A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin (Orion 2022)

 

'Are you quite sure?’ Bartleby had asked him on more than one occasion.

‘I’ve a life’s worth of mitigation,’ Rebus had assured him.

‘Then not guilty it is,’ Bartleby had agreed.

Doors were being opened to allow access to the Crown’s first witness. Andrew, who had handed police the CCTV from Cafferty’s penthouse, strode in. He wore an expensive suit and sported a new haircut. Dapper and ready for bigger things, he locked eyes with Rebus, and grinned.

The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin (Canongate 2021)

 

Lighting another cigarette, Laidlaw became aware of a stooped old-timer with rheumy eyes who had joined the bus queue behind him.

‘You should enjoy life more, son. Your face is tripping you.’

The man’s breath was like a blowtorch, and Laidlaw wondered why it was that after a drink so many Glaswegians turned into the Ancient Mariner, eager to share their stories and wisdom with complete strangers. This particular example boasted a rolled-up newspaper, which he wielded like a baton, as if he could conduct the world.

‘At least it’s only my face that’s tripping me,’ Laidlaw responded. ‘Your whole life seems to be one long bout of falling over.’ He gestured towards the rips in the man’s trousers and the elbows of his worn-out jacket.

The man studied him, taking a step back as if to help him focus. ‘You look like an actor, son. Have I seen you in anything?’

‘We’re all actors in this town, haven’t you noticed? You’re acting right now.’

‘Am I?'

'Badly – but even bad acting deserves the occasional round of applause.’ Laidlaw dug a few coins from his pocket and placed them in the man’s hand. ‘Should cover your bus fare. Either that or a paper from this week rather than last.’

There was a double-decker drawing towards them at that moment. Laidlaw gestured for the old man to precede him aboard, but then stood his ground and told the clippie he’d wait for the next one. The new passenger stared in bemusement from the window as the bell rang and the bus pulled away, depriving him of his audience. Laidlaw didn’t doubt he would soon find another.

Doors Open (2012)

 

A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin (Orion 2020)

 

But it wasn’t his need to pee that woke him at 5 a.m. It was a call. He fumbled for both his phone and the bedside lamp, waking Brillo in the process. He couldn’t quite focus on the screen but pressed the phone to his ear anyway.

‘Dad?’ His daughter Samantha’s urgent voice.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, sitting up, growing more awake by the second.

‘Your landline – it’s been cut off.’

‘I meant to tell you about that … '

'About what?’

‘My landline’s not the reason you’re calling at this hour. Is it Carrie?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘What then? Are you all right?’

‘It’s Keith.’

Her partner; Carrie’s father. Rebus swallowed. ‘What’s happened?’ He listened as Samantha began to sob quietly. Her voice cracked when she spoke.

‘He’s gone.’

‘The bastard … ’

‘Not like that … I don’t think so anyway.’ She sniffed. ‘I mean, I don’t really know. He’s disappeared. It’s been two days.’

‘And things were all right at home?’

‘No worse than usual.’

‘But you don’t think he’s just – I don’t know – maybe gone on a bender somewhere?’

‘He’s not like that.’

‘You’ve reported him missing?’

‘They’re sending someone to talk to me.’

‘They probably told you two days isn’t long?’

‘Yes. But his phone just goes to voicemail.’

‘And he didn’t pack a bag or anything?’

‘No. We’ve got a joint bank account – I looked online and he’s not bought anything or taken money out. His car was left in the lay-by near the church.'

 

In a House of Lies by Ian Rankin (Orion Books 2018)

Sutherland nodded. ‘Not much of an accent left, except when I visit family. I notice you’re English.’

She shook her head. ‘Born here; grew up there – I blame the parents. So where else have you been other than Inverness?’

‘Aberdeen, Glasgow, even Skye for a while.’

‘They have crime on Skye?’

‘I like to think I eradicated it.’ He made a little toast to himself. ‘You ever been anywhere other than Edinburgh?’

‘I was on secondment in Glenrothes when Stuart Bloom disappeared.’

‘That was lucky – if you’d been attached to the case, you couldn’t be on my team now. Conflict of interest, et cetera.

Clarke nodded distractedly. ‘So where do you live these days?’ she eventually asked.

‘Shettleston, in Glasgow.’

‘Can you see Barlinnie from there?’

‘More or less. How about you?’

‘Five minutes from here. Just off Broughton Street.

Ruth and Martin's Album Club by Martin Fitzgerald (Unbound 2017)

So, over to you Peter. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????

What’s wrong with me is a puritanical desire to be serious, and an actual inability to take popular music seriously. I pretty much gave up listening to pop music round about the time Radio London (Big L, 266 on the medium wave band, not the BBC one) went off the air in 1967, and absolutely gave up soon after I crashed my motorbike in the late summer of 1969, an event that strengthened my wish to be serious.

I’d been listening to Tin Pan Alley, I can now work out, since about 1963 (Pick of the Pops on Sunday afternoons was eventually permitted by my boarding school headmaster who until then had insisted nobody could listen to the radio unless he could make his own set, which a couple of my schoolfellows did, so subverting the ban). So I was in on the beginning of it, and it was all catchy, memorable singles which quickly came and quickly went, and the waters closed over them. I don’t think anyone ever expected to hear them again once they’d dropped off the charts, and it was amazing how quickly singles vanished from the shops once they had stopped selling.

As a result, they’re great memory-joggers, instantly taking me back to certain long-ago moments. But most of them are pretty artless. I never thought it was anything more than an ephemeral pleasure, and I still don’t, though one or two singles, e.g. ‘We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place’ and ‘Meet on the Ledge’, appealed to my gloomy instincts more than the rest.

Rather the Devil by Ian Rankin (2016)

“Rebus placed his knife and fork on the empty plate, then leaned back in his chair, studying the other diners in the restaurant.

‘Someone was murdered here, you know,’ he announced.

‘And they say romance is dead.’ Deborah Quant paused over her steak. Rebus had been about to comment that she carved it with the same care she took when using her scalpel on a cadaver. But then the murder had popped into his head and he’d considered it the better conversational gambit.

‘Sorry,’ he apologised, taking a sip of red wine. They sold beer here – he had seen waiters delivering it to a few of the tables – but he was trying to cut down.

A new start – it was why they were dining out in the first place, celebrating a week without cigarettes.

Seven whole days.”

“A hundred and sixty-eight hours.

(She didn’t need to know about the one he’d begged from a smoker outside an office block three days back. It had made him feel queasy anyway.)

‘You can taste the food better, can’t you?’ she asked now, not for the first time.

‘Oh aye,’ he acknowledged, stifling a cough.

She seemed to have given up on the steak and was dabbing her mouth with her napkin. They were in the Galvin Brasserie Deluxe, which was attached to the Caledonian Hotel – though these days it was really the Waldorf Astoria Caledonian. But those who’d grown up in Edinburgh knew it as the Caledonian, or ‘the Caley’. In the bar before dinner, Rebus had reeled off a few stories – the railway station next door, dismantled in the sixties; the time Roy Rogers had steered his horse Trigger up the main staircase for a photographer. Quant had listened dutifully, before telling him he could undo the top button of his shirt. He had been running a finger around the inside of the collar, trying to stretch the material a little.

‘You notice things,’ he had commented.

‘Cutting out cigarettes can add a few pounds.”

“Really?’ he’d answered, scooping up more peanuts from the bowl.

Now she had caught a waiter’s eye and their plates were being removed. The offer of dessert menus was dismissed. ‘We’ll just have coffee – decaf if you’ve got it.’

‘Two decafs?’ The waiter was looking at Rebus for guidance.

‘Absolutely,’ Rebus confirmed.

Quant pushed a lock of red hair away from one eye and smiled across the table. ‘You’re doing fine,’ she said.

‘Thanks, Mum.’

Another smile. ‘Go on then, tell me about this murder.’

He reached for his glass but started coughing again. ‘Just need to …’ signalling towards the toilets. 

He pushed the chair back and got up, rubbing at his chest with his hand. Once inside the gents, he made for a sink, leaning over it, hacking some of the gunk up from his lungs. There were the usual flecks of blood. Nothing to panic about, he’d been assured. More coughing, more mucus. COPD, they called it. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. When told, Deborah Quant had formed her lips into a thin line.

‘Not so surprising, is it?’

And the very next day she had brought him a glass specimen jar of ”

“indeterminate age. Its contents: a section of lung, showing the bronchial tubes.

‘Just so you know,’ she’d said, pointing out what he’d already been shown on a computer screen. She had left the jar with him.

‘On loan or to keep?’

‘For as long as you need it, John.”

Even Dogs In The Wild by Ian Rankin (Orion Books 2015)

Darryl Christie wasn’t a huge fan of Glasgow. It sprawled in a way his own city didn’t. And there were still traces of the old enmity between Catholic and Protestant – of course that existed in Edinburgh too, but it had never quite defined the place the way it did Glasgow. The people spoke differently here, and had a garrulousness to them that spilled over into physical swagger. They were, as they chanted on the football terraces, ‘the people’. But they were not Darryl Christie’s people. Edinburgh could seem tame by comparison, head always below the parapet, keeping itself to itself. In the independence referendum, Edinburgh had voted No and Glasgow Yes, the latter parading its saltired allegiance around George Square night after night, or else protesting media bias outside the BBC headquarters. The political debate had melted into a blend of carnival and stairheid rammy, so that you never knew if people were joyous or furious.

Darryl Christie had considered all the implications for his various business interests and come to the conclusion that either outcome would probably suit him just fine, so in the end he hadn’t voted at all.

Saints of the Shadow Bible by Ian Rankin (Orion Books 2013)

‘The time you phoned him, did you try a bribe?’

‘Didn’t think it would work. I mean, he’d have taken the cash but then come back for more.’

‘In other words, you’d never have been free of him?’

‘Right.’

‘An admission that doesn’t really help your case.’ Rebus paused. ‘What is it he had, Stefan? What could he tell Macari and her team? I’ve been through the custody ledger and there’s half a page missing from the week before Saunders killed Merchant. It got me thinking – could there be something Saunders knew? He comes to you, tells you he’ll do a deal – forget all about it if you get him off next time he’s arrested. You couldn’t know he was going to bludgeon some poor sod to death, so you shook hands on it.’

‘The hearse is arriving,’ Gilmour said, nodding in the direction of the gates. A slow-moving procession of vehicles, the engines almost silent. Wreaths shrouding the coffin, allowing only glimpses of gleaming brass handles, varnished pale wood. In the car behind, the Justice Minister’s widow and son. The First Minister and his deputy had re-emerged from the chapel and were flanking the door, hands clasped as if in prayer, heads bowed.

‘Nothing to say, Stefan?’ Rebus whispered into his neighbour’s ear. Gilmour’s jaw was jutting as he watched the vehicles pull to a halt. The First Minister offered his condolences to the widow, along with a peck on the cheek. She was dressed in black, and wore sunglasses which obscured half her face.

‘Only that you’re making a mistake, John. Sounds very much as if you’ve decided you’re not part of the Saints any more.’

‘Let me tell you something, Stefan. I spoke to Porkbelly and he was all for letting Frazer take the rap for that gun, same as you just did. Seems to me you’ll shit on anyone to save your own necks.’

‘Maybe you think you’re clean, but you’re not,’ Gilmour retorted. ‘You knew we hung on to that gun – why didn’t you take it to the bosses at the time? Remember Interview Room B, that time I walked in and you had your hands around a suspect’s throat? I forget the name now, but it’ll come back to me if necessary. The drugs we planted on that barman we didn’t like? The prossies we let off after an hour in the holding cell, once they’d slipped us a few quid or a promise? The restaurant tabs that never arrived at the end of a meal? Two hundred cigarettes here, a case of malt there . . . The stories we could tell, eh?’

Gilmour’s eyes were boring into Rebus’s.

‘I took the fall, John,’ he went on. ‘And I did it for all of us. Remember that, when you’ve got the tin-opener poised above the can marked “worms”.’

Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin (Orion Books 2012)

“Bert Jansch was dead, too. Rebus had seen him play a few solo gigs in Edinburgh down the years. Jansch had been born in the city but made his name in London. After work that evening, alone in his flat, Rebus played a couple of Pentangle albums. He was no expert, but he could tell Jansch’s playing from the other guitarist in the band, John Renbourn. As far as he knew, Renbourn was still around – maybe living in the Borders. Or was that Robin Williamson? He had taken his colleague Siobhan Clarke to a Renbourn/Williamson concert once, driving her all the way to Biggar Folk Club without telling her why. When the two musicians stepped on to the stage – looking as though they’d just roused themselves from armchairs by a roaring fire – he’d leaned in towards her.

‘One of them played Woodstock, you know,’ he’d whispered.”

Doors Open by Ian Rankin (Orion 2008)

Mike saw it happen. There were two doors next to one another. One of them seemed to be permanently ajar by about an inch, except when someone pushed at its neighbour. As each liveried waiter brought trays of canapés into the salesroom, the effect was the same. One door would swing open, and the other would slowly close. It said a lot about the quality of the paintings, Mike thought, that he was paying more attention to a pair of doors. But he knew he was wrong: it was saying nothing about the actual artworks on display, and everything about him.

Mike Mackenzie was thirty-seven years old, rich and bored. According to the business pages of various newspapers, he remained a “self-made software “mogul’, except that he was no longer a mogul of anything. His company had been sold outright to a venture capital consortium. Rumour had it that he was a burn-out, and maybe he was. He’d started the software business fresh from university with a friend called Gerry Pearson. Gerry had been the real brains of the operation, a genius programmer, but shy with it, so that Mike quickly became the public face of the company. After the sale, they’d split the proceeds fifty-fifty and Gerry then surprised Mike by announcing that he was off to start a new life in Sydney. His emails from Australia extolled the virtues of nightclubs, city life and surfing (and not, for once, the computer kind). He would also send Mike JPEGs and mobile-phone snaps of the ladies he encountered along the way. The quiet, reserved Gerry of old had disappeared, replaced by a rambunctious playboy—which didn’t stop Mike from feeling like a bit of a fraud. He knew that without Gerry, he’d have failed to make the grade in his chosen field.

The Crime Interviews: Volume Two by Len Wanner (Blasted Heath 2012)

Good question. Why are you writing books?

I'm writing books to try and make a connection with a reader. It doesn't matter whether it's a reader who's on the Booker panel or a reader who's a waitress... Whenever I'm up for a prize I think: "Who the fuck are you to judge me?" And then I think: "Give me that fucking prize." Ha! You don't know these people exist until they write to you to say: "You're up for a prize. Do you want to come and have a bad hotel dinner, while feeling really nervous and wearing uncomfortable clothes, and then get up and make a cunt of yourself in front of a big audience?" What the fuck?

I mean, prizes are good marketing tools. They're shorthand for telling readers: "This is a good book." But a better way for people to come to your books is for their pals to say: "You'll like that book. It really meant something to me."

When did a book first really mean something to you?

When I was nineteen, reading Thérèse Raquin in a bedsit, being totally transported by the writing and the way two words can click together, and sitting back, thinking: "What an amazing thing to do with your life – to make that sort of connection with another person, to feel exactly what Zola was talking about, or looking at, or imagining... What an incredible connection!" And what I really love about Zola is that he was a political writer.

Do you see yourself as a political writer?

Yeah! Orwell was who I stole from the library... So it's that connection: reading A Tale of Two Cities and sweating with my heart racing at the end because it was so exciting. But I think you really have to keep your eyes on the prize, because otherwise you become bitter and disillusioned despite having everything. You're being published, you're making a living, you're spending your days in pyjamas wrestling with words, and people are writing to you saying: "I read your book and it mattered to me." How lucky is that?

(Len Wanner interviewing Denise Mina.)

I bloody knew it!

From a New Zealand newspaper's Q & A with Ian Rankin, who's currently bigging up the excellent 'The Impossible Dead':

The book that changed me is

... Laidlaw by William McIlvanney. I read this in the early 1980s when I was a student but also trying to become a published novelist. It's beautifully written, with taut plotting and a clean style. Laidlaw made me think I could maybe write my own crime fiction.

It has to be said . . . Morris Cafferty is no John Rhodes.

The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin (Orion Books 2011)

‘Any other names?’ Fox asked.
‘One or two are probably still a bit cracked – living as hermits in the Western Isles and writing anarchist blogs. Most of them probably found that as they got older, they became the sort of person they’d previously despised.’
‘The establishment, in other words?’
‘These were bright people, in the main.’
‘Even the ones scooping up handfuls of anthrax from Gruinard?’
‘Even them,’ Professor Martin said, sounding sleepy from all the wine. ‘It’s all changed now, though, hasn’t it? Nationalism has entered the mainstream. If you ask me, they’ll sweep the next election. A few years from now, we could be living in an independent European democracy. No Queen, no Westminster, no nuclear deterrent. That would have been impossible to predict a scant few years back, never mind quarter of a century.’
‘Pretty much what the SNLA and all the others were fighting for,’ Fox concurred.
‘Pretty much.’
‘Is there anyone I could try talking to about all of this, other than psychiatric patients and hermits?’
‘Do you know John Elliot?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘He’s on TV all the time. News and current affairs.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘He merits a mention in my book.’
‘What about Alice Watts?’
‘Who?’

Browned off

Not surprised to see Ian Rankin's name so high up the list if last year's Dunfermline charity shops are anything to go by. The question is, do people actually read the books that they eventually palm off to charity shops?

The author and/or book that always seems to be in abundance at thrift shop sales, stoop sales and library fund raisers in Brooklyn? Step forward Ian McEwan's 2001 novel, 'Atonement'. If I had a dollar for every time that unbroken spine stared back at me at a book sale, I could afford a kindle . . . and afford to put a few books on the kindle.

A Question of Blood by Ian Rankin (Back Bay Books 2003)

Jack Bell nodded, and the two men's eyes met for the first time, then both heads turned to face James, who was seated across the table.
"Well, James?" the lawyer said. "What do you think?"
The teenager seemed to be considering the offer. He returned his father's stare as if it were all the nourishment he needed and he had a hunger that would never be stilled.

Strip Jack by Ian Rankin (Minotaur Books 1992)

'Are you an Inspector of Hospitals?' he asked.
'No, sir, I'm a police inspector.'
'Oh.' His face dulled a little. 'I thought maybe you'd come to . . . they don't treat us well here, you know.' He paused. 'There, because I've told you that I'll probably be disciplined, maybe even put into solitary. Everything, any dissension, gets reported back. But I've got to keep telling people, or nothing will be done. I have some influential friends, Inspector.' Rebus thought this was for the nurse's ears more than his own. 'Friends in high places . . .'
Well, Dr Forster knew that now, thanks to Rebus.
' . . . friends I can trust. People need to be told, you see. They censor our mail. They decide what we can read. They won't even let me read Das Kapital. And they give us drugs. The mentally ill, you know, by whom I mean those who have been judged to be mentally ill, we have less rights than the most hardened mass murderer . . . hardened but sane mass murderer. Is that fair? Is that . . . humane?'

The Complaints by Ian Rankin (Orion 2009)

Lothian and Borders Police HQ was on Fettes Avenue. From some windows there was a view towards Fettes College. A few of the officers in the Complaints had been to private schools, but none to Fettes. Fox himself had been educated largely free of charge - Boroughmuir, then Heriot Watt. Supported Hearts FC though seldom managed even a home fixture these days. Had no interest in rugby, even when his city played host to the Six Nations. February was Six Nations month, meaning there'd be hordes of the Welsh in town this weekend, dressed up as dragons and toting oversized inflatable leeks. Fox reckoned he would watch the match on TV, might even rouse himself to go down the pub. Five years now he'd been off the drink, but for the past two he'd trusted himself with occasional visits. Only when he was in the right frame of mind though, only when the willpower was strong.

Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin (St Martin's Paperbacks 1990)

Hyde's Club. Named after Robert Louis Stevenson's villain, Edward Hyde, the dark side of the human soul. Hyde himself was based on the city's Deacon Brodie, businessman by day, robber by night. Rebus could smell guilt and fear and rank expectation in this large room. Stale cigars and spilt whisky, splashes of sweat. And amongst it all moved Ronnie, and the question which still needed to be answered. Had Ronnie been paid to photograph the influential and the rich - without their knowing they were being snapped, of course? Or had he been freelancing, summoned here only as a punchbag, but stealthy enough to bring a hidden camera with him? The answer was perhaps unimportant. What mattered was that the owner of this place, the puppet-master of all these base desires, had killed Ronnie, had starved him of his fix and then given him some rat poison. Had sent one of his minions along to the squat to make sure it looked like a simple case of an overdose. So they had left the quality powder beside Ronnie. And to muddy the water, they had moved the body downstairs, leaving it in candlelight. Thinking the tableau shockingly effective. But by candlelight they hadn't seen the pentagram on the wall, and they hadn't meant anything by placing the body the way they had.
Rebus had made the mistake of reading too much into the situation, all along. He had blurred the picture himself, seeing connections where there were none, seeing plot and conspiracy where none existed. The real plot was so much bigger, the size of a haystack to his needle.

Let It Bleed by Ian Rankin (St Martin's Paperbacks 1996)

"Mr. Haldayne has a point, Inspector." Mathieson was sitting down again, in his big Chief Executive chair at the end of the table. Tables without corners were supposed to make everyone equal, but Mathieson's chair was a leather throne. He looked and sounded completely unruffled by events thus far, while Rebus felt his head would explode.

Hundreds of jobs . . . spin-offs . . . happy, smiling faces. People like Salty Dougary, pride restored, given another chance. Did Rebus have the gall to think he could pronounce sentence on the future of people like that? People who wouldn't care who got away with what, so long as they had a paycheck at the end of the month?

Gillespie had died, but Rebus knew these men hadn't killed him, not directly. At the same time he hated them, hated their confidence and their indifference, hated their certainty that what they did was "for the good." They knew the way the world worked; they knew who - or, rather, what - was in charge. It wasn't anyone stupid enough to place themselves in the front line. It was secret quiet men who got on with their work the world over, bribing where necessary, breaking the rules, but quietly, in the name of progress, in the name of the system.

Shug McAnally was dead, but no one was grieving: Tresa was spending his money, and having a good time with Maisie Finch. Audrey Gillespie, too, might start enjoying life for the first time in years, maybe with her lover. A man had died - cruelly and in terror - but he was all there was on Rebus's side of the balance sheet. And on the other . . . everything else.