2007-12-01 Classic how-to-write-crime novel.

This is my first Rankin novel. I've read his collections of short crime stories, and have found them excellent, so I decided to give this a go.

The first thing that strikes me about Rankin is his excellence as a stylist - the prose is sharp, clean, and everything means something. Too many crime novels just use lots of padding until the next plot movement. With Rankin, something is always going on, whether he's layering up his subplots, deepening characters etc. In essence, everything that a good short story writer does - just goes to show you that writing shorts is excellent practice for novel writing....

Rebus as a character is decent enough - Rankin manages to avoid the stereotypical flaws that pervade a lot of `bad' crime fiction. Rebus is just a normal kind of copper, a bit cynical, but not cartoonishly so. He has normal relationships with women, drinks a bit but not too much. His normalness is refreshing, although he's deep enough to still feel some attachment to. It's a nice balance that Rankin carries off well.

Anyway, plot wise, this novel develops nicely. Rebus starts investigating the death of a young man, and finds himself getting embroiled in various dark and dirty things that are bubbling away under the surface. A minor niggle with this plot is that, while not complicated in itself, there are a lot of bad guys in the mix, and sometimes it's difficult to separate them, given that some are on the same side and some belong somewhere else and some overlap, and it's not really clear until right at the end who plays what role, when it gets explained to us. I think I would have like to be a bit clearer about everyone's roles a bit earlier. By the same token, it's not really a whodunnit, given that it's fairly obvious which organization dunnit so that which particular individual pulled the trigger doesn't really matter.

So, style wise, Rankin is about as a good as any crime writer as there is. Plot wise, I think this particular effort was a bit jumbled, although it moved along nicely and did develop logically. I can't bring myself to award five stars on merit, but four stars seem harsh, so he gets a full house by default. Five it is.