I really like Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels. I tend to read whichever ones I can find, and those are always the later ones. Recently I stumbled across the first two Rebus books – Knots and Crosses and Hide and Seek.
Reading Knots and Crosses was a weird experience (I have not read Hide and Seek yet) after having read all the later ones. The character of Rebus was very one-dimensional, and the story took a long time to get going. The storyline was rather simple and the book was short. Rebus was supposed to be a one-off character who died at the end of the book. He sounds a bit like Boris Johnson, constantly referring to classic literature such as Crime and Punishment and quoting the works of Shakespeare, while there is not much police procedure at all. He prays a lot and hardly drinks.
Rankin did not have immediate success with his books, and I imagine that gave him time to warm up as a writer, explore storylines, and flesh-out the characters. The later Rebus is not particularly likeable and has a fluid moral code, but he feels far more real, and one can understand how he became such a huge success. I bet – 25 Rebus novels later – Rankin is glad he did not kill him off at the end of Knots and Crosses after all.
I don’t normally think of successful writers learning as they go along. Somehow I have had the belief that they appear on the bestseller lists fully formed.
Next up – this one
