Edinburgh Underside: A Review of Hide & Seek by Ian Rankin

The work of Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin has been a favorite since I first encountered one of the Rebus novels some years ago at ICPL.  (On tape or CD--I'm not sure how long ago I'm talking). Since then, I've decided to go back and follow Rebus through his beginnings, so this is the second in the series (earlier I read Knots and Crosses). In this book, Rebus investigates what seems to be an unintentional overdose of a junkie. But Rebus is a skeptic and a determined one at that. As Rebus digs deeper, he peels back a veneer on top of wealthy Edinburgh that's intended to remain hidden.

The series works because Rankin makes Rebus work as a human being. Rebus is a complex character with a daughter, an ex, and current love interests all muddled together with work, sleep, and life in general. And he has colleagues and superiors, not all of whom help him.

I won't go on because I've praised Rankin/Rebus before, and I suspect that the series (this is my third) will only get better. Now that's something to look forward to.

The Comfort of Saturdays: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel by Alexander McCall Smith

This is my third adventure with Isabel Dalhousie after The Sunday Philosophy Club and Friends, Lovers, Chocolate. I found The Comfort of Saturdays at the most orderly, spacious, and well-lit, bookstore that I’ve yet  found in India (via some mall-walking in Chennai). I try to read these in order, but I find that I’ve skipped a couple. In one sense, this is quite alright because Isabel is Isabel, but she has undergone some major changes in her life that give her even more to think about and to act upon. 

In this book, as well as the others, Isabel “meddles”, as she calls it. Asked by someone to look into a situation, she dives in. As a detective (of sorts) she arrives at seeming conclusions much too quickly. She’s often surprised by wrong assumptions and conclusions, yet she wears her mistakes lightly. I do wish that some of her philosophy training would have included more on hypothesis formation and testing, probabilities, and the like. I’m tempted to send her a copy of Sherlock Holmes and The Black Swan (Taleb). She’s too much Watson—but such a lovely Watson. In addition to looking into whether a doctor has committed the misdeeds he’s accused of, she has to deal with a contribution to her journal by an old nemesis and her visceral dislike of a new acquaintance. The joy of McCall’s writing is that he lets us share Isabel’s struggles to do the right thing. She strives to think like a philosopher, but her instincts prompt her to act as a human being, with all our foibles in the face of all the ambiguities that the world presents to us. 

Besides struggling with how the deal with the dislikes of her life, she must also deal with her love life and the insecurities attendant to it. I marvel at McCall’s ability to display this woman’s pride, intelligence, and beauty (inner and outer), yet also her vulnerability and insecurity. Even Isabel, who seems quite the rock in many instances, struggles with these issues. 

I’ll keep reading about Isabel Dalhousie because I like her company. That’s no small compliment in my book. 

Side Note: One of my other favorite series is set in Edinburgh, the John Rebus novels of Ian Rankin. Dalhousie’s and Rankin’s experiences of the city differ, to put it mildly. How would an “Isabel Dalhousie meets John Rebus” novel work? Like “Bambi meets Godzilla”, I suspect. But together they do put Edinburgh on my “to visit” map.

Wolves Eat Dogs: An Arkady Renko Novel by Martin Cruz Smith

Sometime, not too long after its publication in 1981, I read Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park. Set in Cold War Moscow, it introduced Arkady Renko, a Moscow police detective. As I recall, this was the first book by Smith. It proved memorable. In some ways, Renko was like other cops: overworked, under-paid, and with plenty of personal problems. To this extent, he wasn’t unique among fictional police detectives. However, he worked in the Soviet Union, in Moscow, in the heart of the system. But the system didn’t work as the textbooks and propagandists said it did. Like everywhere else in the world, there was an underside, and Renko plunged into it. 

So now, all these years later, for reasons I can’t justify other than my standard “so many books, so little time”, I rejoined Renko in Wolves Eat Dogs. In this installment of Renko’s career the ground has shifted. The Soviet Union is gone. Oligarchs now run Russia. And the remains of a failed nuclear plant at Chernobyl create a deep scar in the Ukrainian steppe. A fall from a seventh story window by one of the “New Russia” oligarchs leads Renko from Moscow to the forbidden (but not uninhabited) land of radioactivity created by the greatest nuclear disaster ever. Renko is nothing if not dogged, even if it takes him to this eerie land of death and fleeting life. 

Like Ian Rankin, whom I recently reviewed, Smith creates a character and milieu that draws the reader in. Like Rankin, Smith’s prose creates enough literary quality to keep the reader careful without slowing the pace. Good detective fiction must walk the line between prose too easily parodied and prose too demanding of the reader. While other types of fiction can wander around with words and leave us wondering here and there, writers of detective fiction can’t afford this luxury—plot and resolution are too important. Smith, like Rankin, walks the line just about perfectly. In doing so, American and other readers get a sense of the Russian and Ukrainian land and culture in which Renko operates. This concern with scene on the part of good detective fiction heightens the enjoyment of this genre. 

So Renko again? Definitely. I have some catching-up to do.  

Knots & Crosses by Ian Rankin

 

Some detectives you meet stick with you. Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Spenser, Arkady Renko, Harry Hole, and John Marshall Tanner (of whom I am not the creator), come to mind. To this list, I must add John Rebus. I’d listened to one Rebus book some time ago, but I was lucky to find this, the initial Rebus book by author Ian Rankin, published in 1987. John Rebus is a police officer in Edinburgh, Scotland. Divorced, with a young daughter, a brother, a love of Scotch (the whiskey), some faith, and a past, Rebus is a round character. Typical of this genre, Rebus is neither a model of rectitude nor a model crime fighter. He lacks the suave confidence of Bogey’s Spade or Marlowe. Rebus, like many of his detective fiction contemporaries, is far too vulnerable.

As the book opens, someone is kidnapping girls. Rebus gets pulled into the investigation as he deals with his own life. His relationship with his brother, his ex, his daughter, an attractive fellow officer—you get the drift—all pull upon him. Rankin digs into the messiness of life in creating this character. Rankin’s prose is medium; descriptive without excessive detail, but not the sparse, hard-boiled prose of many of the outstanding Americans.

I’ve already mapped out what book in the series comes next. I’ll be visiting Rebus again, but then, some of his peers listed above still beckon.

P.S. I found this book in Jaipur in a bookshop. Read a paperback copy. Good luck to have found it!

An Entertaining Visit to Greeneland: Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent

In 1938, Graham Greene was busy writing two novels. The better-known book became his classic, The Power and the Glory, about the Mexican whiskey priest. But Greene feared that The Power and the Glory would not sell, and he needed money to support his family. Therefore, in the mornings, he wrote one of his “entertainments”, The Confidential Agent. As an entertainment, The Confidential Agent qualifies as a thriller. It has a fast-moving plot, reversals of fortune, and plenty of action. In this regard, Greene’s tale is like those of his contemporary, Eric Ambler, and later writers such as Alan Furst, who inhabit the same shady and treacherous underworld of pre-World War II Europe.

But this is Graham Greene. This is Greeneland.

So while The Confidential Agent meets all of the requirements of a thriller, nevertheless, it has that twinge of angst for which Graham Greene is famous. For instance, the protagonist is never given a name, only the initial “D.”. In this, we perceive shades of Kafka. Further, D. is haunted by the past. The civil war in his home country (the Spanish Civil War?) killed his wife and left him in prison, expecting execution. Having escaped captivity, D. is assigned a mission to England by his embattled government. But D’s past pulls at him all the while. His memories, his wounds, and the adversaries have traveled with him to try to thwart his mission to buy coal on behalf of his government. D. is not a James Bond or even a George Smiley. He’s an amateur, a scholar of the medieval French text The Song of Roland. He’s intimidated by the thought of personal violence even though he has suffered his share.

I don’t know if there’s any Graham Greene book that I wouldn’t recommend. Graham Greene’s “entertainments” are weightier than many other writers’ most ambitious works. Greene establishes characters quickly and deeply. Although one can describe the tale as “action-packed”,   you  are taken by fleeting and seemingly minor characters such as Else the cleaning girl at the hotel and the gang members of the mining town. Thus, if you’re looking for something both entertaining and more considerate, you will likely enjoy Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent. 

P.S. If you happened to get the Vintage books edition, be sure and read the introduction by Scottish (crime) writer Ian Rankin. For a further appreciation of Greene, check out Pico Iyer’s The Man Inside My Head.

Ian Rankin: Naming the Dead

I finished listening to Ian Rankin's The Naming of the Dead, courtesy of ICPL. This is a one of a series about Edinburgh's police detective John Rebus. It's set during the G-8 summit of 2005 and at the time of the London train bombings, which play in the background. Like any good cop, Rebus is dedicated and hard-working, and like many a (fictional?) cop, tough and hard-drinking. Interestingly, like many a cop portrayed in fiction, for someone who must exude and represent authority ("the Man"), he tends to be very anti-authoritarian when it comes to his superiors. The performance was fine. It benefited especially from the Scottish brogue that the performer used (something that, say, a Steig Larrson book performance would not do well with—it would end up sounding like the Swedish chef on the Muppet Show). If you enjoy police procedurals mixed with a new and unique setting, this would prove an excellent selection. I have the sense that I'll meet up with DCI Rebus again.