Knots and Crosses (Rebus 1) by Ian Rankin

A study in psyche…

🙂 🙂 🙂

Three young girls have been abducted from the streets of Edinburgh, and Detective Sergeant John Rebus has been assigned to the team investigating the disappearances. Soon the discovery of the bodies of the girls makes the case even more serious, and the race is on to find the killer before any more girls go missing

This is the first book in what became the long-running Rebus series, and it is very different in style from the way the series developed later. Apparently Rankin hadn’t originally intended it to become a series – he wrote this as a one-off, as an examination of a damaged man, suffering from PTSD following his experiences in the SAS.

I’m very glad that I didn’t originally read this series in order because, to be honest, had I read this book first I doubt very much whether I would have gone on to read any of the others. (Thus confirming my general belief that the first book in any series is often the weakest, and it’s often better to jump in around the third or fourth and then work backwards.) The quality of the writing is already here – Rankin could already evoke Edinburgh in all its contrasts of wealth and poverty, the powerful and the marginalised. But the story, as a crime story, is well nigh non-existent. The missing girls are so forgotten about that I still couldn’t tell you any of their names. There is almost no detection, on the page at least, and we spend far more time learning about Rebus’ psychological problems than about either the victims or the perpetrator.

And while it’s an interesting thought to see how a man suffering from the effects of PTSD would have difficulty coping in the police, I’m afraid the implausibility of the reasons for Rebus’ problems made it impossible for me to fully buy in to the premise. Having read many of the later books, I’ve always been aware that Rebus had served in the SAS at an earlier point in his life, but here in the first book we learn that in fact he was so traumatised during the training that he never made it through. In itself this is hard enough to accept since, although the SAS has the reputation of being only for the toughest of the tough, I can’t believe that they would put new recruits through the kind of extreme experiences to which we are expected to believe Rebus was subjected, and send them back into civvy street as broken men.

But what I found even more unbelievable is that the police would employ someone so badly damaged. Because he is very badly damaged, to the point of frequently collapsing, losing awareness of where he is, losing consciousness, becoming violent, etc. And it’s certainly not due to the stress of his current job, since he doesn’t really appear to do anything very much.

The other thing that surprised me is that Rebus is shown here as a man of faith, battling to reconcile his belief in an all-powerful, loving God with the horrors he sees happening daily in the world around him. It’s interestingly done, with that distinctive Scottish flavour of ambivalence towards the whole subject of religion, but again feels very different to the cynical Rebus who develops in the later books.

This whole concentration on Rebus’ psyche goes on for far too long. The story of the abductions is really packed into the last few chapters, by which point I had pretty much forgotten all about the dead girls. I was also disappointed that Rankin fell back on the old clichés of the motivation of the killer arising out of personal animosity for the detective, together with a side story involving Rebus’ brother. However, in these final chapters we see the beginnings of the more traditional style of noir-ish police procedural that Rankin would develop in future books and, throughout, his skill in invoking atmosphere and excellence in characterisation are already clear. Although the Edinburgh setting is already well developed, there isn’t the focus on specifically Scottish society and culture that would become a major feature down the line.

Ian Rankin

So, all in all, my recommendation to newcomers would be to come in a few books further on, when Rankin had begun to focus more on the crime aspects and had allowed Rebus to become rather more functional! For existing fans this one is interesting to see how it all began, but with the proviso that the Rebus of this book has become a very different man by the time Rankin fully hits his stride. I’ll be interested to see over the next few books if that transformation is done by a process of slow evolution, or if Rankin merely threw out the bits of Rebus’ original character that didn’t work so well once he had decided to use him as the lead in a long-running series.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by James Macpherson, who has narrated all of the Rebus books and does a fine job with them.

Audible UK Link