The king of tartan noir
Ian Rankin’s celebrated detective John Rebus is a hard talking whisky man. Jefferson Chase introduces him to a new audience
British readers wonât need much of an introduction to Ian Rankin and his alter ego detective chief inspector John Rebus. The Rebus series is not only afixture in the bestseller lists; several installments have also been filmed for television dramas.
But the Rankin bandwagon is only just starting to get rolling outside the United Kingdom, and Iâd like to jump on it and beat the drum for this talented Scotsman, described by American crime writer and violence addict James Ellroy as the king of âtartan noirâ
Tartan noir? Well yes. Rebus is Edinburgh through and though, and that includes, of course, a taste for single malts, preferably in that cityâs Oxford Bar.
In The Falls, one of Rankinâs more recent works, Rebus spends a good portion of the novel in various states of inebriation and even turns up drunk at one of the main suspectsâ apartment.
Rebus had accepted a black coffee from David Costello, popped two paracetamol from their foil shroud and washed them down. Middle of the
night, but Costello hadnât been asleep. Heâd made for an off-licence at some point: the bag was lying on the floor, the half-bottle of Bellâs sitting not far from it, top missing but only a couple of decent measures down. It was a non-drinkerâs idea of how you handled a crisis â you drank whisky, but you had to buy some first, and no point lashing out on a whole bottle.
As you can see, The Falls is tightly plottedâ in both senses of the word.
The story revolves around the m.....
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By Jefferson Chase
Section : Whisky Literature
Page number : 35
