A fine bloody mess

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/11/2022 (1436 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

John Rebus has never been in this much trouble.

Gangsters galore, supercilious superior officers, bent coppers, all kinds of villains have tried over the decades to bring down the retired Edinburgh police detective.

You could add John Rebus to John Rebus’s worst enemies — so many cigarettes, so much whisky, so many bacon rolls with brown sauce as haute cuisine, and indeed, our John’s health is awful.

But that’s not the trouble.

Never before have we seen Rebus in court in the prisoner’s dock, but so ominously does open the 24th Rebus murder mystery by genius author Sir Ian Rankin.

We don’t know what the charge is but, not much of a spoiler, Rankin makes us wait more than 300 pages to find out what Rebus has allegedly done.

And what amazing pages those 300-plus pages are.

Subplots? You want subplots? We’ve got subplots.

Rebus gets summoned by his lifelong nemesis, Edinburgh’s gangster boss Big Ger Cafferty, now in a wheelchair and holding on desperately as younger sharks circle his blood in the water.

Big Ger forced a minion who he thought had betrayed him to do a runner out of town a step or two ahead of Cafferty’s hitpersons, and now regrets that decision and wants to make amends. Can Rebus find aforesaid former target?

We suspect it’s bollocks, and Rebus knows it’s bollocks, but he’s intrigued because — well, it’s Big Ger Cafferty, in’t it?

Meanwhile, Rebus’s long-suffering protégé D.I. Siobhan Clarke is dealing with a veteran cop who’s beating his wife, but has connections to powerful people who may be scheming to usurp Big Ger’s throne.

The slimy cop reckons he has a lot of cards to play to get out of jail — he’s spent his career in the Tynecastle nick, a fortress of corruption and police brutality in Edinburgh’s worst neighbourhood. He walks away from the charges, or he starts naming names.

One of those names could be John Rebus, who always was fast and loose with the rules to see justice done… but did he ever cross other lines?

The prospect of getting Rebus has Malcolm Fox doing cartwheels. When Rankin once thought he had retired Rebus, he tried making a hero of Fox, then thought better of it, turning him into an ambitious, obsequious management suck-up who sees the fast track to the top paved with the destroyed careers of old-school cops.

And there’s a friend of Siobhan’s who’s the secret blogger telling more than the underworld wants known, as she scoops her way to a mainstream media job.

Would you ever set foot in Edinburgh after reading Sir Ian’s work?

Well yes, of course you would, because it’s a magnificent city. How often do the murders occur on the Royal Mile, or in the castle, or Arthur’s Seat? Even in Tynecastle, the scurrilous stuff starts long after the spectators have scooted back downtown after seeing the football. There’s never been a murder at the Oxford pub, real-life watering hole for both Rebus and Rankin.

But those aren’t the mean streets that John Rebus walks. Hold on, used to walk — he’s now in such poor health that Rebus pretty much goes everywhere in his ancient Saab.

Every time Rankin writes another Rebus murder mystery, we have to steel ourselves whether this is his last — and you won’t be finding out here.

A Heart Full of Headstones is one of the best books Sir Ian has written in the last few years. We can only hope there’ll be many more.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin won’t be dissuaded that a pint just tasted so much better in the Oxford.