The Complaints

I started reading Ian Rankin's books more than a few years back, complicated and often violent puzzles, and the Edinburgh DI John Rebus a morally ambiguous character, even if on the side of the saints.

More recently, I picked up THE COMPLAINTS, released in 2009, which introduces a new and younger character, Malcolm Fox, followed by THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD, in 2011. Fox works for Internal Affairs, known colloquially as The Complaints, who investigate other cops. It's common knowledge these guys are disliked - resented the better word, outsiders who piss on their own doorstep. They find

themselves, like as not, swimming upstream, dealing with obstruction and half truths, closed ranks, hostile witnesses, and fighting chain of command, which might prefer they bury a can of worms.

Both of the first two Fox stories, THE COMPLAINTS and THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD, are very much about that proverbial can of worms. A corruption inquiry, by its nature, leads to the unhappy and unwelcome, and heads are bound to roll. Which they do. Nobody likes The Complaints proved right, and nobody thanks them for it. The dynamic in the novels isn't Us and Them, but Us and Us. Fox is a traitor to his own.

Rankin mounts a near to impenetrable tangle of loyalties and betrayals, absent virtues, malign intentions, misspent human capital, leaky alibis, blood feuds and blood debts. THE COMPLAINTS is about a frame, with Fox himself the target, and THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD turns on a cold case, unquiet graves. If there's a trick to it, Rankin doesn't show his hand. The books seem to lunge forward with the ordained gravitational pull of Doom, inexorable and final, as though agented or engineered by the very devices of wickedness.

You might wonder, why Malcolm Fox? I mean, why has Rankin picked up this new thread? Then again, Rebus hasn't been put out to pasture. The next two books, STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN'S GRAVE and SAINTS OF THE SHADOW BIBLE, draw Fox and Rebus together, although as may be expected, Fox is an adversary. I'd venture to guess it isn't that Rankin has gone stale on Rebus, rather that he's holding him up to the light, getting a fresh perspective. Fox and Rebus are something alike, both of them solitaries, both of them haunted - Rebus more so - but Fox is the more transparent and accessible. I don't know that we relate to him any better. His inflexibility gets in the way a little, Fox kind of dour (the Scots would say 'do-er,' drawing out the long vowels), not in any way humorless, but slow to get the joke. Rebus, as his name suggests, is a puzzle. You can see they'd rub each other the wrong way, Fox being too quick to take his man's measure, Rebus not one to suffer fools, or hide his impatience. And what does Fox make of Big Ger Cafferty? we might ask. All in all, a nice spin on an old tale, a collision of competing integrities. 

One other remark. Rankin's guys aren't a generic index of weaknesses - bad marriages, the worse for drink - or their strengths, either. They're well-observed and genuine, a reflected glance. They have depth, and a specific gravity. Not entirely likable, perhaps, but completely there, if not always in our comfort zone. Is this counter-intuitive? I'm not sure. Fox and Rebus are uneasy companions, with each other, by themselves, and with us. They take warming up to. But they enlist our sympathies. Obdurate, they are. Certainly not frictionless, or smooth. A little sharp and peaty to the taste, like a single malt. Slightly acrid, with a length of finish that lingers in the mouth.

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