Review: Ian Rankin's Knots & Crosses (1987)

 Avid readers of Ian Rankin are of course very familiar with the hardened Inspector John Rebus who is not averse to relying on brawn over brain. I encountered Rebus for the first time however, in the sixth novel in the series, Mortal Causes (1994). Reading Mortal Causes before Knots & Crosses led me to believe that I knew what to expect from a Rankin novel, but the liberal lacing of Rebus’s vulnerabilities stemming from his career before he started in the police force took me by surprise. Indeed, Knots & Crosses is the first in a long line of Rebus investigations, so backstory is something of a prerequisite for the first novel. But it was quite refreshing to be shown a character who is evidently a successor of the hard-boiled tradition having his vulnerabilities portrayed so openly.

With the reader becoming aware almost immediately of the child murderer plaguing Edinburgh, it is obvious from the very beginning that Rebus will have to draw from the personal details of his life to put a stop to the murderer. Rankin masterfully refrains from indulging the reader with the instant gratification of knowing Rebus’s background, and instead secretes small clues that challenge our preconceptions of Rebus himself and his possible connection to the murderer and his motivations. Moreover, in portraying most of the novel through the claustrophobic space of Rebus’s mind, the reader must look elsewhere for the information they desire. If one looks more closely at the descriptions made of Edinburgh, its bleak sensibility can be seen as a mirroring of Rebus’s loneliness and insecurities. Furthermore, by establishing Rebus’s reticent character from the outset of the novel, Rankin forces us as readers to look behind the verbal utterances, of which, in Rebus’s case at least, there are very few. Rankin’s renditions of the city therefore become integral to the reader’s perception of Rebus. The cold and lonely spaces that Rebus traverses through reveal an inner turmoil that he is at first reluctant to engage with. Outwardly, Rankin portrays Rebus as a man who would have everyone believe he had very few needs and desires, but by looking beneath the surface, the complexity of Rebus’s character is revealed. When Rebus meets these past demons however, he does not shut them out as his forefathers Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade would have done. Instead, he works on accepting these vulnerable moments as he is acutely aware of the impact they may have on the outcome of the case.

As the first instalment in the Rebus series, Rankin does well to establish the effects of the trauma his taciturn Inspector endured prior to his career in the police force, but I felt that the presence of frequent clichés is perhaps an aspect of the novel that dampens the psychological profiles Rankin was endeavouring to curate.

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Author Biography
Emily Farmer is currently an MA student, studying Crime and Gothic Fictions at Bath Spa University. With interests ranging from Sensationalist fiction to Scandinavian Noir, Emily’s most recent research has concerned the misplaced attention given to the perpetrators by true-crime narratives, as well as their constructions of “truth.”