalglish, the inspector is a bit of a tart – calling all the suspects into the manor house’s drawing room, at eight o’clock sharp, perfectly punctual and precise, in order to outline exactly who killed Sally Jupp, and how.

The full cast list of suspects awaits judgement on plush cushions, with Dalgliesh orchestrating great tension, shifting suspicion several times before providing the answer. It’s so cute, like how a kid would stage the final act of a murder mystery. This is precisely how I’d have executed the denouement when I was 11.

Dalgliesh calmly throws back all red herrings, exposing and discounting motives and alternative theories. By the time he finally identifies the killer, we are made to understand that they are the only person who could have done it. Logically, there was no other conclusion. If you’ve paid close attention and filtered out the extraneous noise, you’ll know this. I’m happy to say I didn’t guess the killer, but I’ve come to understand that to dedicate serious thinking time to a mystery story is to spoil it a little, even to risk disappointment, like peeking at your Christmas presents.

Cover Her Face is as much of a machine as it is a story – a perfectly planned and constructed engine, making for a very smooth ride indeed. In a sporty little MG, I imagine, brand new, racing green, buffed to a glassy sheen. For a debut novel, PD James’s command of her craft is enviable.   

WATCHING THE DETECTIVES:

Kurt Wallander

Faceless Killers

by Henning Mankell

304 pages, Vintage

Review by Pat Black

The first Wallander story, Faceless Killers, appeared in 1991, but its themes might have dated from the past fortnight.

The Swedish inspector’s first published case is a murder at a remote farmhouse, which sees an elderly man and his wife battered and garrotted by one or more intruders.

The only clue is revealed in the chilling opening chapter after a kindly neighbour realises the couple haven’t followed their usual routine, and arrives just in time to hear the dying wife’s last word:

“Foreigners.”

Heading the police inquiry is Kurt Wallander. Try not to roll your eyes, now (or eye, if you only have one): he’s in crisis, his wife having left him, and his daughter – who survived a suicide attempt - doesn’t speak to him. He drinks, and sometimes gets in his car afterwards. He is perhaps not best suited to such a high-pressure, responsible job.

Hmm. Any character tics or foibles? Yep, of the Morse-y variety: he listens to opera on cassette tapes.

I’ve noticed Scandie Noir detectives are bang into their pastries and coffee, and Wallander is no exception. At time of writing, this doesn’t half put me in the mood for pastries and coffee. I imagine the writers, tucking into pastries and coffee as they type – about pastries and coffee - chuckling as they imagine their readers also tucking into pastries and coffee, or wishing they could. It is a curious metaphysical symbiosis, akin to someone reading Bukowski poetry about getting blootered in a pub, composed when he was blootered in a pub, while they themselves are getting blootered in a pub.

Wallander is horrified by the crime. It’s seemingly without motive, and there are no witnesses. But matters take an even more sinister turn when the dying wife’s last words are leaked to the public.

In the context of the story, Sweden has been taking in refugees in great numbers, and this has already caused tensions among the established population. So the idea of “foreigners” coming to Sweden and slaughtering an old couple ignites nasty, white supremacist tendencies.

Wallander is warned in a series of anonymous phone calls that “something will be done soon unless you catch them”. Something is done – first, a cardboard village is torched, and then a black refugee is executed at random, in cold blood, his head blown off with a shotgun.

So our hero has two major inquiries to sort out – the double killing at the farmhouse, and then the asylum seeker’s shooting – and all while his boss is on holiday.

The late Henning Mankell wrote this book as a response to similar tensions affecting Sweden in 1990. Their parallels with the present day are all too clear.

Mankell was aghast at the racism which emerged in Sweden in response to the influx of refugees. At the same time, he advocated controlled immigration, rather than doors flung open to just anyone. On the face of it, that’s a common sense approach - except I’m not sure that the latter scenario marks the actual truth. “They’re just letting anyone in” sounds a bit like a myth spewed out at the pub by a boozed-up farmer who doesn’t live within five miles of anyone non-white – and he’ll tell you he still thinks Brexit is a good idea, while he’s at it.

Whatever the case, this is a view that Wallander shares, and makes explicit in the book.

His investigation, much like any real-life inquiry, is a methodical, logical process; speaking to witnesses, finding discrepancies in stories and tracking down Persons of Interest. Wallander is led down a few blind alleys, but by and large he follows reasoned steps to find his killers. He even gets a couple of action scenes - one while on stakeout, another as he chases down some bad guys.

I liked the procedural element. There are few if any credibility-stretching leaps of logic disguised as insight, and a wilful rejection of the guess-the-killer card game of most whodunnits. With detective stories, there’s a constant tension between a realistic depiction of police work and the need to create an engaging puzzle. Wallander is more on the side of the nitty-gritty than many of his contemporaries.

Wallander also tries to seduce his district’s new chief prosecutor. She’s a young, ambitious woman who rattles his cage with her attitude – read “competence” – before haunting his daydreams. He is punching well above his weight, here. It comes across as some last-beer-in-the-crate fantasy of a middle-aged, bang-out-of-shape man; the delusion that the good looking woman in the office wants his body.

It seems doubtful that anyone would want Wallander’s body - he is a mess, dishevelled, hung over most of the time, just about clinging to the cliff-face of life. Why a married, accomplished woman would want to get mixed up with someone who screams “loser” at you from a long way off is anyone’s guess, but we probably all know cases where this has happened.

This encounter was problematic as Wallander initially forces himself on her. He does, thankfully, take no for an answer, but even at a gap of nigh-on 30 years, I think he’d end up in trouble in real life for this. Eventually, though, he succeeds.

Maybe I’m a little bit too uptight on this score. Perhaps it’s all down to that mythologised Scandinavian openness over matters of the flesh. I once asked a Swedish person I studied with if this tabloid aspect of his national character had any basis in truth, and he assured me it did. Well, you would say that. There are some national stereotypes that people enjoy living up to. Like if you had a national trait that championed hard drinking or proficiency at violence; some folk would rather this assumption was made about them on first impressions than not.

Whatever the case, I thought Wallander was a wee bit out of line.

There are some fascinating side-characters, including a hard-working lieutenant who does a lot of the spade work for Wallander. This was true to life, as real murder investigations can use dozens of officers making hundreds of inquiries, and not just one maverick gumshoe on his own, eating pastries and drinking coffee, on a hangover.

I was intrigued by Wallander’s father, who lives on his own and suffers from dementia. I felt sure there was Meaning to be found in the old man. He’s an artist, famous for painting the same scene and figures, over and over again. The old boy, who lives alone, has taken to downing his paintbrushes and wandering off into the background, in one case vanishing for a day before the authorities pick him up.

Wallander is worried sick for his dad, and knows the time will come when a hard decision must be taken.

Should we read something into this? Should we see a more romantic notion of Swedish life and society grown corrupt, become sad and dysfunctional?

Even if you choose to read nothing into it, Wallander’s first case is worth checking out.