John Rebus
Detective Inspector John Rebus is the protagonist in the Inspector Rebus series of detective novels by the Scottish writer Sir Ian Rankin, ten of which have so far been televised as Rebus. The novels are mostly set in and around Edinburgh. Rebus has been portrayed by John Hannah, Ken Stott and Richard Rankin for television, with Ron Donachie playing the character for the BBC Radio dramatisations.
In the books
In a series of books and short stories by Ian Rankin, beginning with Knots and Crosses published in 1987 and ending with Exit Music in 2007, John Rebus is a detective in the Lothian and Borders Police force, stationed in Edinburgh. After the first book, he is promoted from Detective Sergeant to Detective Inspector. In novels published after his retirement at the end of Exit Music, Rebus continues to work with the Edinburgh police, either as a civilian or again as a police officer, but only in a temporary capacity.Backstory
Knots and Crosses was originally written as a stand-alone, non-genre novel and presents the fullest portrait of Rebus as a literary character. He comes from Fife, where his parents are buried, and where his only sibling Michael still lives. His father made a living as a stage hypnotist and Michael is a success in the same profession. John is divorced from Rhona and has a daughter, Samantha, who is nearly twelve.Rebus went from school into the army and after a difficult stint in Northern Ireland at the beginning of The Troubles, signed up for the SAS. There, he and another man were subjected to various kinds of torture in an attempt to see whether they would “break”. Rebus passed the test but, having had to abandon his companion, had a nervous breakdown himself. After recovering, he became a police detective. In Knots and Crosses, he suffers from PTSD, which is cured when his brother hypnotizes him.
In subsequent novels, more about Rebus’s background is revealed. In the first few novels, Rebus likes jazz, but by the fourth one he admits to being partial to the Rolling Stones. From that point on, his favourite music is always folk and rock from his own and youth and that of the author. In Fleshmarket Close, which deals with immigrant trafficking, Rebus recalls that his paternal grandfather was a Polish immigrant. In Dead Souls, he recalls his school-leaving party in Cardenden, Fife and his ill-fated plans to get a job and settle down with his childhood sweetheart.
Rebus lives in the flat he bought with his wife Rhona in the 1970s, on Arden Street in the Marchmont area. During his relationship with Patience Aitken he spends a lot of time at her flat and even rents his apartment out to students in The Black Book, though he has to move back in with them when Patience kicks him out. In The Falls, he has the flat rewired with an eye to selling it, but changes his mind. In A Song for the Dark Times, the garden flat in his own building has become vacant and he moves in as this will save him the difficult two-flight climb to his old flat.
Starting with Black and Blue, Rebus drives an older Saab 900. Before that, he had admired a Saab and wished he could afford one. In some of the later novels, he talks to the Saab, thanking it for making long trips, and he is relieved in A Song for the Dark Times when it can be repaired. In Even Dogs in the Wild, he acquires a dog, Brillo.
Age
As Rankin developed Knots and Crosses into a series of crime stories, he allowed Rebus’s life to continue as if he were living in real time. Thus, in Knots and Crosses his daughter Samantha is “nearly twelve” and in Tooth and Nail she is about sixteen. By the year 2000, Rankin was aware that Rebus was approaching 60, the age of compulsory retirement for police. Despite some indecision about Rebus’s actual age, Rankin settled on 1947 as the protagonist’s year of birth and 2007 as his year of retirement. More recently, since Rebus's retirement, Rankin has admitted that the character is no longer ageing in real time and that he imagines Rebus as being in his late sixties in 2020, with some disabilities but still physically as well as mentally capable.Although it is possible to summarize Rebus’s character and habits, he changes over the years. Early on, for example, he is ambitious, but as time goes by he sees that promotion would take him away from the hands-on investigative style he loves. To take another example, although his relationship with his daughter Samantha is a matter of rare phone calls for over a decade, they have more frequent visits after her daughter Carrie is born. In Dead Souls, his reflexive bullying of paedophiles in earlier books is gradually replaced by the realization that some of them, at least, have suffered abuse themselves.
Character and habits
, in an article written originally for the London Review of Books in 2000, says of Rebus,Stubbornness is Rebus's most deep-seated characteristic. All the various ways in which he could improve the quality of his life - which boil down essentially to his being less impossible - are somehow unthinkable. He stands in everybody else's way, but he stands in his own way too: difficult, determined, remorseless, honourable, honest, and proud of his lack of charm. He is a deeply Scottish self-image….
Melanie McGrath, in a review of Even Dogs in the Wild, takes a slightly different view,
… an intensely romanticised, self-dramatising lone wolf, a kind of urban cowboy driven to detection as a means of resolving his existential crisis. As Rebus himself puts it, if justice didn’t matter, “then neither did he”.
Rebus loves to make jokes at the expense of others, especially his superiors and his friends. At times he even examines his own parting words, judging whether they were clever enough. He spars verbally with Siobhan Clarke but also with ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty.
Rebus's sense of honour is questionable and he will lie to a witness swearing that “this is just between the two of us”, with no intention of keeping pertinent information private. He treats the criminal Cafferty’s influence and knowledge as a resource in his investigations and will sometimes do a favour for him. In Cafferty’s mind, Rebus belongs to him, but in Rebus’s own mind he is always fighting Cafferty and trying to collect evidence of his crimes.
Rebus is a heavy drinker and smoker, though always aware that this is bad for his health. He chooses to eat fried and/or fatty foods, knowing they are not good for him. His knowledge of Edinburgh bars and his appreciation of malt whiskies are encyclopaedic. Starting with Mortal Causes, his favourite hangout and meeting-place is the Oxford Bar, and from Exit Music to Rather Be the Devil, the ritual of going outside the bar to smoke is part of his routine. In Black and Blue, with the help of his old friend Jack Morton he stops drinking and is able to continue abstaining through the next book, The Hanging Garden. However, at the end of that novel Jack dies and Rebus resumes drinking. From one novel to another he may try to ration cigarettes, but he is not able to quit smoking entirely until he begins to suffer from COPD at the beginning of Rather Be the Devil — at that time he also begins to cut back on his drinking.
Music is important to Rebus, though he does not play an instrument himself. He has an extensive collection of vinyl, augmented when his brother Michael dies and leaves him records from their youth. It is not until Mortal Causes, however, that his love of rock and folk from the 1960s and 70s is firmly established. In Black and Blue, The Hanging Garden, and Dead Souls, Rebus’s stream of consciousness is sometimes presented as a series of song and album names, which both identify and dismiss his emotional reactions to a situation. Starting with Set in Darkness, he plays a game with Siobhan Clarke of reciting song names and expecting her to identify them. Clarke gives him newer music to listen to, and forms opinions about his favourites, too. In A Song for the Dark Times, she tells their friend Fox,
”John says he wants it put on his gravestone: ‘He listened to the B-sides.’”
Books are important to him, but his interest tends to be aspirational; he struggles with the sense that he might have done better if he had had better educational opportunities. Especially in the earlier novels, there are references to piles of unread books in his apartment, and to the fact that his wife Rhona, an English teacher, took many of the books originally in the apartment when she left him. Aside from Crime and Punishment, he doesn’t actually read much.
Rebus's interest in politics is informed by a deep scepticism. Rankin considers him to be "small-c conservative" and therefore unlikely to support political change; at one point in Strip Jack, he tells his friends Brian and Nell that he has only voted three times in his life, "Once Labour, once SNP, and once Tory." On the other hand, when Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon suggested in a public venue that Rebus would have voted pro-Brexit, Rankin was taken aback.
Rebus’s romantic life is varied. He has occasional one-night stands, but his more durable relationships are with women who have a superior education to him, including his wife Rhona, DI Gill Templar, Dr. Patience Aitken, the museum curator Jean Burchill, and Professor Deborah Quant. His experiments in living with a woman are not successful. He can never put a woman’s needs before those of his current case and he is usually the one who gets left or dismissed. In A Song for the Dark Times, he and Deborah Quant are satisfied with being “friends with benefits".
His most enduring relationship is with Siobhan Clarke, but its romantic expression peaks with a single kiss at the end of A Question of Blood. Starting with Set in Darkness, Clarke ceases to be a mere helper or sidekick and any erotic element needs to be suppressed in order to maintain this new relationship, which is important to both of them. In Set in Darkness, Rebus defends her from a stalker and in the 2002-2004 sequence, Resurrection Men, A Question of Blood, and Fleshmarket Close, he is explicitly compared to a knight. She is sometimes mistaken for his daughter and in A Song for the Dark Times performs the daughterly task of helping him move house.
Around the time of retirement, and during the pandemic lockdown especially, Rebus's constant companion is a dog named Brillo. Brillo features prominently in A Heart Full of Headstones.