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More reviews by William May
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Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin
Is IAN RANKIN about to retire Detective Inspector John Rebus as the main character of his police procedurals and replace him with his female protege, Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke?
Even though RESURRECTION MEN is currently near the top of the bestseller list in Britain, it seems a reasonable question to ask. This is IAN RANKIN's 13th police procedural in 15 years and Colin Dexter killed off Inspector Morse in his 14th novel, The Remorseful Day.
Then why are you here?
Significantly, 'Then why are you here?' is the question posed by the same Career Analyst to both Rebus and Clarke, the first time to Rebus as the opening line of the first chapter and the second time to Clarke as the opening line of the final chapter, 438 pages later.
Rebus has been sent on a 'refresher course' to the Scottish Police College at Tulliallan. He lobbed a mug of cold tea at Chief Superintendent Gill Templer, a former flame, and now he finds himself with the 'The Wild Bunch', three veteran officers who have 'failed in some way', and who, as part of their rehab, must work as team players on the unsolved murder of Rico Lomax, a Glasgow low-life who before his death found safe-houses for criminals on the run.
The plot thickens
But all is not what it seems. One of the Resurrection Men, DI Gray, worked on the same case six years ago, as did Rebus. Is the college instructor's choice of a dormant case deliberate? Has Chief Constable Sir David Strathern landed Rebus in a trap? Rebus may well ask for he has infiltrated the college as Strathern's mole and his job is to uncover a dirty deal from the past and expose the Resurrection Men as bent policemen. Rebus' plan is to tempt them with a secret cache of drugs but he risks being accused of being the mastermind by the Big House and of being outwitted by his nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty.
With Rebus in purdah, Clarke is left in charge of the investigation into the murder of an art dealer, Edward Marber, outside his home in Duddingston Village, a wealthy enclave on the outskirts of Edinburgh. After his taxi made a U-turn and before he could open the front door, Marber was bludgeoned to death with a weapon that is yet to be found. Clearly it was not a robbery: none of Marber's paintings was missing though they had all been removed from their walls and stacked neatly in bubble-wrap.
Both investigations proceed concurrently with Rebus and Clarke crossing over to help each other out at crucial moments. Their dependency on each other, however, alerts the reader to a conclusion that would have been less predictable in a novel full of bluffs and twists had IAN RANKIN developed the principal storylines without this link.
Wit galore
In the end it was not the novel's surprises or denouement that lingered in this reader's mind but IAN RANKIN's gift for dialogue:
'The solicitor stepped through the debris. 'My name's Allison by the way.'
'And your surname, sir?' (DC) Hynds enquired blithely.'
Sometimes the irony is overdone. Each character, it seems, whatever the circumstances (interrogation room, hospital ward, pub) can deliver a nasty wisecrack or a clever comeback.
The net effect is to shift the reader's focus away from the plot's evolution to IAN RANKIN's development of character, particularly the emergence of DS Clarke as a protagonist in her own right.
More of a good thing?
Like her mentor, Clarke has few interests outside her work - music, chocolate, football, drink, long drives and home-delivery pizza. The Marber case solved, she wonders during counseling if she is cut out to play the game: she has witnessed a brutal slashing and blames herself for not acting quickly enough to save the victim. Her Career Analyst ruminates:
'You want to be an outsider, someone who breaks the rules with only a measure of impunity?..Maybe you want to be like DI Rebus?'
'I'm well aware that there's not the room for more than one of him.'
If DS Clarke does take over from DI Rebus in IAN RANKIN's next novel, her cynical, middle-aged colleague will be in two minds:
'More and more, she reminded him of himself. He wasn't sure it was necessarily a good thing, but was glad of it all the same.'
William May
03/03/2002
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William May has just finished his first novel. He is principal of an international school in Hong Kong. |
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