Tag: Ian Rankin

Reading Dilemma – a Surfeit of Crime Fiction!

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

I feel I’m overdosing on crime fiction right now and need to read something else. I’m in the middle of Ian Rankin’s Dead Souls and whilst I think it’s a good story, I’m being sucked down to the dark side. Rebus is pessimistic:

…  once again Rebus’s speech had gone unspoken, the one about how he’s lost any sense of vocation, any feeling of optimism about the role – the very existence of policing. About how these thoughts scared him, left him either sleepless or scarred by bad dreams. About the ghosts which had come to haunt him, even in daytime. About how he didn’t want to be a cop any more. (page 17)

It doesn’t help that one of his colleagues has died after falling off Salisbury Crags – was it suicide or not? In addition as Mairie Henderson (journalist) says to him “I think something’s gone bad inside you.” He doesn’t disagree. There’s a paedophile who is being persecuted by his neighbours; an old girlfriend’s son has disappeared and he keeps wondering what his life would have been like if he’d not become a cop; he’s surveilling a killer who has returned to Edinburgh courtesy of the US government and he know it’s a waste of time; he has bad memories and is feeling guilty – he’s in a bad way.

I need to counter-balance this with something different, something unrelated to crime. But when I look at the other books I’ve started and those I’ve recently borrowed from the library I see they’re all crime fiction of one sort or another.

Back to my to-be-read piles, then. So, should I read … ?

  • The Snow Geese by William Fiennes. Marina Warner on the back cover states “he has renewed the variety and wonder of the world.”  It’s a blend of  natural history, the snow geese migration, and autobiography, meditations and philosophy.
  • The Pursuit of Happiness by Douglas Kennedy – but the back cover states it is a tragic love story of divided loyalties and the random workings of destiny. It’s set in 1945 in Manhattan. Not sure I want tragedy right now.
  • The Warrior’s Princess by Barbara Erskine. Maybe I’m in the mood for historical fiction. This is a dual time story – the present and two thousand years earlier at the time of Caractacus, king of the British tribes during a battle with the invading Romans.
  • An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. A friend gave me this one saying it’s a wonderful book. Again, (paraphrased) from the back cover – this is a book about love, music and loss – “the power of music to transform human experience.”
  • Maybe romantic comedy with The Sex Life of My Aunt by Mavis Cheek – “a modern morality tale … about the age-old conflict between love and money.”
  • Or how about Firmin: Adventures of  Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage. Fimin is a rat, a literary rat living in the basement of a bookstore, who develops the ability to read.

Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin:Book Notes

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I included Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin in a Weekly Geeks post on unreviewed books and Deb asked: Is ‘Knots and Crosses’ the first Rebus novel you’ve read? How important is it to you to read such a series in order? Does it matter? The Rebus novels, to me, are as much about Rankin’s development of his character as they are puzzles/crimes to be solved.

Eva asked: Is Knots and Crosses more of a mystery or a thriller?

Knots and Crosses is the first of the Rebus books, but it is not the first one I’ve read. I’ve also watched many of the TV dramas, although I don’t remember this one. I think it is better to read them in the order they were written because the character of Rebus evolves throughout the series. In Knots and Crosses various facts about his past are revealed, which helped me understand events in the later books. And it’s definitely more of a mystery than a thriller.

Briefly it’s about the search for the killer of young girls, set in Edinburgh. Rebus receives anonymous letters containing knotted string and matchstick crosses – a puzzle that is connected with his time in the SAS, that only he can solve. It’s fast paced and I did work out who the killer is before the end of the book, but that only added to my satisfaction.

Knots and Crosses is in an omnibus edition, Rebus: the Early Years, containing the first three Rebus books and a short introduction in which Rankin explains how he came to write the Rebus books:

I wanted to update Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to 1980s Edinburgh. My idea was: cop as good guy (Jekyll), villain as bad guy (Hyde). So I wrote Knots and Crosses. I was living in a room in a ground-floor flat in Arden Street, so my hero, John Rebus, had to live across the road. When the book was published, I found to my astonishment that everyone was saying that I’d written a whodunnit, a crime novel. I think I’m still the only crime writer I know who hadn’t a clue about the genre before setting out.

I’m now reading the second Rebus book –  Hide and Seek.

The Falls – Ian Rankin

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

The Falls (Inspector Rebus, #12)

I loved The Falls by Ian Rankin.  This is set in Edinburgh where a university student Philippa Balfour, known as ‘Flip’ to her friends and family has disappeared.  DI Rebus and his colleagues have just two leads to go on – a carved wooden doll found in a tiny coffin at The Falls, Flip’s home village, and an Internet game involving solving cryptic clues. Rebus concentrates on the tiny coffin and finds a whole series of them have turned up over the years dating back to 1836 when 17 were found on Arthur’s Seat, the extinct volcano within Holyrood Park, east of Edinburgh Castle. DC Siobhan Clarke meanwhile tries to solve the cryptic clues.

There are many things I liked about this book – the the interwoven plots, throwing up several suspects; the historical references to Burke and Hare, the 19th century resurrectionists; the spiky relationship between Rebus and his new boss Gill Templeton; Siobhan Clarke whose liking for doing things independently matches Rebus’s own maverick ways; and above all the setting in and around Edinburgh. All the way through I kept changing my mind about “who did it” and it was only just before the denoument that I worked it out.  This is a very satisfying book and I’m looking forward to reading more Rebus books very soon.