My choice for the letter G in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet meme is A Good Hanging by Ian Rankin. I first wrote about this book when I read it in April 2008. It was one of the first books by Rankin that I had read, although I was familiar with Rebus from the TV series.
A Good Hanging is a collection of twelve short stories featuring Inspector John Rebus, set in Edinburgh. All the stories are concise and I think convey the character of Rebus; he is cynical and analytical, a lone worker, who drinks and smokes too much. None of the stories pose complex mysteries and are easily solved by Rebus.
First published in 1992 it’s one of the earlier Rebus books. The first story in this book is called ‘Playback‘. It’s a bit dated now with Rebus impressed by being able to phone your home phone ‘from the car-phone’ to get ‘the answering machine to play back any messages.’ As the title indicates, solving the crime in this story hinges on phone messages. The police receive a phone call from the murderer confessing his crime. He panics and tries to flee, only to be caught as the police arrive on the scene of the crime. He then insists on his innocence. Rebus disentangles the puzzle even though this seems to be ‘the perfect murder’.
In ‘The Dean Curse‘ Rebus is reading Hammett’s novel ‘The Dain Curse‘, which he tosses up into the air disgusted by how far-fetched and melodramatic that book was, piling on coincidence after coincidence ‘corpse following corpse like something off an assembly line’, when he receives a phone call with news of a car bomb that had just gone off in Edinburgh. He cannot believe it has happened. It seems as though this is the work of terrorists, the bomb having all the hallmarks of an IRA bomb and it had gone off seconds after the car had been stolen. It seems to Rebus as if the coincidences in the Hammett story have nothing on his case. But there is more to this case than at first meets the eye.
My favourite in the book is the title story ‘A Good Hanging‘ in which Rebus solves the crime through his knowledge of ‘Twelfth Night‘. It’s set during the Edinburgh Festival period, when the city is full of young, theatrical people. A Fringe group, comprising a number of students are staging a play called ‘Scenes from a Hanging’ promising a live hanging on stage. The story starts with the discovery of a young man found hanging from the stage scaffold in Parliament Square. It appears to be suicide according to the note in his pocket ‘Pity it wasn’t Twelfth Night’. But Rebus investigates and finds that all is not as it seems.
The other stories involve the discovery of a skeleton buried beneath a concrete floor, a Peeping Tom, and blackmailers. One story I particularly like is ‘Being Frank‘ about a tramp who overhears two men talking about a war that’s coming. He is well known for making up stories and informing the police of numerous conspiracies so they just laugh at him. But fearing the end of the world Frank confides in Rebus who eventually begins to suspect that this time Frank is not lying.
Another author who used to be a great favourite of mine is Ed McBain. I haven’t read anything of his for many years. He was born Salvatore Albert Lombino in 1926 and changed his name to Evan Hunter, writing under the pseudonym Ed McBain from 1956. He died in 2005. He wrote an enormous number of books – from 1958 until his death he wrote one or two books a year as Ed McBain. The first one in his 87th precinct series is 
Then there is Ellery Queen – who was actually two people writing pseudonymously. They were cousins Daniel (David) Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee. They also used the pen name Barnaby Ross. Ellery Queen was also the chief character of their novels. A list of their books can be found on the 
Umberto Eco wrote one of my favourite books 
And there in those two quotes is the nub of this book. Who is the good guy? As Fox, yet another divorced cop with a drink problem, his father in a care home and his sister, Jude, in an abusive relationship, is drawn into an increasingly complex and puzzling investigation he has to work out just who the bad guys are. He is asked to investigate DS Jamie Breck, a likeable young cop who is allegedly involved in a paedophile site run by an Aussie cop in Melbourne. Then Jude’s partner, Vince is murdered and Breck is the investigating officer. As Fox gets to know him it become increasingly difficult for him to know just who he can trust.
Although the Great War had ended more than thirteen years years ago it still haunts Maisie and her assistant Billy Beale and this suicide brings all its horrors back to them. This is a dark novel as Maisie is drawn into the investigation by Scotland Yard to discover the identity of the man who is threatening to kill thousands of people unless his demands are met. It highlights the desperate conditions of the war veterans suffering still from shell-shock, unable to work and receiving no pensions. As first dogs and birds and finally a Government junior minister are found dead from some unknown chemical substance the search becomes increasingly more sinister as the mind of the madman is revealed.
BooksPlease 