John Rebus Read online

  John Rebus

  A Mysterious Profile

  Ian Rankin

  I

  “Male hero (a policeman?)”

  That was my first note to myself, dated March 15th 1985, about the character who would eventually become Detective Inspector John Rebus. I was twenty-four years old and a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh. I was living in a shared apartment with two other (female) postgrads in Arden Street. I’d been in the city six-and-a-half years, and still I couldn’t fathom the place. My doctoral thesis was concentrating on the novelist Muriel Spark, and through her I was beginning to investigate the Edinburgh of the imagination. In Spark’s most celebrated work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Brodie is a descendant of William Brodie, a real historical character. Brodie was a deacon of the city, a councillor, cabinet-maker and a man who lived a double life. Respectable and industrious by day, by night he led a masked gang into the homes of his victims, robbing them of their valuables. Brodie was trying to fund his lavish lifestyle (including a couple of demanding mistresses), and had diversified into lock-fitting, meaning he had little trouble gaining unlawful entry. When caught and found guilty, he was hanged on a scaffold he had helped to modernize as part of his daily profession.

  Deacon Brodie provided the template for another great character from Scottish literature, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Henry Jekyll. Muriel Spark was a huge fan of Stevenson, and my researches took me to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The idea of the doppelganger had been explored before, however, in James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, so I had to read that book, too. At the same time, I was becoming fascinated by contemporary literary theory, enjoying the “game-playing” aspect of storytelling. Eventually, I would name my own fictional detective after a type of picture-puzzle, and the mystery in his first adventure would be solved with the help of a professor of semiotics.

  That’s the problem with Knots and Crosses (and one reason I find it hard to read the book these days)—it is so obviously written by a literature student. Rebus reads too many books, and even quotes from Walt Whitman (a writer whose works he really shouldn’t have known). He is overly literate, perhaps because I didn’t quite know him. I was twenty-four and knew little enough of life outside the confines of academia. I certainly didn’t know what it would be like to work as a cop. The plot of Knots and Crosses demanded that Rebus be a seasoned pro, so I made him forty years old. He’s separated from his wife and has a young daughter. Really, this guy was unlike me in so many ways, and our one resemblance—that love of literature—made him less than realistic.

  It seems to me now that I wasn’t interested in Rebus as a person. He was a way of telling a story about Edinburgh, and of updating the doppelganger tradition. Knots and Crosses was self-consciously based on Jekyll and Hyde, just as a later Rebus novel, The Black Book, would use Justified Sinner as its starting point. The thing is, I’d always been a bit of an outsider/doppelganger, always tried to present several faces to the world. I’d grown up in a fairly tough neighbourhood—a town of 7,000 inhabitants—which had existed only as a hamlet and a couple of farms until coal was discovered at the start of the twentieth century. That’s when my grandfather shifted the family east from the Lanarkshire coalfields. Homes were constructed quickly (and cheaply) to house the new labor force. There wasn’t even time to think up names for the streets, so they just got numbers instead. My dad (the youngest of seven) didn’t work down in the mines, but all his brothers did. By the time I came along, however, the coal was running out. The klaxon which signalled the start of each new shift fell silent one day, and that was that. Not that I took much of this in, being too busy living a completely separate life inside my own head.

  There was another world in there—a fantastical world filled with spaceships and soldiers and constant thrilling adventure. In winter, I’d pretend that my bed was an Arctic encampment—which wasn’t so far from the truth. There was heating only in the livingroom downstairs, and in the winter months I’d wake up to a thin film of ice on the insides of my windows. But even that ice seemed strange and wonderful to my young imagination. I’d be under the thick blankets with a flashlight and a good supply of comic books—British and American. Soon, I was even making my own versions, folding sheets of paper and slitting the edges to make little eight-page booklets which I would cover with doodles and drawings—more spaceships, more soldiers. I think I remember showing one of my creations to my mum, who seemed bemused. Maybe she’d spotted something I hadn’t: an absolute lack of artistic ability.

  Not that this mattered, because by the age of twelve I was moving from comic books to music. I’d started buying chart singles and reading pop magazines. I was decorating the walls of my room with posters. A friend’s older brother opened my ears to Frank Zappa, Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin. My mother agreed to buy me a Hendrix album for my birthday, although this meant a terrifying sortie to the “hippie” record shop in nearby Kirkcaldy. As with comic books, however, I wasn’t interested in being a mere bystander—I wanted a band of my own, and created on paper what was impossible in real life. My alter-ego was vocalist Ian Kaput, and he was joined by guitarist Blue Lightning and bassist Zed ‘Killer’ Macintosh (plus a drummer with a double-barrelled name, but I forget now what it was). The group was called the Amoebas. They started off playing three-minute pop hits, but eventually graduated to progressive rock—their masterpiece lasted twenty-six minutes and was called Continuous Repercussions—and I was with them all the way, writing their lyrics, designing their record-sleeves, planning their world tours and TV appearances. I’d make up a top ten (albums and singles) each week, which entailed the creation of another nine group, and so it went.

  I’m conscious now that what I was doing was “playing God,” re-imagining my world and making it more exciting and evocative than the reality. It’s what all writers do, and already I was starting to feel like a writer. My parents weren’t great readers, and there were few books in the house, but I was drawn to stories. I would haunt the town’s library, and soon started borrowing “adult” titles, meaning books whose films I wasn’t old enough to see at the cinema. At age thirteen, I was reading Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. By fourteen it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I also came across Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft books (and would eventually give Rebus the forename John as a nod to ‘black private dick’ John Shaft). I checked the TV schedules to see if there were any programs about books and would watch them, deciding that I really needed to read this guy Solzhenitsyn (I ended up struggling through volume two of The Gulag Archipelago). Later on I would fail to finish Dante’s Inferno but be thrilled by Ian McEwan’s first book of short stories.

  My best subject at high school was English. I always enjoyed writing essays (which were in effect short stories). One was called “Paradox” and concerned a man who seemed to be president of the United States but later turned out to be an inmate in an insane asylum. My teacher liked it but wondered why I’d chosen that particular title. It was the name of a Hawkwind song, I told him, and I just liked the sound and look of the word.

  “And no, sir, I’ve no idea what it means.”

  For another essay, we were given the phrase “Dark they were and golden-eyed” and told to use it as our starting point. I wrote about two parents searching a house filled with drug addicts, seeking their errant son.

  Words were a passion of mine. I would do crosswords, and flick through the dictionary, noting interesting new words (including, after the exchange noted above, “paradox”). And those song lyrics for the Amoebas had become poems, one of which I entered for a national competition. It was called “Euthanasia” (another of those great-sounding words
) and was runner-up. When my success was noted in the local newspaper, my parents learned for the first time that I was writing poetry. I hadn’t dared tell anyone until then. (Later, I would learn that Muriel Spark’s first publication had also been a prize-winning school poem.)

  I’d always been a successful chameleon, playing the part of fitting in. I hung around the street corners with the tough kids. I played soccer (badly) and had a bicycle. But when a rumble started, I’d be on the periphery of the action, taking it all in without getting involved. When I went home, I’d head for my bedroom and write poems about the fights, the booze, the first sexual fumblings, and then my notebook would go back underneath my bed, hidden from view.

  II

  Okay, so I’m seventeen now, and I want nothing more than to be an accountant.

  See, nobody in my family has been to university, but it seems I’m brainy and it’s expected I’ll go. And if you’re working-class, you go to university to escape your roots—to get a good career: doctor, lawyer, dentist, architect …

  I had an uncle in England, and he owned his own house (unlike my parents) and had a flash car (neither of my parents could even drive). Our summer holidays were spent at seaside resorts in Scotland and England, or in a cramped trailer twenty miles north of my hometown. My uncle always seemed to have a tan from foreign holidays. He was the most successful man I knew, and I wanted the same for myself.

  Problem was, I wasn’t very good at economics. And I was growing to be ever more in thrall to books and to writing. I’d cranked out a couple of “novels” (probably twenty pages long, scribbled on jotters stolen from my school). The first was about a teenager who feels misunderstood so runs away from home and ends up in London, where he is ground down by life before eventually committing suicide. The second was a retelling of Lord of the Flies, set in my own high school. It was starting to dawn on me: why the hell was I thinking of going to university to study a subject I had no real interest in? I broke the news to my parents and watched their shoulders sag. They were in their late fifties by this point, not too far from retirement. What, they asked, would I do with a degree in English? It was a fair question.

  “Teach,” was all I could think to reply.

  I started looking at possible universities. St. Andrews was the closest, but I liked reading modern American and British novels, and “modern” at St. Andrews meant John Milton. I knew this because I’d asked. Edinburgh, however, had a course in “American Literature,” so I applied there and was eventually accepted. How well did I know the city? Hardly at all. I’d lived all my life about twenty miles north, but the family seldom ventured that far. I remember being taken to see a stage version of Peter Pan, and my mother once took me to the castle and a children’s museum. In my last couple of years at high school, I’d made occasional Saturday-afternoon forays with friends. But we would always stick to the same route, taking in all the available record shops, one radical bookshop (where porn, under the guise of “art books,” could be perused), and a couple of pubs where the bar staff had decided we weren’t underage enough to pose a problem. Arriving in the city in October 1978 as a student was terrifying and exciting. The university had been unable to provide me with accommodation, so I was sharing a room with a school pal in a motel on the outskirts. I was quick to join the Poetry Society and Film Society; quick, too, to discover new pubs, live music venues, and strip-bars. I’d also joined a punk group (as singer and lyricist), so had found a new outlet for my stanzas. And I was on the receiving end of a slew of rejection letters from magazines and newspapers.

  The Poetry Society held weekly meetings. Hormonally-charged young men (all the poets seemed to be male, the audience fifty-fifty) would recite odes of love lost, love unrequited, love from afar. My poems were a bit different. A typical opening might be:

  Mutated machine-guns patrolling the subways

  While glue-sniffing kids hang themselves in lift-shafts …

  I had another poem called “Strappado” (a form of torture) and yet another telling the moving story of a husband who strangles his young wife on their honeymoon. Where was this stuff coming from? Why was I writing lyrics about addicts and killers and crucifixion? I can’t find anything in my early life to justify this apparent interest in the bizarre and the demonic. I even had an alter-ego, a drifter called Kejan, who cropped up in several poems and who would usually be drinking absinthe in Paris or traversing the stews of Alexandria:

  A foreign body in the bloodstream of Berne,

  Kejan tips the remnants of tobacco

  From the pack onto the paper,

  His breath scattering the flakes

  Onto the floor

  To lie wriggling in the draught.

  Kejan needs some air …

  None of this, it goes without saying, was helping me get laid.

  But I did get to meet a lot of “real” writers for the first time in my life. The Poetry Society had funding to bring one professional poet to do a reading each week, and afterwards we would all go for a drink or nine, during which time the poets would attempt to sell us copies of their books and pamphlets while we’d be asking questions such as “How do I get published?” I soon learned that most poets don’t make a living but have to supplement their income with other work. I wondered if the same was true of fiction-writers.

  My poems were far from the Wordsworthian ideal of “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” They were narratives. My characters went places, and did things, or things happened to them. (There were always consequences.) I started writing short stories, influenced by Ian McEwan, Jayne Anne Phillips, and anyone else I happened to be reading at the time. I was trying to find out two things: what I wanted to write about, and how to do the actual writing. It took me a while to realize that the thing I really wanted to write about was enveloping me and embracing me every step of the way and with each and every breath I took.

  It was Edinburgh itself.

  III

  This is a haunted city. For centuries it was haunted by the memory that it had once been a thriving capital before signing that status away to London. It’s a city rife with ghost-tours. Its cemeteries teem, and there are myriad streets, tunnels and caves just below ground level. It’s a city that hides itself away from the world. In the past, whenever invaders called, the denizens would scurry underground, emerging once the triumphant armies had tired of taking possession of what appeared to be a ghost-town. The city the tourist sees, even today, is far from the whole story. Edinburgh is also home to a bloodstained history. Burke and Hare were serial killers who posed as grave-robbers, slaughtering at least seventeen victims before being brought to justice (after which Burke’s skin was crafted into a series of gruesome souvenirs, some of which can be viewed in the city’s museums).

  There were stories of well-respected citizens who had confessed to devil-worship, of a coach driven by a headless horseman, of covenanters executed and witches burnt. By night, the teenage Robert Louis Stevenson would creep from his home to consort with harlots, poets and ruffians in the seediest bars he could find …

  The more I looked at Edinburgh, the more I learned. The city is geographically divided—the mazey Old Town to the south of Princes Street, the rational and elegant New Town to the north. The journey the young Stevenson took from one to the other was the journeying of Jekyll towards Mr. Hyde. But was that particular Edinburgh a city of the past? Not really. In October 1977, a year before I’d arrived as a student, two teenage girls had vanished after a night out. Their last sighting was in a bar called The World’s End. Their bodies were found the next morning. For more than two decades, their killers went undetected. Edinburgh’s students knew that there really was a “bogey man” out there; we didn’t need the frisson provided by ghost-tours and the like.

  Contemporary Edinburgh and the city of the past collided in my imagination. I was living in the 1980s but reading about Miss Jean Brodie (set in t
he Depression years of the 1930s), Jekyll and Hyde, and the Justified Sinner. The Edinburgh I walked through by night seemed to have changed very little. There was a heroin problem, a housing crisis, and HIV was on the horizon. There was bitter rivalry between the city’s two soccer teams, spilling over into weekend violence. Go-go bars would eventually be replaced by lap-bars; we all knew that Leith had the red-light district, but that the saunas were also something more than they seemed. I’d started listening to a lot of music which would later be classified as “goth”: Throbbing Gristle and Joy Division and The Cure. My imagination was darkening all the time. I was sleeping till noon and staying up until 4:00 a.m. I was writing, reading, writing, reading and then writing some more. My short stories had titles like “The Suffering,” “Confession,” “The Violation of Mr Paton,” “Pig” and “Isolation.” I’d finished my degree but applied to do a Ph.D. with Muriel Spark as the subject. Her stories were filled with supernatural elements, gothic settings, harsh satire and devilry. But she was such an elegant, subtle and concise writer that often critics chose not to notice the darkness lying just below the shimmering surface of her prose. I was learning from her, too.

  One day, I got a letter telling me I’d won second prize in a short-story contest run by the Scotsman newspaper. They would print the story and give me some cash. It was called “The Game” and concerned the last day in the life of a shipbuilding yard. (I’ve no idea where that came from, either.) Around the same time, another story was accepted for publication by New Edinburgh Review magazine. Two more were taken by the BBC to be broadcast on radio. A story about a cop patrolling a soccer game was going to appear in a collection called New Writing Scotland. In August 1984 I won a story contest organized by a local radio station. Peter Ustinov presented me with my prize.

  Bloody hell, I thought. It could only be a matter of time before my first novel found a publisher.