Reprinted from Green Man Review.
After 17 novels, a smattering of short stories, and 20 years sleuthing in Scotland’s seedy underbelly, Inspector Rebus at last takes on his final case. Like many of the novels from Rankin’s Rebus series (and almost certainly a majority of crime fiction generally), we begin with a body, crime scene tape, and a mystery, the same mystery, in the broadest sense, we’ve seen countless times before: who, how, why?
What makes this story special is not the crime, but the inspector himself. As our Rebus walks into this crime scene, he is only 10 days from retirement, and counting. As the chapters fly by and the days with them, we wonder if he can solve this last case in time, or if it will be one more maddening piece of unfinished business, one more loose end at the end of a long career with its share of disappointments.
I haven’t read all of Rankin’s books in this long-running series, far from it. I have read the first and (now) the last, plus enough in-between to see that for an old-school cop, the more things change, the more they stay the same. He’s gotten older, and perhaps only grudgingly wiser, but through it all, John Rebus is John Rebus: unshakably determined, often insubordinate, loose on proper procedure when the situation seems to require it, but ultimately a good cop, one of the best.
Presumably I don’t need to explain to anyone reading this how a detective story goes: mystery, clues, red herrings, climactic showdown, etc. The genre has a long pedigree, after all. I have to admit, though, I wondered how a long-established fictional detective career ends. After all, there have been a number of quintessential characters in this genre over the last 100+ years, but does anyone recall how they made their final bows?
Chandler’s Marlowe . . . no idea. I do remember Sir Conan Doyle’s solution when he tired of his famed character. The dreaded Moriarty, far from being a long-time nemesis as popularly believed, was created exclusively, it seems, as Holmes’ final challenge. The two of them finally killed each other in the very same story in which the criminal mastermind was first introduced. (Due to fan uproar and popular demand, Doyle, a few years later, revived Holmes, and continued the series.)
It’s not an easy thing to end a series like this. We can’t imagine Rebus in retirement, and, it seems, neither can he. I think Rankin takes the only approach he really can: focus on the task at hand, get the job done, and afterwards . . . who knows? This series has always been firmly rooted to the real world. In the real life Edinburgh police service, or any police organization, really, you don’t ever tie up all your loose ends. You just do the best you can and continue on.
Without revealing any plot details whatever, I can say that this last case proves as sordid, convoluted, and downright riveting as any that have come before. It’s all the more bittersweet, knowing it’s the last. But it’s a fitting end to a long career, and I’m happy Rebus received a proper send-off at the last.
(Little, Brown and Company, 2008)
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