Ian Rankin and Boston Teran review by Pat Boran

Set in Darkness. Ian Rankin. Orion. £16.99 UK HB.
God is a Bullet. Boston Teran. Macmillan. £10.00 UK HB.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Tribune)

'I don't think you have to be obsessed to make a good detective,' says DC Siobhan Clarke halfway through Ian Rankin's eleventh and very impressive outing for the scourge of Edinburgh's crime world, DI John Rebus. Strangely, however, both novels under review here, and the genre as a whole, would have us believe the opposite.

The fact is that the history of crime fiction is the history of loners and obsessives, criminals and detectives alike. Though it's difficult to defend the notion that the first fictional detective was that obsessive loner Hamlet -- after all, the victim himself tells the prince who dunnit at the start, a luxury afforded few sleuths -- nevertheless the common belief that detection is a kind of vocation goes back at least as far as Chesterton's Father Brown.

It is also interesting to note that, again in both books, the principal character has been abandoned by a wife (and young daughter) because of the very qualities which drive him. Clearly we're in archetypal territory (Rebus' wife Patience has run out on him, geddit?) And, given the limitations of the genre, in some ways the challenge is less to be original than to be convincing.

Rankin goes in with confidence and comes out looking very good indeed. Set in December 1998, his latest Rebus adventure has a fairly demanding plot concerning the discovery of three separate bodies, one of them a prospective Member of the Scottish Parliament, all in the first couple of dozen pages. On a larger scale, as with the earlier books, the city itself is under scrutiny, in this case specifically the increasing movement of organised crime into the property business.

A somewhat weak opening aside, the plot is otherwise tight as you'd expect from Rankin, but it's in dialogue and character that the book really sparkles.

'Life used to be so simple,' Rebus says to the young Clarke, the surrogate daughter who might yet become his lover. Clarke nods. 'You lived in a cave, clubbed your food to death...' And Rebus comes back: 'And little girls went to charm schools. Now, you've all got degrees from the University of Sarcasm.'

Though wise-cracking detectives are hardly new, Rankin's considerable achievement is to have captured not only the voices and characters of lives under stress, but also the relative silences of a heart and a city in winter.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for New Yorker Boston Teran's debut God is a Bullet. Hyped as 'a wild ride into a savage subculture of cult violence' the book offers nothing by way of insight into cult goings-on, unless frequent references to tattoos, tarot cards and something vaguely referred to as the Left-Handed Path qualify.

Violence, however, there is.

The story -- such as it is -- follows the adventures of desk cop Bob Hightower who, when his ex-wife is viciously murdered and his beloved daughter kidnapped, takes to the road after the perpetrators. Conveniently, he teams up with Case, a recovering junkie, who agrees to lead him to the man she believes is responsible, the aforementioned Left-Handed Path's chief bottle-washer, Cyrus. And it just so happens that Case and Cyrus 'had a thing going' way back.

But hey, who needs plotting in a book where people don't show fear but their faces 'flush out with a fearful symmetry' or where a character can be described as 'an illusion of decorum shrink-wrapped around a frightened stiffness'.

The pity about this totally unchecked desire to impress is that Teran can produce the goods when it comes to place, witness 'the dark blue icing of night' descending on the Californian desert where so much of the story is set.

Novels told in the present tense can seem more active, but they can also come across as desperate to engage. Something of the poetry of horror of Brando in Apocalypse Now -- 'I love the smell of napalm in the morning -- is what Teran is after here. But, unfortunately, descriptions of 'brain jelly trailing up the wall like the spanning wings of a bird' come not from the mouths of characters but from an author who reaches for the ketchup bottle more than once where he might have settled for a red pen.