Free Ian Rankin & Inspector Rebus by Craig Cabell Page B

is the subordinate. Rankin is playing with great Scottish literature again but he can’t help it. The statue of Sherlock Holmes stood for many years around the corner from Princes Street (until they started putting the tram lines down in 2009) and Rankin would acknowledge Doyle every time Holmes and Watson – his Holmes and Watson – took centre stagein his novels.
    Strip Jack was released in October 1992. It is a political novel about a local MP called Gregor Jack and it appears somebody wants to Strip Jack Naked – set him up, bring him down – which is why he is found in bed with a prostitute during a police raid at the start of the book. Rebus feels sorry for the man until Jack’s wife is found murdered and the novel takes a more sinisterturn.
    The constituency of North and South Esk (a fictional setting in the novel) has parallels to North and South Edinburgh but there is more to it than that. The book is about boundaries, territorial/political, and personal ones too. It hits out at both Conservative and Labour parties and makes observations on the changing face of Scotland.
    Strip Jack was the fourth Rebus novel – released afterthe first anthology of short stories ( A Good Hanging and other stories , Century, 1992) – and it is clear that Rebus had fully developed in Rankin’s mind. He lived and breathed, made his own decisions and pushed his creator on to greater heights. But it wasn’t a dark novel, as Rankin admits in his Introduction to the anthology Rebus: St Leonard’s Years (Orion, 2001): ‘I think the … novel is oneof the lighter additions to the series.’
    With a son, and the beautiful French countryside all around him, he must have felt more relaxed, despite the pressure of writing a quality book for his new publisher because, for me, that’s the reason why the story is lighter, perhaps more laid-back.
    The story is less dynamic than the previous three novels in the series. It is a straightforward whodunitbut it doesn’t go anywhere until Liz Jack is murdered halfway through. The only saving grace is dear Mrs Wilkie, the OAP owner of a remote guesthouse who is practically senile and provides a few laughs at Rebus’s expense.
    Perhaps the most important aspect of Strip Jack is Rebus’s sudden love of rock music, which coincidentally is matched by Gregor Jack: The Rolling Stones, and specifically theiralbum Let It Bleed (the album title will become a future Rebus book title). Suddenly Rebus’s musical taste matched that of his vinyl-junkie creator.

CHAPTER EIGHT
THE PLOTS THICKEN
    ‘When Great London Road police station had burnt down, Rebus had been moved to St Leonard’s, which was Central District’s divisional HQ.’
    The Black Book
    T he Black Book was the first novel set at St Leonard’s police station and the first to feature Siobhan Clarke (Rebus’s soon-to-be sidekick). It also brought back Nell Stapleton from Hide & Seek and the blind manVanderhyde from Knots and Crosses (note the ‘hyde’) . Also it’s the first outing for Sword and Shield, a hardline offshoot of the Scottish National Party that returns in Mortal Causes (the following novel) in a bigger way.
    The Black Book was where Rankin really developed the working world of John Rebus, as he told me: ‘I know that I’d been reading Confessions of a Justified Sinner in which a youngman gets too close to the Devil for comfort and eventually is persuaded to kill. That’s basically the plot of The Black Book , isn’t it?’
    Well, not quite! The book opens with the black humour we now expect with a Rebus novel. Straight away Rebus loses a lover, finds a useless brother and witnesses ‘the black comedy of life in a blood-soaked Edinburgh butcher’s shop’. 43 All of this is dismissedby Rebus as ‘just one of those weeks’ but things get steadily more complicated and exciting. Enter ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty. ‘I’d been reading Larry Block’s Matt Scudder books,’ Rankin told me. ‘And Scudder becomes friends