Ian Rankin - "The Complaints"

As promised in my last review, I'm going back to Ian Rankin's first Malcolm Fox novel - 2009's The Complaints - in light of the very welcome return of John Rebus. In other words, do the standalone Fox investigations (The Complaints and 2011's The Impossible Dead) stand up by themselves?

The Complaints is, if anything, more of the "complex internal affairs investigation" model of a novel than Impossible Dead is. Most viewers of neo-noir television or film will know the outline - moral ambiguity from the top down, people constantly setting each other up and double-crossing each other and a flawed hero who wants the side of "right" to prevail but has to resort to underhand methods. Such is the novel we have here.
The investigation begins on the tail-end of a success for Fox and his team. Glenn Heaton, a corrupt officer in a neighbouring force, has been suspended pending a trial for his willingness to take bribes from small-time criminals. No sooner has the ink dried on this report, but Fox is given a new investigation - once again directed at one of the force's own. A young detective called Jamie Breck has been identified as having paid a "membership fee" to join a child exploitation website. While Breck hasn't contributed any images (the other half of the membership process), Fox's assignment is to find out whether this has any other explanation, such as fraud.
So far, so simple. Rankin's plots, of course, are never that. Fox's younger sister, Jude, is in an abusive relationship and her partner, Vince Faulkner, disappears after breaking her arm. Faulkner, soon enough, is found dead and Fox is informed as a member of the family...by none other than Jamie Breck.
Fox has occasionally suggested to Jude that she leave Faulkner, and he and his colleagues Naysmith and Kaye have investigated Faulkner's past south of the border, a concern which comes back to haunt them when Fox finds himself in the frame as a potential suspect in Faulkner's murder.

From this promising beginning, however, the plot increasingly veers out of control. Fox is presented as a straight-laced - almost stick-in-the-mud, frankly - type in the opening chapters, but when it suits the purposes of the novel, Rankin is happy to have him pull rank on Breck and buddy up with the younger detective to investigate the crime. Admittedly, this creates the requisite dramatic tension (Breck needing to be sure that Fox is innocent while conducting his own investigation, Fox trying to clear his name while keeping an eye on Breck), but this is done in a very ham-fisted manner.
While there are occasional moments when Breck and his colleagues - some of whom are friends of Heaton, and hold Fox's role in their friend's downfall against him - openly suggest that things "don't look good" for Fox, it's very clear in the "investigative" scenes that the identity of the killer lies elsewhere. Moreover, Fox being a teetotaller, Rankin doesn't even have the luxury of giving him an "alcohol-induced haze" at the key moment of Faulkner's death. We therefore know that Fox is entirely innocent as well.
The worst that can be said of Fox is that he's happy to get in the way of the investigation, which he duly does. This isn't Rebus' amusing willingness to conduct matters "his way" so much as it is a genuinely unintelligent action on Fox's part. Thus, both Fox and Breck find themselves suspended from duty and having to establish the truth of what turns out to be a very murky plot as citizens.

And it is this very murkiness of the plot that is really The Complaints' downfall, I feel. Rankin has clearly come up with a very cleverly-worked Edinburgh underworld, with corruption stretching from organised crime to government and elsewhere, but Fox and Breck's discovery of these links has far too much to do with coincidence and not nearly enough to do with careful investigation. Fox "conveniently" knows a detective at another station (who "conveniently" owes him a favour), and surprises him at a cafe to get some details from him. The detective's sister just happens to be an investigative reporter who can find out more information. And so on.
The original leg of the plot - Breck and the child-abuse website - is largely forgotten as this wide-ranging and rather unorthodox investigation goes on, only to rear its head towards the end of the novel as part of a completely bizarre and never properly-explained double-cross. Admittedly, child abuse isn't a great topic with which to sell books, but this really does come close to a violation of Chehkov's famous dictum of the gun (if there's one on the wall, it has to be used somewhere along the line), which is a shame given Rankin's typically tight plotting.

Rankin also seems to try too hard to give Fox a private life. Rebus' family life - or lack thereof - is a strand running through his more famous creation's adventures, but that builds up organically (his young daughter gradually grows up, for example). Fox is saddled with Jude's dysfunctional relationship and an elderly father from the outset, and given that the former is reduced in many ways to being a "plot token", it all feels very artificial.
Seemingly to compensate, Fox takes an interest in the two female characters given the most air-time in the plot. The journalist - Linda Dearborn - is manifestly younger than he is, but keeps turning up in Fox's thoughts. Meanwhile, one of the team dealing with child-abuse online - Annie Inglis - passes for a love-interest for roughly a third of the plot before almost being written out in what feels like a fit of authorial pique. Her explanation for some of the more obscure parts of the back-story to the plot is missing several parts and is never adequately explained.

All in all, The Complaints feels like Rankin trying much too hard to recapture what worked best with Rebus and failing quite badly. Fox is a wooden character, along with most of the rest of his team. While Breck is likeable enough, he doesn't make a return in The Impossible Dead and seems not to play a role anywhere later (although Rankin has pulled this trick before, so never say never). Faulkner as a murder victim doesn't seem particularly pleasant either - although that's hardly a pre-requisite - but we never really meet him as a person, which is a problem when his domestic situation is as central to the plot as it ostensibly is.
Could Rebus have investigated this instead? No. For a start, Rebus' track record would never have seen him anywhere near Fox's team, and this is patently an "internal affairs" style of case. That said, this is in many ways an investigation which could have been done by more well-rounded characters. As much of the investigation is done by "civilians", essentially, perhaps this would have been a better opportunity for an investigative-journalist character, rather than Fox.

One star, sadly.

Ian Rankin - "Standing In Another Man's Grave"

"Rebus Is Back" reads the cover of my edition of Rankin's 2012 novel, and back he most certainly is. The most famous member of the Lothian and Borders police - having apparently been retired after 2007's Exit Music - is once again investigating crimes.

The question of how to deal with the age of a series character is one which a number of novelists have had to address, particularly with the rise in popularity of policemen as protagonists. Rankin has admitted in the past that he genuinely didn't expect John Rebus to prove as popular as he has, which meant that with every case he investigated, he drew closer to mandatory retirement age.
In Rankin's favour, simply "retiring" a character is probably a less controversial move than what must still rate as the most infamous attempt at ending a series - Conan Doyle's dramatic scene involving Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty throwing each other off the Reichenbach Falls - as such an act required rather a bit of "un-doing" when popular sentiment demanded Holmes' return, courtesy of a very hasty explanation or two.
Agatha Christie, too, faced a similar difficulty with her two most famous sleuths. Hercule Poirot had already left the Belgian police by the time he investigated The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and by some counts must have been well past his hundredth birthday by the time of Curtain, his final case. Miss Marple's indeterminate (but still advanced) age may have saved her from the same fate that befalls Poirot, whose faculties are failing him, but it is important to note that the final adventures of both detectives were written much earlier than they were published. Rankin hasn't had this luxury, at least that we know of.

In between Exit Music and Grave, Rankin gave us two novels featuring Malcolm Fox. The Impossible Dead I've reviewed previously and - in a break with my usual custom - I'll go back to re-read The Complaints shortly, as I genuinely feel that it's only with Rebus that Rankin's imagination shines through.

Grave begins - appropriately enough - at the funeral of one of Rebus' former colleagues. On his return from the gravesite, Rebus hears a song by one of his favourite singers which appears to feature the lyric "Standing in another man's grave", only to be a mondegreen for "another man's rain". This mishearing prompts Rebus to wonder about his hearing and his age in general, which may well rate as one of Rankin's few concessions to his character's age.
Rebus, we learn, has found work as a civilian member of Lothian and Borders' Cold Case Unit, a team staffed by former police still with a strong desire to contribute to the force they were forced to retire from. Fans of the television series New Tricks will doubtless recognise the general outline of the place, although the strongly career-oriented leader of his team is perhaps an invention from the whole cloth.
The unit looks to be on borrowed time, with the decision having been taken to centralise cold-case investigations. While this is a clear signal to Rebus' colleagues that full retirement is the next step, Rebus himself is aware that the mandatory retirement age has recently been increased, and is looking to rejoin the police for another few years, much to the chagrin of his supervisor and former colleagues.

By chance, Rebus is contacted by Nina Hazlitt, a woman whose daughter disappeared during the Millennium celebrations and who is certain that a list of seemingly-unconnected disappearances are linked. It emerges that another such disappearance took place only a matter of weeks ago, and the investigation has been assigned to none other than Rebus' old protege Siobhan Clarke and her colleagues at Rebus' old stamping ground of Gaythorne Square.
Despite the reservations of a number of Clarke's team - including, for a while, Clarke herself - Rebus finds himself "attached" to the investigation of the most recent disappearance and trying to make sense of a mysterious photo sent by a number of the women before they disappeared. Of course, Rebus being Rebus, he also finds himself causing a level of disruption to Clarke's office and her relationship with her superior officer James Page (who for a while has to put up with Rebus' constant references to Led Zeppelin, despite being manifestly too young to have realised that he shares a name with Jimmy Page of that iconic group).
Rankin has always taken considerable delight in the humour which comes from Rebus' "old-school" approach to investigations - cultivating sources on both sides of the law, not shying away from physical violence, drinking in slightly too many pubs - and the "cleaner" methods favoured by those above him, and this is a strong theme once again in the plot here. Page - who is dismissed at one point as "an office manager" - is driven to the point of distraction by Rebus' willingness to turn up in precisely the wrong place at precisely the right time.

Importantly, though, there are a number of key subplots in play throughout Grave. When Rebus left the scene in Exit Music, it seemed that "Big Ger" Cafferty, his organised-crime nemesis, was dying in hospital. Early in Grave, we learn that Cafferty has recovered, but is finding that his own methods of work aren't in line with the newer approaches favoured by younger criminals. It appears - and this is something for which we can definitely hope in future instalments - that both Cafferty and Rebus will have a new nemesis in Edinburgh's underworld by the end of the novel.
Also, Malcolm Fox makes an appearance as well. While his ability to carry a novel by himself is up for debate, as a supporting figure he's far from a bad one. Still incontrovertibly on the side of the "good guys", Fox is concerned by Rebus' willingness to share an occasional drink with Cafferty, and even more so when it seems that his unorthodox methods are once again rubbing off on Clarke, who appears to have been tagged as a "rising star" now that she's seemingly freed herself from Rebus' influence. There is even a risk that Fox - who surprises none of Rebus' frequent readers by warning him that there's an immense file of his indiscretions - might have an impact on Rebus' return to the force.

With all of these balls in the air, something most likely has to give in this novel, and I'll admit that the final revelation and the moment at which the "bad guy" is punished felt a bit grafted-on. Even with around 30 pages to go, I had honestly expected this plot to be continued in the next novel, and yet things do wrap up to some extent by the time the final page ends.
That said, Standing in Another Man's Grave has a lot of territory to cover and more to set up - more on both counts than most of the Rebus novels before his retirement. While Rankin has a history of creating solid supporting characters who don't always carry over to the next book he writes (Cafferty, Clarke and the less-used Gill Templer are the three best exceptions to the rule), he's given himself a very strong cast to pick from next time. Even Fox and his team would seem to be in a stronger light as foils or antagonists to Rebus, and a repeat performance from them wouldn't go astray.

The fact that this is a real return to form is also borne out in the crackling dialogue. The Complaints and The Impossible Dead both feature Rankin's snappy one-liners from many of the characters, but his style of humour only seems to work properly in the mouth of a maverick policeman, rather than a goody-goody like Fox and his team. Rebus' dialogue with a doorman at a sleazy nightclub, for example, is Rankin at his best, as is a three-way dialogue among Page, Clarke and Rebus as they leave a particularly gruesome crime scene.

Frankly, if this isn't Ian Rankin at his best, it's Rankin very close to it. Four stars.

Donna Leon - "Drawing Conclusions"

Guido Brunetti's twentieth outing sees us return to Venice once again, and this time at the end of autumn, allowing Donna Leon to indulge in her trademark languid descriptions of that beautiful city as the days shorten and winter creeps in.

Drawing Conclusions opens with a woman returning from a holiday in the south of the country and discovering that her downstairs neighbour had collected her post. On attempting to collect it, she discovers that her neighbour has died of what looks like a heart attack. As there is some blood on the floor, she panics and calls the police - enter Brunetti.
Brunetti has often shown considerable tenacity in previous investigations, refusing to believe that inquiries should be stopped for any reason, and does so again here. He and Vianello wonder whether the elderly neighbour had "been caused to have a heart attack", particularly as their medical colleague Rizzardi is more evasive than normal in his discussions of causes of death. Thus begins an unusual series of inquiries, which often feel designed more to put Brunetti at ease rather than solve any potential crime. The investigation grows to encompass everything from refuges for victims of domestic violence, illegal immigrants and the "guests" of a private nursing home as the revelations gradually appear.

Leon's customary sense of humour is strongly evident throughout the novel. We first meet Brunetti being harangued by Vice-Questore Patta - not because of something he's done or failed to do - but because wine from the north of Italy is (apparently) not as good as that from the south. Brunetti is described as secretly wishing that the restaurant he's eating at would be attacked, so that in the confusion he could at least wound his superior.
Later, Patta's fury at not being informed (at approximately 3 in the morning) of the identity of the deceased knows no bounds. Brunetti is puzzled by this, until Patta explains that the woman in question was the mother of Patta's son's former vet - which is simultaneously an entirely plausible connection in Venice and proof of Patta's view of the world. There is also a very memorable exchange between Brunetti and the ambiguously-moral Signorina Elettra, in which the latter takes pity on government agencies with poor electronic filing systems, as well as explaining that she has carefully set an unpopular officer up as the "real" source of the hacking she has done over the years.

In many ways, though, Drawing Conclusions turns into a series of scenes in need of a plot. Leon's novels don't tend to rely on coincidence too much, but the eventual explanation of a motive feels quite tenuous here, as it deals with a completely unrelated series of events which have never been explained in the previous novels but which all the characters appear intimately familiar with. The final scenes of a Brunetti investigation tend to have an emotional "pull" of varying sorts - frequently, the criminal turns out to be unable to be prosecuted for all manner of reasons - but Brunetti's kid-glove confrontation of a suspect here feels more mawkish than dramatic, too.
There is also a very long exploration of domestic violence which only adds tangentially to the plot. Brunetti's investigations have touched on this issue before, and the scenes here give at least some indication of being "leftovers" from Leon's earlier novels which have been added into the current investigation to pad it out a bit.
Even the final resolution of the plot remains slightly obscure. The exact nature of the crime or crimes committed is never entirely clear - and neither, in fact, is whether they were committed at all. Brunetti's willingness to let the matter slide is admirable, and he's done that sort of thing before, but the fact that there may not strictly have been a "matter" in the first place (one potential crime is well outside the statute of limitations, at least) seems contrived.

All up, Drawing Conclusions is not Leon at her best. Over a series of more than twenty novels (she has published number 27 this year), a misstep like this can be readily excused. If nothing else, it reminds the reader just how good the best entries in the series are.

3.5 stars.