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Well, the 25-year-old Ian Rankin who wrote that book had no grounding in the English whodunit. I had never read any Christie or Allingham or Sayers and had yet to discover Rendell and James. But I was doing a PhD on the novels of Muriel Spark, whose magnum opus, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, had taken me on an adventure into the world of the gothic, much of it Edinburgh-based and much of it grounded in reality. Miss Brodie tells us that she is descended from Deacon William Brodie, a noted gentleman. What she neglects to add is that William Brodie – a real-life historical figure – was a respected figure by day but a thief and rogue by night. He headed a gang which would break into homes, assaulting the unwary and stealing their valuables. Brodie was caught, tried and hanged – allegedly on a scaffold he had helped craft as Deacon of Wrights. Robert Louis Stevenson may have had Deacon Brodie’s story in mind when he wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, his short but potent novel focused on the question at the heart of all crime fiction – why do we humans continue throughout history to inflict terrible damage on each other? Stevenson chose (for whatever reason) to set his tale in London, but it is every bit as Scottish in its themes and tone as Spark’s much later novel, and both books perhaps owe a debt to an earlier, lesser-known work, James Hogg’s Edinburgh-based slice of psychological Grand Guignol, Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Just as Spark took me to Stevenson, so Stevenson led me to Hogg and his complex narrative concerning a young religious zealot who comes under the spell of a charismatic stranger; who convinces him that as a member of ‘the elect’ (and therefore bound for Heaven whatever he does on Earth) he should feel free to murder those he feels deserve it, including an elderly minister of the church and, eventually, his own brother.
We are never sure in Hogg’s tale whether the charismatic stranger is a psychopath, the Devil incarnate, or a fever-dream conjured up by a religious maniac. This ambiguity is central to much of the best Scottish literature, along with an interest in the doppelgänger. All three books suggest that human beings have within them warring natures. Sometimes we’re good, and sometimes bad. In my first Rebus novel I created an evil alter ego for the detective, in the shape of someone who had been almost like a brother but was now out to destroy him. I certainly had the battle between Jekyll and Hyde in mind as I planned the book. I even added clues that Rebus himself may be the serial killer terrorising Edinburgh. He suffers alcoholic blackouts and wakes in the morning unable to remember the night before, much as Jekyll does. In Rebus’s second adventure, Hide and Seek, I even play with the name Hyde in the title. (The book was originally going to be called Hyde and Seek.)
Many of the best contemporary Scottish crime writers learned from the same books I did, their work owing as much to Hogg as to Christie or Chandler. But several of us also proclaim a debt to William McIlvanney, a literary novelist, poet and essayist who, in the late 1970s, created Jack Laidlaw, a tough, streetwise Glasgow detective with a penchant for philosophy. Those books emerged just as the Scottish novel was having fresh life breathed into it by the likes of James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, writers sustained by working-class city life and by the trials and vicissitudes of characters often not given a voice in literature. This is something I feel the Scottish crime novel has picked up on – giving a voice to the voiceless. Crime after all is more likely to strike those who have little or nothing than it is those who are protected by wealth and power.
The mechanics of the whodunit – its narrative conventions – do not really interest me as a writer. What interests me is the soul of the crime novel – what it tells us about ourselves and our society, what it is capable or uniquely qualified to discuss. My favourite crime novels tackle big issues, but always with reference to the effects of the investigation upon those doing the investigating and those affected by the crime, up to and including the initial victim. We are all inquisitive and curious animals, learning through questioning, and crime fiction touches this deep need both to ask the questions and (hopefully) to begin to touch on possible answers.
Crime fiction also enters dangerous territory – murder, rage, revenge – and so stirs up emotional responses we might not otherwise feel. Reading is not a passive experience in the way sitting through a film or TV show is. We watch violence on the screen, but seldom feel it in our heart. A well-executed narrative description can make us feel the pain of the sufferer, while also putting us inside the head of the inflicter. In a world made largely safe, crime fiction provides the sensation that we may be on the edge of danger. It heightens our basic survival instincts and gives us a primal reminder of the cave and the predator. And yet we read these books in our largely murder-free communities. There is little demand for crime fiction in a war zone. Once the conflict has died down, the crime fiction appears, to try to explain to us what just happened. You see this right now in Ireland, in the brilliant novels of Adrian McKinty, Stuart Neville, Brian McGilloway and many others. And in Africa, in everyone from Deon Meyer to Oyinkan Braithwaite. Just as the Scandinavian crime novel tells us so much about the social issues of that region, so writers in India such as Anita Nair are beginning to use the whodunit to explore issues such as child exploitation and sexual identity.
It seems to me there’s not much that is out of bounds to the crime novel, which is perhaps fitting, since the spirit of the crime novel is anarchic. We are absurdist writers, writing in the realms of satire and irony, from the ‘cosier’ end of the spectrum (owing much to Jane Austen, as realized by authors such as Reginald Hill, P. D. James and Val McDermid) to the harsher, derisive ironies and dark exaggerations of a Derek Raymond, Philip Kerr or David Peace. In satire, prevailing vices and follies are held up to ridicule, and the crime novel is the perfect vehicle for this, dealing as it does with larger-than-life characters whose weaknesses will soon be revealed, all set in a society largely ill at ease with itself. Of course, this also makes the crime novel ripe for satirizing, and plenty of authors have had fun deconstructing the likes of Hercule Poirot or the hard-boiled gumshoe. Michael Dibdin’s sublime The Dying of the Light comes to mind, as does Tom Stoppard’s clever stage comedy The Real Inspector Hound. More recently, Anthony Horowitz (The Magpie Murders; The Word Is Murder) and Steve Cavanagh (Twisted) have played with the crime novelist as anti-hero. Literary authors, too, have been attracted to the crime genre down the ages, either by plundering or paying homage. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a favourite – the monk/detective’s name is even William of Baskerville! Muriel Spark turns the conventions of crime fiction on their head in her short, shocking novel The Driver’s Seat, which was itself influenced by the nouveau roman, especially in the hands of Alain Robbe-Grillet, several of whose experimental novels were shaped as whodunits. More recent literary successes include Eleanor Catton’s Booker-winning The Luminaries, which has a murder mystery as its narrative engine. Nor is children’s fiction immune. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are constructed as traditional whodunits, full of untrustworthy characters, reversals, mysteries, twists and revelations. Little surprise that Rowling, post-Potter, has gone on to fresh success as a writer of crime novels for adults.
The whodunit is, however, the broadest possible church, able to embrace the macho blood-and-guts nihilism of a James Ellroy and the gentle humanity of Alexander McCall Smith’s Ramotswe stories. In the stories of the past, however, there was a tendency for the irrruption of violence to lead to resolution (the unmasking of the culprit) and a return to the status quo. These days, it is harder to imagine everything settling back to ‘normal’ after an extreme act. Extremism has visited places we never imagined it would. Murderous acts seem to happen out of the blue – rare though they still are. The murder mystery these days seldom ignores this. As Muriel Spark herself once said, ‘We should know ourselves better by now than to be under the illusion that we are all essentially aspiring, affectionate and loving creatures. We do have these qualities, but we are aggressive too.’
In dealing with these aggressive qualities in the human animal, crime fiction provides both a salutary warning and the catharsis common to all good drama. The tight three-act structure of the crime novel (crime–investigation–resolution) pays tribute to the fact that we humans hunger for form and a sense of closure. Yet within those confines all human life plays out. We readers can explore cultures of the past, present and (very occasionally)
