Short but not sweet

As Ian Rankin explains in the introduction to ‘Beggars Banquet’, the reason why there aren’t many short stories featuring his booze-sodden copper Rebus is because he generally tends to write them in between the novels “as a way of getting the good Inspector out of my system for a while”.

Appropriately enough, then, that most of these stories are tasty little morsels not sufficiently substantial to satisfy a real hunger but snacks you can eat between meals (novels, if you’re not following the horribly stretched metaphor) which not only don’t spoil your appetite but actually whet it.

The difficulty is that the crime fiction genre, of which Rankin is an undisputed master, conventionally depends upon a series of twists and turns, leading the reader down unexpected avenues, and the short story form only really allows for a single twist – even though, in the cases of tales like ‘Someone Got To Eddie’ and ‘The Wider Scheme’, the twists are admittedly good ones, deftly handled so as to be unforeseen and yet seemingly inevitable in hindsight.

At the same time, and despite efforts to evaluate these stories on their own merits, I can’t help but be coloured in my judgements by having only recently read Irvine Welsh’s ‘Filth’. Compared to that, Rankin’s depiction of the darker side of Edinburgh and his occasionally wayward hero feel a bit lightweight. It’s as though ‘The Falls’ has been the pathway drug to ‘Filth’, and now I can’t quite go back to the softer stuff.

As a result, perhaps the best piece in the collection is ‘Glimmer’, which Rankin confesses is him seizing upon “the chance to create a mythology around one of my favourite Rolling Stones songs” (‘Sympathy For The Devil’). It’s a vivid glimpse of late 60s hedonism and the death of the hippy dream through the drug-glazed eyes of a journalist hanging around with the Stones with the supposed intention of writing an article. The subject matter might be outside his usual range, but that doesn’t stop him from writing brutally about brutality: “They’d threatened to cut off your eyelids. That was the way things were now”…

Lean and trim, the stories of ‘Beggars Banquet’ are a decent and very easily digestible introduction to what Rankin is all about.

(Note to self: must read more short stories.)