A QUESTION OF BLOOD

Ian Rankin

Orion £17.99 hbk/£10.99 tbo Rel: Aug 2003

Reviewed by

Bob Cartwright

Is there no end to this author’s talent? Or to his gall? Who else would see to it that his hero, the already existentially challenged John Rebus, had to spend the whole of a book with his arms encased in bandage, and totally dependent on his sidekicks, just so that he could shamelessly deliver a passage such as:

"The cigarette was tucked behind his right ear, and he pawed at it, not quite catching it as it fluttered to the ground, a gust sending it rolling. Stooped, eyes down, Rebus started following, and almost collided with a pair of legs. The cigarette had come to rest against the pointed toe of a gloss-black, ankle-length stiletto. The legs above the shoes were covered in ripped black fishnet tights. Rebus stood up straight. The girl could have been anything from thirteen to nineteen years old. Dyed black hair lay like straw against her head, Siouxsie Sioux style. Her face was deathly white, the eyes and lips painted black. She was wearing a black leather jacket over layers of gauzy black material.

‘Did you slash your wrists? She asked, staring at his bandages.

‘I probably will if you crush that cigarette."

But it’s not just the characterisation of Rebus, which probably has a rival only in Reg Hill’s Andy Dalziel. It’s not only the capacity to deliver lines which cleverly straddle pathos and humour. It’s also the capacity to deliver, time and again, plots and story lines which are totally unique. That’s what put Rankin and rebus right on top of the crime fiction tree, and keeps them there. And A Question of Blood sustains the high standards he has reached since Black and Blue. So why, you may well ask, did Rankin not figure in the Crime Writers Association Dagger nominations this year given that the judges were apparently disposed to indulge in a bit of second time round? Yes, you may well ask. I wonder how the judges would respond to that challenge.

However, to the book in hand which has John Rebus again in trouble with his superiors in the Ednburgh police force. They suspect that the scalds he claims he got from a too hot bath are really burns he received when he torched the kitchen of one Martin Fairstone, a nasty piece of Edinburgh gobshite who has been stalking Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clark, and given her the black eye which afflicts her for most of the book. While he’s not trying to get out from under the suspicion of killing Fairstone, John Rebus, ably assisted by Siobhan, investigates an apparently random shooting in a public school in South Queensferry which leaves two students dead, one more injured, and ends with the killer shooting himself. The killer is Lee Herdman, the owner of a local power boat business and like Rebus, ex-army with a spell in the SAS. Trying to find out just why Herdman carried out this supposedly motiveless crime leads Rebus to revisit his own experience with the Who Dares Wins mob, and to uncover the facts behind the loss of the helicopter in the Scottish Isles some years earlier while had crashed while carrying a number of British army intelligence bigwigs back to Northern Island.

All in all, it’s a story which only Ian Rankin would dare to touch, and only he could bring off with such consummate ease. It’s a book to grab for the total enjoyment of reading the best crime fiction around at the moment. En passant you can also see why sales of the Rebus series currently eclipse by miles those of any other. I wonder if his success had anything to do with the negligence of the CWA judges? Still, if it’s any compensation to Ian, the judges on both sides of the pond have also ignored the claims of George Pelecanos. Just goes to show how monumentally wrong judges can be.