The impossible world of DI John Rebus. A London Review of Books essay surveys Ian Rankin’s appealing, encyclopedic series of crime novels featuring a gritty Scottish detective.

The sheer

range of subjects treated in the novels is one of the keys to their

interest. John Rebus, born in irritation at the self-ghettoising of

the literary novel, grew into a highly effective tool for describing

and engaging with modern Scotland. Rankin does not indulge

any temptation to play formal games with his character. There is

no ludic or ironic component to the series, just as there is none

to Rebus himself; the books do not experiment with the

crime-novel form, and do not make any kind of distancing or

Post-Modern gestures towards it. A writer who began by trying

to write a book his father might want to read found himself, after

the publication of Dead Souls, occupying eight of the top ten

positions in the Scottish bestseller list.