Rebus Part 2

Of course, being pushed to the side in favor of newer and/or younger detectives doesn’t really bother Rebus. Rankin has Rebus fall into cliché at that point, making his character so determined to follow through on the case that nothing will stand in his way, not even police hierarchy. And of course the story follows suit, in that Rebus is almost always right.

Fair enough. I can live with that, if only because it grates on his allies. I believe that in most other novels and series, those under him would fall in line, but here, even his best friend on the force, Siobhan Clarke, gets rankled. Instead of wanting to be just like Rebus, Clarke spends a substantial amount of time – especially towards the end – worrying that she’ll wind up just like him. And there are signs that something like that is happening. But more on her later.

 This wariness, coupled with the real-time aging process, is what sets Rebus above his counterparts in the world of crime fiction. That’s not to say he’s the only crime fiction character to have aged (Tom Ripley from the Patricia Highsmith novels aged, but not in real-time, and certainly there are other characters out there). But it certainly sets him apart.

 Now, Rebus is a Noir character. He gets beaten up quite a bit (he’s lost teeth, been cut, shot, stabbed, and so on). And he doesn’t mete it out himself. He simply takes a lot of punishment. So while he’s screwed up cases before, it’s never been through violence. In fact, I’m not even sure he carries a gun (in the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon writes that most homicide cops don’t really ever use their guns outside of the firing range, and it wasn’t unheard of for them to leave them locked in their desks, forgotten… by the way, go buy that book).

 This is the hallmark – or a hallmark – of a Noir hero. Another hallmark that Rankin explores – again, toward the end of the series – is that the overworld is just as bad, if not worse, than the underworld. As Rebus’ nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty, gets older, he starts to move the public face of his empire into more legitimate businesses. David Simon’s series on HBO, The Wire, explored this as well, and I wondered sometimes if Rankin was taking a cue.

 This leads me to something else: The villains of the series range from murderous thugs – the people you’d expect – to more institutional villains. Though they may not be doing anything expressly evil, are still doing damage in their own way. When the new Scottish parliament is to be built, the land chosen in Edinburgh is a housing estate, or, as we say in the States, the ghetto. It’s assumed that when the new parliament is complete, the land around it will become valuable. And so, people are moved out. At the time he dropped it into the story I wondered what Rankin was getting at, since he never really explored it. Looking back at it now, I think he was beginning to hint at the themes he would visit in the later books.

  So what, I wondered, was Rankin trying to accomplish with Rebus. Well, to be honest, I figure he was just trying to tell a good story. And if that’s the case, then I think he did a fantastic job of it. On the other hand, by the end, he wasn’t preaching, but he did seem to be reaching for more. Was he saying that crime has many faces? That the law doesn’t always serve Justice? I think that’s a typical Noir trope anyway. So yeah, he probably was.

 But with shows like Law & Order and CSI on, showing us run-of-the-mill villains committing crimes in all kinds of strange ways, Rankin shows that the rot is all around. And by the time the series wraps up, he seems to be saying that we need more cops like Rebus, who give themselves over to the job almost completely.

 More later, mi vaqueros.