Inspector Rebus

About the Inspector Rebus series

John Rebus is a Detective Inspector with Edinburgh CID: a hard-drinking, rule-bending insomniac who solves cases as much through stubbornness and an instinct for the city's underside as through procedure. Ian Rankin builds each novel around a real strand of Edinburgh life — the tourist Old Town sitting on top of a much darker New Town of gangsters, corrupt councillors and old sectarian grudges — and lets Rebus's insubordination with his superiors (and his complicated, decades-long feud-turned-uneasy-alliance with gangster Big Ger Cafferty) run through the whole series. Colleague-turned-equal Siobhan Clarke grows from rookie DC in the early books into a DI running her own cases by the later ones, and the series ages Rebus in something close to real time: he retires, comes back as a civilian cold-case consultant, retires again, and by the most recent books is dealing with COPD and his own mortality while still getting pulled into cases.

What makes the series distinctive is that tension between a classic tartan-noir mystery-of-the-week structure and a genuinely serialised life — relationships, health, Edinburgh politics and Rebus's own record all carry forward book to book. It's for readers who want their police procedurals morally grey, their setting almost a character in its own right, and their detective allowed to actually grow old.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Knots and Crosses (1987), is the way to read Rebus — Rankin wrote the series to be read in sequence, and Rebus's career, health and relationships (especially with Siobhan Clarke and Big Ger Cafferty) develop continuously across the books. There's no meaningful chronological-vs-publication split here: the books were written and are set in the order they came out.

The two short-story collections sit alongside the novels rather than in the numbered run: A Good Hanging and Other Stories (1992) collects early Rebus stories, and The Beat Goes On (2014) gathers essentially all of Rankin's Rebus short fiction, including a novella, into one volume — both are optional extras best read after you're already invested in the character, not as a starting point. New readers should simply start with Knots and Crosses.