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Inspector Rebus #3.5 & 13.5
The Complete Short Stories
In good condition. Shows normal shelf and usage wear.
529 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
13 people are currently reading
553 people want to read
About the author
Ian Rankin
424 books6,537 followersAKA Jack Harvey.
Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982 and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel was published in 1987; the Rebus books are now translated into 22 languages and are bestsellers on several continents.
Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow. He is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award, and he received two Dagger Awards for the year's best short story and the Gold Dagger for Fiction. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, and Edinburgh.
A contributor to BBC2's Newsnight Review, he also presented his own TV series, Ian Rankin's Evil Thoughts, on Channel 4 in 2002. He recently received the OBE for services to literature, and opted to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/ianrankin
Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982 and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel was published in 1987; the Rebus books are now translated into 22 languages and are bestsellers on several continents.
Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow. He is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award, and he received two Dagger Awards for the year's best short story and the Gold Dagger for Fiction. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, and Edinburgh.
A contributor to BBC2's Newsnight Review, he also presented his own TV series, Ian Rankin's Evil Thoughts, on Channel 4 in 2002. He recently received the OBE for services to literature, and opted to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/ianrankin
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 18 reviews
December 30, 2016
I'm not a great fan of short stories, by I must admit that I liked reading this book. It was interesting to see how Mr Rankin constructed his short stories. There are a number of stories in this set that are not related to Rebus, so it was a treat to read other work by this author.
A recommended read.
A recommended read.
January 31, 2021
Hannah or Stott? That’s that’s even a question is down to John Rebus being a cipher, a cardboard cutout of a character. The challenge for the actor boils down to remembering the lines and not banging into the furniture. What’s my motivation? Solving the crime. That’s enough for Rankin, hence it should be enough for us. As a test, try casting those two as Holmes and Watson - you see? it only works one way.
There’s nothing in the writing or the plotting to drag this above the ordinary, either. For every deft touch - one story set in an art gallery, title forgotten, was particularly, well, artful - there are three that rely on coincidence or just petter away. Two and a half stars. Workmanlike.
There’s nothing in the writing or the plotting to drag this above the ordinary, either. For every deft touch - one story set in an art gallery, title forgotten, was particularly, well, artful - there are three that rely on coincidence or just petter away. Two and a half stars. Workmanlike.
April 25, 2019
Excellent!
November 20, 2020
a rapid read and proof crimes can be solved in 20 or so pages, if you are clever.
February 25, 2021
Great collection
I enjoyed the short stories though I forget how easy they are to read so harder to get lost in them. Still a brilliant writer though
I enjoyed the short stories though I forget how easy they are to read so harder to get lost in them. Still a brilliant writer though
August 3, 2011
I don't know if it's hideously unfashionable to profess a certain love for Rebus, but over the last three or four years I have developed an inordinate fondness for the fellow. This is an omnibus edition of two previously published short story collections: A Good Hanging and Beggars Banquet, as well as the exclusive Atonement (not to be confused with the other Ian's Atonement).
This book is a prime example of why you can't really just assign an arbitrary number ranking to something: some of these stories are four star material, but overall the collection doesn't really rise above three stars. A Good Hanging is Rebus' exclusive domain, and Beggars Banquet is a combination of Rebus and completely separate short pieces. Most readers will probably gravitate towards more favourable impressions of the Rebus joints, especially if they're not huge proponents of the short story form in the first place.
Rankin admits in his intro that he writes shorts as a way of exorcising Rebus between novels, and what we've got in the non-Rebus stakes is pretty good. Short stories being what they are, though, Rankin has no real loyalty to the idea of the "happy ending", providing some twists and subversions. Sometimes the narrator is bad and wins, sometimes they're a patsy, sometimes someone just gets killed and that's the end of it.
They're mostly good, many of them not character pieces, but rather an exploration of a criminal concept. Stylistically, they're all over the place. It's an interesting tonal experiment but not strictly my speed of reading.
One in particular, "The Principles of Accounts", I simply couldn't get my head around at all. "Glimmer" is actually a second person account of being a satellite of The Rolling Stones, and Rankin admits that it could have been more of a vanity piece than it already is.
The Rebus stories are generally Rebus lite, with Rebus taking on cases that either don't mean a lot or don't take a lot of solving. I read this over the course of a month and, looking over the titles of the stories, I have positive memories of all of them.
"Being Frank" is plainly a play on perspective, but the rest of them are effective snapshots of Rebus's life. I prefer full strength Rebus, obviously, but there isn't a disappointing Rebus case to be found here. The only problem is that these were obviously written at different stages of Rebus's career and it can be hard to track the relationships that he's had both with women and his fellow officers through these pages. There's barely a Siobhan to be seen.
The novella Death Is Not The End is the highlight of the collection for me. It was later expanded to become the prime Rebus novel Dead Souls, but here plays out with an entirely different outcome. Dead Souls had one of the heaviest and depressing conclusions of anything Rankin has offered, but not so here. While this fact calls the canon of Death is Not the End into question, it's still a valuable piece of Rebus work regardless.
The Complete Short Stories works best as a curio, and doesn't substitute for a full Rankin novel, but there's definitely more than enough here to offer a rewarding reading experience for those who already care about Rankin's work. For others, I imagine it would be too much like an outsider peering in.
This book is a prime example of why you can't really just assign an arbitrary number ranking to something: some of these stories are four star material, but overall the collection doesn't really rise above three stars. A Good Hanging is Rebus' exclusive domain, and Beggars Banquet is a combination of Rebus and completely separate short pieces. Most readers will probably gravitate towards more favourable impressions of the Rebus joints, especially if they're not huge proponents of the short story form in the first place.
Rankin admits in his intro that he writes shorts as a way of exorcising Rebus between novels, and what we've got in the non-Rebus stakes is pretty good. Short stories being what they are, though, Rankin has no real loyalty to the idea of the "happy ending", providing some twists and subversions. Sometimes the narrator is bad and wins, sometimes they're a patsy, sometimes someone just gets killed and that's the end of it.
They're mostly good, many of them not character pieces, but rather an exploration of a criminal concept. Stylistically, they're all over the place. It's an interesting tonal experiment but not strictly my speed of reading.
One in particular, "The Principles of Accounts", I simply couldn't get my head around at all. "Glimmer" is actually a second person account of being a satellite of The Rolling Stones, and Rankin admits that it could have been more of a vanity piece than it already is.
The Rebus stories are generally Rebus lite, with Rebus taking on cases that either don't mean a lot or don't take a lot of solving. I read this over the course of a month and, looking over the titles of the stories, I have positive memories of all of them.
"Being Frank" is plainly a play on perspective, but the rest of them are effective snapshots of Rebus's life. I prefer full strength Rebus, obviously, but there isn't a disappointing Rebus case to be found here. The only problem is that these were obviously written at different stages of Rebus's career and it can be hard to track the relationships that he's had both with women and his fellow officers through these pages. There's barely a Siobhan to be seen.
The novella Death Is Not The End is the highlight of the collection for me. It was later expanded to become the prime Rebus novel Dead Souls, but here plays out with an entirely different outcome. Dead Souls had one of the heaviest and depressing conclusions of anything Rankin has offered, but not so here. While this fact calls the canon of Death is Not the End into question, it's still a valuable piece of Rebus work regardless.
The Complete Short Stories works best as a curio, and doesn't substitute for a full Rankin novel, but there's definitely more than enough here to offer a rewarding reading experience for those who already care about Rankin's work. For others, I imagine it would be too much like an outsider peering in.
December 31, 2008
This collected shorts of Ian Rankin I had come across in some remainders shelves at a Barnes & Noble.
"A Good Hanging" & "Atonement"
I had only ever seen the Inspector Rebus series on the BBC occasionally. For police procedurals everyone in the UK seems to be a drunk or drug addict with special powers of observation & deduction (see: Jane Tennison, Sherlock Holmes, etc.). These were the Rebus short stories collected so I came out of the experience with little more feel for the character than I went in with. However, the Edinburgh (and surrounding) settings were pretty vividly portrayed and some of the crimes or solutions were clever but not overly memorable.
"Beggar's Banquet"
In this section of the collection, I figured out what Rankin was so beloved for. Although there were small smatterings of Rebus shorts in here, it was broader, gorier, twistier and altogether more creative with different narrators, points of view, and story formats. "Somebody Got to Eddie" had a viewpoint and twist that made the earlier Rebus stories seem like old episodes of Dragnet. "Glimmer" was a throwback story to the stones era that seemed out of place in the collection but got a slide for being attention-grabbing. "Natural Selection" was probably about 90% dialogue but still kept the story going as tightly as a short play.
If you can get the book for as inexpensively as I could and like crime stories, Inspector Rebus, Edinburgh or lack an attention span, pick it up. It's definitely worth a look, although the superior Beggar's Banquet section raises the bar but unfortunately dulls the surrounding short stories.
"A Good Hanging" & "Atonement"
I had only ever seen the Inspector Rebus series on the BBC occasionally. For police procedurals everyone in the UK seems to be a drunk or drug addict with special powers of observation & deduction (see: Jane Tennison, Sherlock Holmes, etc.). These were the Rebus short stories collected so I came out of the experience with little more feel for the character than I went in with. However, the Edinburgh (and surrounding) settings were pretty vividly portrayed and some of the crimes or solutions were clever but not overly memorable.
"Beggar's Banquet"
In this section of the collection, I figured out what Rankin was so beloved for. Although there were small smatterings of Rebus shorts in here, it was broader, gorier, twistier and altogether more creative with different narrators, points of view, and story formats. "Somebody Got to Eddie" had a viewpoint and twist that made the earlier Rebus stories seem like old episodes of Dragnet. "Glimmer" was a throwback story to the stones era that seemed out of place in the collection but got a slide for being attention-grabbing. "Natural Selection" was probably about 90% dialogue but still kept the story going as tightly as a short play.
If you can get the book for as inexpensively as I could and like crime stories, Inspector Rebus, Edinburgh or lack an attention span, pick it up. It's definitely worth a look, although the superior Beggar's Banquet section raises the bar but unfortunately dulls the surrounding short stories.
August 17, 2009
Great collection... most of them Inspector Rebus stories.
Captures both the dark and refreshing sides of Edinburgh and its surrounds, which this forms the backdrop of all stories.
You can guess out the mystery in the early stories, but it is the writing style and characterisation that takes hold. The later stories are exceptional and reveal a fast maturing writer clearly enjoying his prowess.
I found that the shorter the story, the more gripping it is. Clearly, this is the format where Mr Rankin excels.
The Rolling Stones theme behind some of the stories adds a distinctive flavour. Best served with the right music.
Looking forward to more short stories from this author.
Captures both the dark and refreshing sides of Edinburgh and its surrounds, which this forms the backdrop of all stories.
You can guess out the mystery in the early stories, but it is the writing style and characterisation that takes hold. The later stories are exceptional and reveal a fast maturing writer clearly enjoying his prowess.
I found that the shorter the story, the more gripping it is. Clearly, this is the format where Mr Rankin excels.
The Rolling Stones theme behind some of the stories adds a distinctive flavour. Best served with the right music.
Looking forward to more short stories from this author.
October 11, 2015
I'm not usually a fan of short stories, but Ian Rankin is a master. This is a collection of short stories featuring John Rebus from the beginning as a new cop to his retirement. Most are very short with a wonderful ironic twist. Several take place during the Christmas holidays. I especially liked the one that ended with the bad guys being "St Nicked." It helps to have read his other books. Rankin is the one who got me turned on to "Tartan Noir." He's still the best in my opinion.
January 2, 2010
A really nice collection and I had seriously enjoyed it. The stories aren't all about crime, actually, only a few are. And the rest? They're stories that are about so many things: human nature, luck, death..etc
RECOMMENDED~
RECOMMENDED~
February 5, 2012
I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. I haven't read that many Rebus novels but dipping in and out of this collection of stories set in Edinburgh and surrounding area has inspired me to read more in the series!
May 29, 2013
Have finished the first section of the book and am quitting for now, will return it to the library as I am on chemo and my arms, shoulders and thumbs are really painful, and this book is very heavy.
I look forward to reading it at a later time.
I look forward to reading it at a later time.
February 6, 2010
A great treat for fans of Rankin's Inspector Rebus series.
January 11, 2011
I am not a fan of Short Stories and the stories starring Rebus are good but predictable. I did enjoy those that were utterly unknown and therefore interesting and startling.
July 27, 2016
Average
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October 2, 2009Rebus: The Complete Short Stories~Ian Rankin by Ian Rankin (2005)
October 20, 2014
Good selection of stories. Very long book but the content was captivating with each story.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 18 reviews