Read Online Ian Rankin & Inspector Rebus by Craig Cabell - Free Book Online

again, the corrupt will continueto rule the city and he will continue to play his own small part in trying to thwart them. The sad fact is, by Exit Music , Rebus understands that he’ll never beat the system or the city, realising that he was just another cog in the huge mechanism that is human life.

    ‘To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touchingbooks.’
    The Secret Teachings of All Ages

CHAPTER SIX
THE WOLFMAN
    R ebus’s story continued with Wolfman , a book that became an interesting breakthrough novel for Rankin, for he would write about London instead of Edinburgh. Why was that? Simply, Wolfman was written in London in 1990 and would take on influences from Rankin’s current surroundings. He moved to a maisonette in Tottenham in 1986 with his wife, where they would stay until 1990,when they moved to France for six years.
    Rankin needed a steady job and applied to become a hi-fi journalist. He knew nothing about hi-fi but he could write, so suddenly he was letting everyone know what hi-fi to buy! When he talks about the job now he makes it sound mundane, and perhaps it was, but it was still writing, and to practise a little journalism wasn’t a bad thing.
    According to Rankin’sdiary, he started Wolfman on 11 March. ‘I’ve started, half-heartedly, a new Rebus novel… it’s going to be called Wolfman , if it ever gets off the ground.’
    His sense of apprehension comes from the fact that he knew he had a lot of research to do before getting the book off the ground. That said, the London setting allowed him to use common Scottish words and introduce them to a London audience,as Rebus would find England’s capital city difficult to get to grips with. Conversely the unsympathetic London coppers have trouble with the accent, not to mention their own prejudices against ‘the Jocks’. If Rankin endured this prejudice himself when in London is not clear; suffice to say he lacks sympathy with the city throughout the novel.
    Wolfman is significant for other reasons, too. It’sthe first outing – albeit in cameo appearance only – of Morris Gerald Cafferty, the gangster who rules Edinburgh. ‘Big Ger’ would start making his name in the Rebus series from The Black Book onwards, to the extent that he took on Professor Moriarty significance – always there to tease Rebus (not always from the foreground) as he makes his investigations.
    With Wolfman set in London, one couldsuggest that Rankin was writing outside his comfort zone, but he had lived there for a few years before starting to write the book and had left for France before final proofs and publication. More significantly, Wolfman was challenging for Rankin because the book was about a serial killer – the Wolfman of the title – and it therefore developed into Rankin’s most graphically horrific title as aconsequence. His editor at the time thought the book would benefit from a few cuts, so the horror aspect was played down, or rather left to the reader’s imagination. Rankin complied and learned a very important lesson as a writer: letting the suggestion of horror play on the reader’s mind.
    Wolfman was a commercial novel because Rankin wrote it to try and break into the massmarket. On publicationof the book he would proudly claim that he was now a ‘professional author’. Couple that with the fact that he had recently won the Chandler-Fulbright Fellowship Prize in America, where he was sponsored to spend approximately six months, and things were looking good for the young man. Then, when life couldn’t get any better, Rankin’s wife Miranda announced that she was pregnant with their firstchild.
    With his confidence building, Rankin pushed the character of Rebus in Wolfman a bit further, as he told me: ‘I didn’t know Rebus at all in book one – he was really only a means of leading the reader from one place to another. By the end of book two, I felt