"The Rise" by Ian Rankin

The Rise is a luxury residential building facing London’s Hyde Park. Units start at about 10 million pounds. To no one’s surprise, while all of its residences are owned, few are occupied. Corporations own a few for investments. Foreigners own a few as safe havens. The developer lives in a penthouse on the top floor. 

When the body of the security guard (called a “concierge”) is found in the lobby, the suspects look to be a relatively small group of people. A Middle Eastern princess and her bodyguards. The building’s developer. The wife of a known and much-sought gangster. A young actress whose best days may already be behind her. A Russian oligarch.

 

Detective Sergeant Gish pulls the night call for the murder. She’s working with Detective Inspector Jack Milton, a few months from retirement. Their investigation takes them into the worlds of art, gangsters, crime, affairs, and more. And it is Gish who will slowly but methodically discover what happened. 

 

The Rise is a short story by acclaimed Scottish writer Ian Rankin, author of the Detective John Rebus stories. While it’s described as a short story, it might be more accurate to call it a short-short novel. At 86 pages, it’s one long short story.

 

Ian Rankin

Rankin is an international No. 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.

 

Short story or short-short novel, The Rise is an entertaining and gripping story. One wonders if it’s the beginning of a new detective series. If so, it will be something of a branching out from Rankin’s home territory of Scotland, the setting for his Rebus stories and novels. It has the classic Rebus touches – the plodding and exhaustive police investigation, the back alleyways those investigations can discover, and something of a surprise ending.

 

Related:

 

Ian Rankin’s Standing in Another Man’s Grave.

 

Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin.

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Gaza Hostage Crisis is an American Hostage Crisis – Armin Rosen at The Free Press.

 

Murders for October – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine on new mystery novels. 

 

Watney Market and Watney Street, Shadwell – A London Inheritance.

"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.

Ian Rankin’s “Standing in Another Man’s Grave”

Ian Rankin is one of the best authors of police procedurals writing today. A few years back, he retired his chief protagonist, Detective Inspector John Rebus, Rebus having reached mandatory retirement age. Fans mourned. Rankin kept writing, just not about Rebus.

Rebus is back, and Standing in Another Man’s Grave is a grand story.

Rebus is not the most sympathetic of heroes. He’s always disheveled, looking like he slept in his clothes (and he often does). He somehow manages to subsist on a diet of cigarettes, alcohol, and “crisps” (chips). He’s in trouble with his superiors more often than not, and manages to remain politically incorrect in an era of political correctness run amuck. He often consorts with organized crime figures. Even he recognizes what a dinosaur he is.

The problem he, Rebus gets results. Rebus solves crimes. And it’s hard to argue with success.

The mandatory retirement age has changed, and Rebus finds himself back in police service, assigned to a dead-end department for unsolved crimes. He’s hoping to return to regular police work; rumor has it that he’s applied for a position.

A teenaged girl has gone missing. Her family has ties to organized crime elements. Rebus thinks the disappearance may be similar to others from years before. Subsequent events in the investigation probe him right, and he’s “attached” (temporarily assigned) to the main investigation. Non-orthodox police work ensues.

Part of the enjoyment of reading an Ian Rankin novel is to watch Rebus resist approved police procedures, maneuver around his superiors, flout the rules, make mistakes, overlook the obvious, and discover what others don’t see. A Rebus novel is often less about a crime being investigated and more about how John Rebus in involved in a crime being investigated.

The investigation of the missing girl moves forward, aided and abetted by the internet. When bodies are found in a mass grave, the investigation becomes surrounded by a media circus. And in spite of the opposition of everyone he’s working with, and being ordered off the team, Rebus begins to close in on a suspect.

Standing in Another Man’s Grave is tightly written and fast-paced. The often cited Scot names, places and words don’t distract (a good map of Scotland will help). In the hands of a lesser writer, all of the Scot references might have been troublesome.

We end the book as we begin it – watching John Rebus, recognizing and understanding his all-too-obvious flaws, and cheering him on to prevail over villains, his own police department, gangsters and thugs. We admire his iconoclasm, his natural tendency to resist authority, and his impatience with bureaucracy. John Rebus is us.

And we’re glad he’s back.