The Complete Short Stories

Inspector Rebus #3.5 & 13.5

by Ian Rankin

Ian Rankin has amassed an incredible portfolio of short stories, which all share the best qualities of his phenomenally popular novels. Now his two critically acclaimed short story collections - A GOOD HANGING and BEGGARS BANQUET - come together in one volume, along with ATONEMENT - a new Rebus story, written especially for this collection. A GOOD HANGING - Twelve Inspector Rebus mysteries, including the hanging of a student during the Edinburgh Festival, a gruesome arson attack, and the apparent witnessing of a miracle. Step off the tourist trail and into the macabre heart of Rebus's Edinburgh. BEGGARS BANQUET - Ranging from suburban murders to the sinister workings of a serial killer's mind, here are twenty-one tales all bearing the hallmark of great crime writing. Included are seven Inspector Rebus mysteries, and the Dagger award-winning story 'Herbert in Motion'. ATONEMENT - When Rebus comes to the aid of an old friend, he uncovers some hard-to-swallow truths about life, and death, at a local home for the elderly.

Genres: Fiction, Crime, Mystery, Short Stories, Thriller

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

AKA 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

Reviews

[Dan Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd aleady read A Good Hanging and Beggar's Banquet so this was a bit of a re-run for me. But the stories are short and fun. Like old episodes of Columbo or Banacek.

The anthology held together well, like it says on the back cover "not a dud in the pack". And that's pretty rare. Not all were great but none of them were bad.

Individual stories reviewed below;

Playback - a perfect murder, using 80s or 90s tech. Car phones and answering machines, spliced cassette tapes. A stabbing and a frame up. 3/5

The Dean Curse. An ex British army major with IRA experience sets up a cat bomb to dispose of his daughters criminal suitor. 3/5

Being Frank. Frank is half-mad and homeless. A gentleman wanderer, a classic tramp. He overhears some goons planning a crime on a park bench, wildly misunderstood the goal but tipped Rebus off anyways. 4/5

Concrete Evidence. A dead body found beneath a slab of concrete leads to a construction contractor murder, an old cold case. Some implausible memories lead a trail to some flimsy evidence. 2/5.

Seeing Things. A Church hosts a drug deal gone wrong, sensational media and religious interest. 4/5

A Good Hanging. Top tier, love triangle, dramatic fake suicide, lovely parlour scene. 5/5

Tit for Tat. Arson case against peeping Tom. I thought this was overkill, sure he deserved to get punished but the fire could’ve spread and killed many people, the smugness of the twist reveal was weak. 2/5

Not Provan. The story itself and the twist around timing was weak, but the deeper story underlying the conflict between a free society and the police ability to fight crime was great. 4/5

Sunday. Top Rebus. A slow Sunday, day of rest. While a tormented Rebus replays the recent knife fight and justified killing of a drug dealer. A window into his life and his conflict with doing what has to get done while wishing it didn’t have to happen. 5/5

Auld Lang Syne. A joint police operation on New Years Eve at a crowded public spot. Rebus spots an old crook, tails him. Confronts him but is then convinced he’s reformed. But it was a half truth, too late he realizes and the job is done before he can intervene. A murder, but a just one. 4/5

The Gentlemen's Club. Awkward teen girl suicide, Rebus gets to the bottom of it but nobody walks away happy. 3/5.

Monstrous Trumpet. A fun “closed room” one off. Somebody stole a Priapic statue, but who and why? And will the French exchange inspector Clouseau be any help? In the end it was a fun parlour scene wrapping up in the pub. 5/5.

Introduction. A quick bit of background from Ian Rankin about how he ended up an author and why he likes the short story format. His love of economically written stories does shine through in all the Rebus works.


Trip Trap. 2/5. An elderly couple, nice lady and angry curmudgeon. Living out their routine until the day comes and she snaps. Rebus is called in to investigate and makes a pretty tenuous connection that absolutely wouldn’t hold up in court.

Someone Got to Eddie. 3/5. An assassin knocks off a witness even though they’re under a new identity and under protection. Story is told from his meticulous POV. Good twist in the end.

A Deep Hole. 4/5. Humble guy leads a simple life, just digging holes for the construction company. Not smart enough to operate heavy equipment, he’s a shovel guy. He has a friendship with the local bad guy. Ends up in trouble, then cleverly eludes it. Sound ending.

Natural Selection. 4/5. A great scene of building intensity while crooks try to figure out who sold their fellow ganger out and ratted. The scene closes on everyone reaching for a weapon. Would be a good stage play.

Facing the Music. 4/5. A fun one-off caper where Rebus (call it what it is) entraps A criminal stereo shop owner into confessing he’s feeding burglars with info on rich clients. Fun and twisty at a slow, low consequence pace.

Principles of Accounts. 3/5. A sociopath kidnapper plays cat and mouse with the police, stretches credulity more than a bit.

The Only True Comedian. 4/5. A lonely kid discovers comedy as a way to fit in. He ends up going unsuccessfully pro, but gets in deep with his childhood friend turned mobster. He goes on the run working small time gigs, gets caught and the fear sets him off to do the best set of his life. Wholesome twist ending.

Herbert in Motion. 5/5. A scheme to replace Tate originals with expert copies for exclusive, secret clients comes to a head at the PMs cocktail party. The art director gets caught, but spared by a funny coincidence.

Glimmer. 3/5. I enjoy the Hunter Thompson style drug rampage narrator. The events just sort of staggered past in a montage. So it was entertaining but not engaging, more of a spectacle than a story. Ending in a pessimistic, low energy manslaughter. So casual it barely happened.

Unlucky in Love, Unlucky at Cards. 2/5. An implausible frame up of an unlikeable private eye. High point of the story is him standing by the car, hearing the sirens and realizing he’s been done over.

Video, Nasty. 5/5. A man in a boring, one track life and a video obsession accidentally murders his “best friend” and then has to execute a cover-up. Everything goes his way and he gets the life he wanted.

Talk Show. 4/5. A smooth talking late night radio call-in personality is getting stalked by an angry, anonymous caller. He’s very adaptable and adept at fooling the call screens. Too adept, it turns out. The management wanted to drum up some scandals for ratings. She was livid, but turned to Rebus with some “gratitude”.

Castle Dangerous. 3/5. A whodunnit murder mystery centering around sir Walter Scott (same name, different guy). Some blackmail that lead to him dying of a heart attack at the big reveal. Rebus had to put it all together through old letters and photos.

The Wider Scheme. 4/5. Narrator as the villain, revealed near the end. But she caught him monologuing. All on tape and the shifty lawyer gets dragged down by his police “buddies” and faces the music.

Unknown Pleasures. 5/5. A great speed run through the chain from skagged-out street punk to dealer to gangs, soldiers, politics and the wealthy criminal CEOs behind it all. The whole life cycle of the hard drug black market industry.

In the Frame. 4/5. Well told eureka for Rebus when he recognizes some people in an incriminating photo. Illustrated the big gap between old photos and digital photos with time stamps. Also a clumsy blackmail attempt based on a misunderstanding of the phone book address.

The Confession. 3/5. A good caper told by a crank who’s always making up stories for the police. A solid example of the boring business side of police work.

The Hanged Man. 3/5. An assassin confronts his target 1 a tarot card reading lady, only to discover that she’s his mum! The twist wasn’t great but the two main characters were both solid and they managed to imply a powerful villain, nasty crime organization and a team up adventure.

Window of Opportunity. 4/5. A boring main story about a criminal sneaking out to avoid notice if a stakeout with a great supporting character who’s an escape artist with flair.

The Serpent's Back. 3/5. A historical fiction noir caper set in old Edinburg circa 1800s. A sleuth on a case and people keep turning up dead, he had to get to the bottom of it before he was one of them.

No Sanity Clause. 4/5. A con figures a great angle to work the holidays but crashes the same party Rebus is attending. After he puts it together Rebus lets him give back the loot and sneak off. It’s the season, after all.

Death Is Not The End. 3/5. A longer story in the collection, broken into short chapters. It follows two parallel stories that converge a bit clumsily at the end. Just dogged investigation, a scam running in the background of a missing person investigation. The missing person self resolves but the larger caper is brought to a satisfying close by Rebus and his chief.

Atonement. 5/5. Stuck to the Rebus formula, an up front case hiding another case underneath. This was engaging, heartwarming. You feel like everyone got what they deserved in the end.

[Kevin Marsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Robert Bagnall · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent!

[Alec Downie · Rating 3 out of 5]

a rapid read and proof crimes can be solved in 20 or so pages, if you are clever.

[Leilaferguson · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Alex Doenau · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Vineet · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Larraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[H · Rating 4 out of 5]

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~

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

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!

[Lbaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great treat for fans of Rankin's Inspector Rebus series.

[Arlene Richards · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Simon Gelling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Average

[D.]

Rebus: The Complete Short Stories~Ian Rankin by Ian Rankin (2005)

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good selection of stories. Very long book but the content was captivating with each story.