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.
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