Ian Rankin (2024) Midnight and Blue

I’ve never met Ian Rankin. Not even on the page. He announced to the world he’s thinking of retiring from writing. I don’t need to make such pronouncements. He’s ‘the iconic number one bestseller.’ ‘A genius’ according to Lee Child. ‘A Master,’ according to the Guardian.

Midnight and Blue you’d expect to be a knockout.  ‘The new John Rebus thriller’ (well, since adding to his back catalogue of 24 Rebus novels and two short-story collections and a couple of plays and televion series) is fine-ish.

Two storylines running concurrently. Day 1…Day 7.

Former Detective Rebus in banged up in Saughton, renamed but still the old nick. Rebus isn’t in good nick. He’s seventy, for god sake. Prisoners don’t take to cops or child molesters. He’s in isolation and hoping to hear about his appeal for wrongful conviction. Convicted of killing his nemesis, Ger Cafferty. Smothering a man in wheelchair with a pillow is neither here nor there in prison life. Darryl Christie is pleased. He’s got a free run at taking control of the Edinburgh underworld now his rival is dead. And is running things from his prison cell. He’s given the nod that Rebus is not to be harmed and he’s released into the general prison population. He can socialise with other prisoners and has got a job in the prison library.   

Storyline 1. Jackie Simpson murdered in his cell. His cellmate, top bunk, Mark Jamieson claims, like the three wise monkeys, to have seen nothing, heard nothing, done nothing because he got knocked unconscious by the attacker.  He’s got a convincing alibi. Bruised head and face. Enough Spice in his system to kill a lesser man.

The CCTV camera aimed at his cell conveniently stopped working. Forensics have no murder weapon, no blood to work with despite Simpson’s throat being slashed.

There’s talk of prison guards on the payroll.

It’s the kind of closed-door (Agatha Christie) mystery than Rebus can resist poking his neb into.

Storyline 2. Outside HMP Edinburgh, Jasmine, an ordinary Edinburgh schoolgirl, has gone missing. Siobhan Clarke leads the investigation. Rebus’s old understudy gets to step into the big man’s shoes and play the main investigative role. But she keeps in touch with official visits and burner phones.

When Clarke finds the Jasmine has been flashing more that the cash, the police investigation ratchets up. They need to find her…by Day 7.

You’d expect these two plotlines to meet and cross over.

A third storyline, but more a complication tacked on, involves Malcolm Fox. Former Professional Standards officer, now in Organised Crime, inserts himself into both investigations. Fox has been tracking Rebus for years, usually on the losing side. He’s delighted to find him in prison. Unfortunately, the murder victim in HMP Edinburgh also happened to be working for Fox (page 1).  

Fox gets his comeuppance is standard fare. Not that it mattered in the bigger picture, or indeed at all? A crossing of the t-s aimed at Rankin’s readers of the unbroken series of Rebus books, perhaps.

Rankin is a graduate of Edinburgh University where he studied English—currently shutting most of the departments related to Scottish ethnicity on the grounds of cost—but he’s not averse to quoting Sherlock Holmes and putting words in Rebus’s mouth.  ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

It’s from The Sign of Four (1890), and it’s the closest thing Holmes had to a fingerprint. Conan Doyle used the motif repeatedly across his detective novels, but this is the original, canonical form. In cliched form, such as the leading Scottish university shuts down the study of Scotland and its varied culture and writing because we can’t get enough foreigners to pay inflated fees, must be the truth. Where were we?

Rebus’s ah-ha moment didn’t do it for me.

Jasmine’s location was no great surprise. Clever.  Clarke’s pulling of the thread of who is the pervert in blue with a game of musical notation was more Scooby than do. Read on.