"Rather Be the Devil" by Ian Rankin

John Rebus, formerly a detective inspector with the police in Edinburgh, is retired. He’s fighting a nagging cough that erupts into serious hacking. He had to get a spot on his lung biopsied, but he’d rather not think about it. He has a romance going with Deborah Quant, the coroner, and under her influence he’s given up smoking (mostly) and is trying to achieve a healthier lifestyle.

He becomes intrigued with an old murder case, a cold case of a woman who married well and played around even more well. Proof of any suspect’s guilt was never found, but the list of suspects included a popular singer, his manager and the woman’s former lover, her husband, and perhaps half a dozen other people. Rebus has his former detective sergeant borrow the cold case file, and he eventually has a talk with the detective who was involved in the investigation and is now a doorman for nightclubs. Less than a day after the conversation, the man turns up dead.

The police are also investigating a missing, possibly dead, financial management guy, who appears to have had ties to organized crime, including the up-and-coming new boss of Edinburgh. The new boss gets attacked by someone with a baseball bat, and suspicion falls on the down-and-going crime boss Gerald Cafferty, Rebus’s old acquaintance, nemesis, and sometime cooperative informer. 

Ian Rankin

Rebus suspects all of these cases, including the cold case, may be connected. But the powers that be in Police Scotland, bean counters, degree-holders, and ambitious professionals, are more aggravated with Rebus’s involvement than appreciative of his help. Didn’t this guy retire? And how does he keep getting past the front desk of police headquarters, and helping himself to tea?

Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin is a classic John Rebus story. Rebus may be older and occasionally ailing, but he’s lost none of his instincts for where a crime might have come from, and where it might be headed.

Rankin is an international Number 1 bestselling crime novelist and the author of 40 books, including John Rebus novels, short stories, non-fiction, and other works. He’s received an Edgard Award, a Gold Dagger Award for fiction, a Diamond Dagger Award for career excellence, and the Chandler-Fulbright Award (an international award funded by the estate of detective writer Raymond Chandler). He lives in Edinburgh.

Rather Be the Devil is John Rebus (and his author) in top form. Retired doesn’t mean dead, although Rebus keeps an eye out for his back. The story if a solid mix of a cold case, organized crime, and motives old and new.

Related:

My review of Ian Rankin’s Standing in Another Man’s Grave.

Dancing King Stories: Christmas in Edinburgh

In my novel Dancing King, Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes have something of a break from London, when they go to Scotland for Christmas (with a slight interruption with Michael’s sermon at Southwark Cathedralin London). It’s a relatively short part in the narrative, but two important things happen.

First, Michael has a conversation in the stable with his guardian father, Ian McLaren. Ian and his wife Iris were surprised – shocked is a better word – to discover they become the guardians of a six-year-old boy. Childless themselves, they raised him as their own child, and he still calls them “Ma and Da.” And Michael gets his degree from the University of Edinburgh, which is where he meets American exchange students and twins David and Sarah Hughes in the first novel in the series, Dancing Priest.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: An Cala in Scotland, the model for McLarens, the home of Michael Kent-Hughes’s guardians.

‘On Glasgow and Edinburgh’ by Robert Crawford

Scotland beckons.

We’ve taken vacations to the United Kingdom for the last four years, and focused on London and southern England. But given the fact that my first novel has scenes set in Edinburgh, which I’ve never visited except via the internet, Scotland has started exerting a stronger pull. After reading Robert Crawford’s On Glasgow and Edinburgh, the pull has become irresistible.

This is not traditional travel writing. This is more like a well-researched, filled-with-fascinating-facts love letter to two cities, which, Crawford points out in a long introduction, maintain a usually friendly rivalry for pre-eminence in Scotland.

What Crawford does for both cities is to take the areas where most visitors would see – the historical areas, the museums, the shopping districts, the historical neighborhoods – and then provide a detailed look at where they came from, who lived there, what life was like, and interesting facts (like murders and trials). The result is a rich tapestry of understanding, a look into life and people across different historical eras, and how these two cities developed as they did.

This is the kind of book you read before you visit. Perhaps you even bring it with you to consult during your visit.

Edinburgh Castle

You walk with Crawford on streets and neighborhoods, like the Royal Mile in Edinburgh and Buchanan Street in Glasgow, and you find history, commerce, art, literature, architecture, science, medicine, and people. You discover who built the universities, where the great art collections and libraries came from, and how Edinburgh became a royal capital and Glasgow a manufacturing one (and why both revere the poet Robert Burns).

And you discover Edinburgh’s poetry library, and Glasgow’s Mitchell Library. You learn who it was who pioneered what today we called an English literature course (Adam Smith, he who wrote The Wealth of Nations and the “father” of capitalism). You meet Mary Queen of Scots, Lord Kelvin, Dr. Joseph Lister (pioneer of antiseptic surgery), the murderers Burke and Hare who supplied cadavers to Edinburgh’s medical school, the architects, artists, sculptors, tobacco merchants, and shipbuilders. Best of all, Crawford does this in a well-written narrative; this is no laundry list of facts and figures but a story, a great story of two cities which have had a tremendous influence worldwide.

Robert Crawford

Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St. Andrews, and a fellow of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy. He’s the author of The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot (1991), and well as several works on Scottish literature, including Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination 1314-2014, The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography (2009), and Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature (2009). He is also a published poet, with six poetry collections, including Talkies (1992), Masculinity (1996), Spirit Machines (1999), Full Volume (2008), The Tip of My Tongue (2011), and Testament (2014). Earlier this year, he published Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land, which I reviewed at Tweetspeak Poetry.

On Glasgow and Edinburgh is an informative, entertaining delight.

Yes, Scotland beckons.

Top photograph: The main building of Glasgow University on Gilmorehill. Photograph of Edinburgh Castle by Kevin Casper via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

"Dancing Priest" -- The Writing Process

It started as an image evoked by a song. The image was a priest dancing on a beach. The song was “Luna Rossa” sung by Greek tenor Mario Frangoulis.

This started in October 2002. At the time, I was working as an independent consultant. The recession had taken its toll on my consulting business, though, and I would soon start to look for a return to regular employment. In the meantime, that dancing priest kept buzzing around my head.

It buzzed for three years. I essentially wrote the story – the entire novel and then some – in my head. Nothing went to paper or the computer screen.

I started mentally writing the story because of having trouble falling asleep. I began to think about the dancing priest, and what he was doing dancing on a beach. I made him part of a tour group that included a young American woman. The group had a dinner in a restaurant. The priest, an Anglican from Britain, and the American woman started a mild flirtation at dinner. I imagined a conversation between the two of them embedded within the conversation by the entire group at dinner.

The story grew and changed. The tour group disappeared. It was just the priest and the woman accidentally meeting and having dinner together. Then the beach disappeared. The priest became a young man studying for the priesthood in Scotland, the woman an American exchange student.

Two years into this “mental writing” process, I took up road biking. A few weeks later, so did the priest, except he rode for his university’s team and was a contender for the British Olympic team. By this time, he had acquired a full-blown history – born in England and raised by Scottish guardians. The mental writing at night before falling asleep continued.

Looking back, I can tell when this whole exercise started to get truly serious – early 2005. How do I know that? By the dates on documents I was beginning to collect for research. When my wife would ask about the pile of news stories on Britain, I would mumble something about a “writing project” – I wasn’t ready to tell anyone, including her, that I was working on a novel.

In the summer of 2005, the mental writing process – and the story – had become so involved that I needed a way to keep track of it. I began to make notes and outlines. And then, one day in the fall of 2005, I started writing the story on my computer.

Once I started, it was almost as if I couldn’t stop. The words came pouring out of my head, except it wasn't a “stream of consciousness” exercise – I had been writing and editing and rewriting the story in my head for three years. It flowed and flowed, and the flow became a torrent. By the time I finished, I had a manuscript of more than 150,000 words – closer to two novels than to one.

So I did what any writer would do – I split it roughly in half, and started rewriting the first half, over and over again. Rewriting, and new ideas, caused the first half to creep back up to 100,000 words, and so I began to edit and cut. (One of the cut scenes, the story of how the hero’s parents first met, is the story “Gratitude” I posted on Nov. 17.)

By this time, given the amount of time I was spending typing, I had told my wife what I was up to. At some point, she read an early version of the manuscript. I asked her just to read it for the story – and not edit it (she’s a first-class editor but at that point I had not done any serious editing myself).

She started reading. Some days into it, she called me at work and left a message. She was in tears. She had reacted to a certain scene in the way I had hoped she would, the way I had hoped any reader would. (The publisher – a man – had the same reaction to the same scene when he read it.)

I spent a good year on rewriting and editing. In the meantime, the story kept growing and developing. I completed the second manuscript, and there are six others in various stages of creation – from a 4,000-word story summary to a 70,000-word manuscript.

I went to a writer’s conference, where I met with an editor who had critiqued a section. We introduced ourselves, sat down, and then she said, “What happened to Henry and Anna? I have to know!” I took that as a good sign.

At the same conference, I met with an agent, who threw up all over it. “It won’t work,” he said. “No one will accept a romance like that. And it needs to be vampire chick lit,” a reference to the Stephanie Meyer “Twilight” series that had just become all the rage. “Look,” he said, “I just signed a multi-book deal for an author who’s writing about a woman who’s a late night radio talk show host – and also a werewolf. That’s what’s publishers are buying.”

I sent carefully constructed queries and pitch letters to all the usual agents, and received all the usual form rejections. Some of the queries were major projects – and I concluded that agents are trying to discourage as many people as possible.

I kept writing and editing. Then one day, a friend who had published a book himself and was working on a children’s book asked to read the manuscript. The world didn’t change overnight, but it began to change.

Images, from top: University of Edinburgh; men’s road race at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing; part of the ceremony at the ordination of Anglican priests; mission style church (similar to the one in the novel). All are elements of "Dancing Priest."