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'The Falls' by Ian Rankin

Books in Brief

Thursday, January 10, 2002

By Michael Helfand

	The Falls By Ian Rankin St. Martin's Press $24.95

Philippa Balfour, the fiancee of a rich, dissolute ne’er-do-well, disappears from her Edinburgh apartment. Detective Inspector John Rebus and his squad can’t find the woman and don’t know if there is a suspect, usual or not, to round up.

There is, in fact, nothing usual about the few clues or the information they do eventually turn up, which is not unusual for these Scottish sleuths. In fact, it’s typical for Ian Rankin’s 14 previous books ,which feature Rebus, his interesting crew and, especially, the city of Edinburgh.

The series has been praised by many critics for its well-constructed plots, offbeat characters and vivid social realism. Rankin’s latest continues to demonstrate these fine qualities, although there is an Agatha Christie-like element of the plot involving an anonymous Internet games man who leads the police on a hunt for information with riddles for clues.

But this is only one part of an investigation which involves much of Edinburgh and the surrounding countryside and reaches back in time to incidents involving tiny hand-carved dolls and caskets which may or may not be related to Philippa’s disappearance.

The society Rankin shows us is as bleak and grim as those described by Scottish novelists Robert Louis Stevenson, James Hogg and George Douglas Brown (the little-known author of the brilliantly grim “The House With Green Shutters”).

Rebus’ life is the prime example. Divorced and lonely, he lives in a flat he has never bothered to organize and spends most of his nights drinking Scotch. (If you want to learn about the wide variety of single malts, this is the book for you.)

Then he goes home and sleeps in a chair. Think a permanently depressed and needy version of Inspector Morse who listens to rock instead of Rachmaninoff and you’ll get the picture. Of course he’s brilliant, but his health and psyche are fragile and he drinks too much, sometimes shows up at work drunk, has trouble with authority and is, basically, a mystery to himself -- one he can’t solve.

But Rebus is only one case in point. There is a breadth and density of social detail that gives contemporary Edinburgh a life as dark and harsh as its old quarter. One critic has described the Rebus novels as “tartan noir.” It’s probably more accurate to describe them as a black watch. And Rankin is a writer worth watching!

(The reviewer teaches English at the University of Pittsburgh.)