No 16: The Rebus series by Ian Rankin
What are they about?
The 17 Rebus books written between 1987 and 2007 follow the sleuthing career of John Rebus as he solves a variety of murders mostly in and around Edinburgh. Standard police procedural stuff with a backdrop of the seamy side of the Scottish capital and with Rebus’ own foibles and failings to the fore throughout.
What have they got to do with leisure?
Sport, leisure and culture pervade Rankin’s oeuvre with Rebus painted as a frequenter of pubs, a man who loves music – blues and soul rather than the classics pace Morse – and a buyer of (often unread) books. Sport is represented by football but football supporting rather than playing or even watching. Rebus’s sidekick for many of the books, Siobhan Clarke, is a supporter of one of Edinburgh’s two great clubs, Hibernian FC, an allegiance Rebus takes seriously but does not share. Football, like the expectation of violence, is an underlying fact of Scottish society and in the Rebus novels the opposing football clubs provide an easy example of the fractured society the misfit policeman inhabits and observes. Scotland is a nation split by football, by religion, West hates East and both revile the teuchtars from the North; above all it is split by money. Throughout the 17 books Rebus flits between the gritty reality of the “schemes” on Edinburgh’s outskirts to the rarefied atmosphere of city’s rich centre, loathing the first for their brutalising effect and despising the second for its inhabitants’ assumption of privilege.
Why should I read them?
Rankin’s writing is compelling, his plots original and believable, his capture of argot and accent precise, and his characters complex and real. Reality pervades the books with Rebus himself a complex, ill-favoured and grubby anti-hero whose personal life crumbles as his professional drive alienates him from colleagues. In the background Edinburgh comes alive but as a zombie comes alive: grey, shabby and threatening. As violent deaths follow violent lives it is all just a little depressing; but there is humour, albeit black humour, and occasionally the triumph of the human spirit.
Read the Rebus books as a study of society’s underbelly, for an explanation of why Scotland is already a separate nation but mostly because they are very well written and hugely diverting.
the leisure manager’s library
An occasional series offering a guide to leisure-related literature
