Hide and Seek
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- €5.49
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- €5.49
Publisher Description
The second Inspector Rebus novel from 'Britain's No.1 crime writer' DAILY MIRROR.
A junkie lies dead in an Edinburgh squat, spreadeagled, cross-like on the floor, between two burned-down candles, a five-pointed star daubed on the wall above.
Just another dead addict - until John Rebus begins to chip away at the indifference, treachery, deceit and sleaze that lurks behind the facade of the Edinburgh familiar to tourists.
Only Rebus seems to care about a death which looks more like a murder every day, about a seductive danger he can almost taste, appealing to the darkest corners of his mind...
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Ian Rankin’s Inside Story: “I tend not to re-read my own work, but in the mid-2010s, my publishers wanted to republish the older books and asked me if I would write introductions to them. So I had to go and reread the Rebus series from book one all the way through. And it was interesting. I mean, there was one in particular, Dead Souls, that I couldn’t make head nor tail of. I literally had no idea what was going on. I was completely lost in the plot. It was too complicated.
“And some of the early ones that I hadn’t had fond memories of, I liked a little better. Hide and Seek was the second Rebus novel. The first one, Knots & Crosses was meant to be an updating of the themes of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but nobody got that. So I basically rewrote it. It revolves around a gentleman’s club called Hyde’s, just to hammer it home a bit more. On the surface and in the daylight hours, these gentlemen are upstanding members of society, but at night they loosen the collar and get down and dirty. So it was taking the notion of Jekyll and Hyde and making it a societal thing.
“I think there was a big leap forward in the writing. I think the first one, Knots and Crosses, is overwritten. It’s written by someone who’s just in love with language. There are sentences in it I don’t actually understand, I’ll be honest with you. There’s one sentence in there that talks about ‘the manumission of dreams’. I think I just loved the word manumission, and wanted to get it into that book in any way, shape or form. So the language here is less flowery, the Rebus characterisation is a bit more assured and I think it’s a leap forward in quality.
“If a reader was going to start their Rebus odyssey, I think I would point them here first. Not least, perhaps, because Knots & Crosses was intended to be a standalone. It’s not really until book two that I thought, ‘Hang on a minute, this guy could be around for a while.’ I had come to the decision that I really wanted to write about contemporary society, about politics, about social issues. And a detective was the best way to do that, because a detective has access to the highest in the land and the lowest in the land. So I could look at society from top to bottom, using one character. And so having had that realisation, then I just had to stick with it.”
