Years he'd been fighting the bastard; it was about the means & the method too. Years he'd been fighting the bastard, & now technology & some bespectacled penpusher might end up finishing the job. No mess, no blood
There should be mess
There should be fuss
There should be blood
That is a quotation from Ian Rankins la[te]st Rebus novel, End Music
Sums up the books really. And a kind of Arts & Crafts attitude to policing: Get your hands dirty (craft), despise modern methods & clean clothes
I used to find Rankins books difficult to follow unless I wrote the names down in the back as I went along. More than 80 in Black & Blue for instance, some with at least 2 nicknames (Malcolm 'Malky' 'Stanley' Toal), or aliases. It seems a compulsion to give all his characters names, even those such as waiters or barmen who never reappear. Other characters seem to be of that ilk but then crop up as crucial to the plot several hundred pages later.
I got tired of this & I just stopped bothering to read him, until this latest
Rebus is a brother under the skin of Banks & Resnick. Lonely cops with maverick tendencies. Not good at relationships, as they say
Nothing new about that. Since the days of Sherlock Holmes, at least, there has been something about crime fiction which demands The Outsider to observe & interpret human foibles, to see through the façade of civilised behaviour
Sue Grafton has said that personal ties & family life can get in the way of the plot. Kinsey Millhone would not be able to do what she does if her energies went on caring for those close to her
But Rebus, Banks & Resnick bother me. They seem so far down that they are almost not there at all. No wonder they cannot sustain a relationship. To live in the same house, to share a bed with, someone who is not there would be scary
Melancholia, depression, or a realistic reaction to the disillusion of police work, of the kind described in Roger Graefs Talking Blues?
Some fictional policemen have had a reasonably rounded private life. I used to be pretty keen on John Creaseys (writing as JJ Marric) Gideon of the Yard. And Ruth Rendells Inspector Wexford. I also used to enjoy the prolific outpourings of Elizabeth Linington (Dell Shannon, Lesley Egan, Anne Blaisdell), all featuring uxorious family men. I doubt, though, that I would want to reread any of them today
Rankin, Robinson & Harvey each tries to give their character emotional depth by letting us know their musical tastes. Too much detail for me, verging on the obsessional going on autistic. And does not provoke empathy if you do not know the tracks involved
You can have too much of a good thing however. Faye Kellerman gives too much information about Deckers wife & marriage
There should be mess
There should be fuss
There should be blood
That is a quotation from Ian Rankins la[te]st Rebus novel, End Music
Sums up the books really. And a kind of Arts & Crafts attitude to policing: Get your hands dirty (craft), despise modern methods & clean clothes
I used to find Rankins books difficult to follow unless I wrote the names down in the back as I went along. More than 80 in Black & Blue for instance, some with at least 2 nicknames (Malcolm 'Malky' 'Stanley' Toal), or aliases. It seems a compulsion to give all his characters names, even those such as waiters or barmen who never reappear. Other characters seem to be of that ilk but then crop up as crucial to the plot several hundred pages later.
I got tired of this & I just stopped bothering to read him, until this latest
Rebus is a brother under the skin of Banks & Resnick. Lonely cops with maverick tendencies. Not good at relationships, as they say
Nothing new about that. Since the days of Sherlock Holmes, at least, there has been something about crime fiction which demands The Outsider to observe & interpret human foibles, to see through the façade of civilised behaviour
Sue Grafton has said that personal ties & family life can get in the way of the plot. Kinsey Millhone would not be able to do what she does if her energies went on caring for those close to her
But Rebus, Banks & Resnick bother me. They seem so far down that they are almost not there at all. No wonder they cannot sustain a relationship. To live in the same house, to share a bed with, someone who is not there would be scary
Melancholia, depression, or a realistic reaction to the disillusion of police work, of the kind described in Roger Graefs Talking Blues?
Some fictional policemen have had a reasonably rounded private life. I used to be pretty keen on John Creaseys (writing as JJ Marric) Gideon of the Yard. And Ruth Rendells Inspector Wexford. I also used to enjoy the prolific outpourings of Elizabeth Linington (Dell Shannon, Lesley Egan, Anne Blaisdell), all featuring uxorious family men. I doubt, though, that I would want to reread any of them today
Rankin, Robinson & Harvey each tries to give their character emotional depth by letting us know their musical tastes. Too much detail for me, verging on the obsessional going on autistic. And does not provoke empathy if you do not know the tracks involved
You can have too much of a good thing however. Faye Kellerman gives too much information about Deckers wife & marriage
