Bob Hawke’s Labor government was re-elected, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made her first appearance live on Soviet TV and US President Ronald Reagan’s administration was exposed in the Iran-Contra affair.
The year was 1987, and a lot was going on.
Far away in the Scottish capital, Fife-born budding author Ian Rankin was allegedly studying for a PhD on the nation’s literature at the University of Edinburgh. Instead, he was mostly scribbling down bits and pieces of what would become his life-changing first Detective Sergeant John Rebus novel, Knots & Crosses.
Rankin insists the unpublished Summer Rites – technically his first novel – will stay that way forever. And while The Flood – only tangentially a crime novel – was published the year before Knots & Crosses, it was Rebus that rocketed his name across the globe.
Knots & Crosses would confront Rebus, the former SAS man-turned-toughened cop, with the fiendish strangulation of two young girls and dark secrets from his traumatic past, including the shadow of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The very name ‘Rebus’ is a clue. Literally, it means a riddle that can be solved through deciphering pictures and symbols.
The new series sees 'Outlander' star Richard Rankin playing the surly policeman. Credit: Viaplay
A surly loner – divorced from Rona with one kid, Samantha – forged in the hard-boiled tradition, Rebus lives in Marchmont within sight of the uni window where Rankin invented him. Fond of chasing pints with whisky and a fag, he’ll do whatever it takes to bring down the rancid miscreants gnawing at Auld Reekie’s darkest corners. Their number might just include his brother, Michael, doing it tougher than his police-paid brother and drawn by the siren’s lure of drug money.
Rankin rankled with the ‘crime’ fiction categorisation at first. A literary young man, he held up Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic horror novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as the Promethean spark that willed Rebus into being, hoping it would make his Ian Flemming and John le Carré-reading father proud. But of course Stevenson’s work was already genre, with Rankin ultimately embracing his Tartan Noir destiny.
The Rebus novels gathered an inexorable momentum, with one novel following every year and progressing in ‘real-time’ until Rebus retired at 60 following the conclusion of 2007’s Exit Music. Only you can’t keep an old dog down. Many books have followed as he continues to insert himself into the city’s dastardliest plots.
Four Weddings and a Funeral star John Hannah may have been the first actor to bring Rebus to aggravated life on the small screen with the eponymously titled show debuting in 2000, but he never quite convinced. Soon replaced by Ken Stott, who cut his teeth in a couple of episodes of Scotland’s much-loved, Glasgow-set crime show Taggart, his take didn’t stick either.
While countless actors have portrayed the detective in audio adaptations, including Taggart star James MacPherson, it’s Outlander alum Richard Rankin (no nepo baby relation to the author) who has most captured the hearts of fans and critics alike.
Rebus (Richard Rankin) with DC Siobhan Clarke (Lucie Shorthouse). Credit: Viaplay
He brings a dishevelled charm to a younger Rebus, still haunted by his past but trying to keep himself on the straight and narrow in this magnificently gritty new take co-written by Rankin and .
When we meet our new Rebus, huffing a cigarette in close up, he’s bloodied and bruised after weaselly crim Ger ‘Cafferty’ (Stuart Bowman), an occasional ally, has rammed his partner’s car off the road. An action for which Cafferty’s repaid by a seriously not-by-the-book strangulation attempt in the back of an ambulance. Prevented by the arrival of Rebus’ boss Gill Templer (Caroline Lee-Johnson), his only reprimand is a cranky cussing. She’s as keen to keep Rebus’ rogue reactions quiet as he is. She needs results, with no patience for gangster warfare breaking out within spitting distance of the castle and Edinburgh’s assorted postcard-pretty tourist traps.
In the new show, there’s no clear sign that she and Rebus were lovers, but there’s enough of a frisson to suggest that might have been the case. She saddles him with keen recruit DC Siobhan Clarke (We Are Lady Parts lead Lucie Shorthouse), imported from England on a fast-track degree, annoying but also intriguing the irascible Rebus. Perhaps the loudest laugh of this occasionally blackly comic show is when she responds “Never Shiv” when he asks what her nickname is, proceeding to call her that henceforth.
Shiv has history with Thoren Ferguson’s slick professional standards copper Malcolm Fox, for whom Rebus has no time nor love. Also watch out for ace Moroccan-Scottish actor Noof Ousellam as another of Rebus’ rogue’s gallery, gym-owner Darryl Christie.
Sure, Rebus’ marriage has fallen apart, but he still shares undeniable chemistry with Amy Manson’s Rhona, now living in a mansion with rich boy Lockie (Nick Rhys). Mia McKenzie is amusingly sassy as 12-year-old Sam, thoroughly unimpressed when her deadbeat dad decks out his brother Michael (Brian Ferguson of remake series), retooled as ex-army too. Michael’s put-upon wife, Chrissie (Neshla Caplan, The Rig), also has the shits with his detective brother: “He always thought he was better than us.”
Arguably the most significant change, in bringing the Rankin books back to life, is Edinburgh herself. For all the grim shots of seagulls fighting over dregs discarded in mucky gutters, she’s a very different city than when Rankin wrote Knots & Crosses in 1987. The working-class Leith docks and the realms also traversed via fellow Scottish author Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting boys have long since endured a gentrifying facelift.
Still, as this must-see show reveals, scratch an inch of fresh paint and it’s just as dirty underneath.
Rebus is streaming now at SBS On Demand. The series will also air on SBS on Thursday nights from 15 August.
Stream free On Demand
Rebus
