The impressive blurb of simpering compliments for this, Ian Rankin’s latest and last offering from the Detective Inspector Rebus series, was very encouraging. Unfortunately this final product seems to churn out the tried and tired clique of the boozing, renegade detective kept in line by his curt and alert younger female sidekick. Exit Music sees DI Rebus approaching retirement and, unsurprisingly, stumbling across a particularly tricky murder case and winding up as a prime suspect. There follows the usual dance of his being ostracised from the force and burning the rule book by traipsing back alleys and stalking suspects to simultaneously clear his name and solve the murder in a few tidy chapters.
The huge success of the book is probably due to the rather more colourful TV tie-in series Rebus, though it is telling that the drama is ‘loosely based’ on Ian Rankin’s novels as, if Exit Music is any demonstration of his previous work (which I admit I have not read), the stories lack the suspense usually imperative in detective fiction. Nothing much actually happens in this book except a long and repetitive roll-call of suspects and lots of stuttering interviews to disguise the glaringly obvious guilty party who are (shock!) masquerading as one of the good guys.
Rankin’s attempt to re-create the gritty and thankless battle against the criminal underworld relies on cliques like crooks with snake tattoos and Russians suspects with ‘steely grey eyes’ wearing big fur coats and hats. Detailed descriptions of Edinburgh’s city setting fail to compensate for the general naivety of the narrative, especially in the simplistic language designed to lead the reader’s comprehension by the hand.
After a long, monotonous trudge through the mire of disillusioned CID, peppered with sarcastic interchanges between disgruntled detectives and members of the public, the gripping climax occurs within two pages and consists of Rebus’ triumphantly hauling his bulky mass into the guilty party and slamming him into a broken nose. This is clearly a characterisation book and its popularity lies in the portrayal of Rebus and his eccentricities – a successful but well-wrung formula. As a newcomer to the series I wasn’t expecting literature – ‘The duty doctor duly declared death’ rings off as more of a morbid nursery rhyme than evocative alliteration – but I was looking for something more compelling and much more original. This is a good example of a very self-conscious genre; if you’re a Rebus fan no doubt you will enjoy this book, if only to witness the conclusion to a well-trodden journey through the fame of cop-pop fiction, the expectation of which clearly allowed Rankin to rest on his laurels and shrug off any suggestions of creativity.
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