Rather Foxy

Ian Rankins new cop,Malcolm Fox,gets more intriguing on his second outing

Its been rather quiet in Edinburgh since the retirement of Detective Inspector John Rebus,that rule-bending cop with a weakness for drink,and a strong urge to show any authority the finger. Fans miss his dry wit and sarcasm,his tutorials with Professor Nicotine,the morning swills of single malt,and the sense of a man raging into the dark night.

So one wondered what Ian Rankin had got himself into with the mild-mannered Inspector Malcolm Fox that he introduced in The Complaints two years ago. This is a man who seems at first too sandpapered of the rough edges. He is a teetotaler who quietly knocks back tomato juice in a bar full of carousing cops; lives in a bachelor beige bungalow,and is rarely witty. As a member of the department of Professional Ethics and Standards or the Complaints,he respects the rulebook,and his task is to investigate cops who have bent the law while being entrusted to protect it. But stay with him through the pages of The Impossible Dead,and you find hes no punctilious bureaucrat,but a dogged sleuth and an intriguing character.

Fox and his colleagues Tony Kaye and Joe Naysmith,the former a wisecracking,cynical cop after Rebuss heart,arrive at Kirkcaldy,a city near Edinburgh,to investigate if police officers there helped cover up for Paul Carter,a detective constable convicted of sexual harassment. They are met,as usual,with withering scorn from real cops,and their queries stonewalled. If the unexciting remit of the Complaints is a plotting problem for Rankin,he solves it by slowly revealing Fox to be a far nosier cop,ready to meddle in cases which are not strictly his business,including getting a wire tap on his suspects without informing his superior. When Carters uncle Alan,who reported his nephews misdemeanor,turns up dead in a lonely cottage,Fox refuses to believe it is suicide. His investigation entails a turf war with local cops,and ends up getting him taken off the original case. He carries on nonetheless,digging up a case that goes back to the 1980s and a group of loony Scottish nationalists that might not have disappeared entirely,and angering some of the most powerful in the land.

Rankin does not disappoint pages after pages of crackling dialogue,a cast of quirky characters and a narrative pace that can keep sleep-deprived moms awake into the night,though one could quibble at the ending. The novel works also because of how much he invests into Fox,who might not be an attractively flawed cop like Rebus,but is a man torn between his meticulous sense of right and wrong,and the need to do a job well. Is he a real detective if all he investigates are procedural lapses of wayward cops? Is he negligent towards his ailing father,slipping into dementia at a care home? Is his father right,when he hints he is not at home among the CID,the department he will join when his tenure at the Complaints is over?

For readers of crime fiction,the detective is the warm,human centre of plots littered by random death,what often lifts genre fiction from its nuts-and-bolts formula. Rankin spends a lot of time describing Foxs despair at his fathers illness like any other son,he too is defeated by approaching death. We find him at the end,though,in his house,converted from a bachelor pad to a scene of grubby domesticity,now that his father has moved in. Father and son raise a toast to each other. Theres no tomato juice in Malcolm Foxs glass. Thats a good sign.