Saints of the Shadow Bible

The subtitle of Ian Rankin's Saints of the Shadow Bible, Rebus: Saint or Sinner?, is a red herring: "saint," after all, has a double meaning in the novel--the good cop vs. the crooked Summerhall gang of detective "Saints"--and, in practice, the ex-Saints turn out to be sinners in a very big way. Rebus sins by association with the Saints, and the Saints accuse him of sinning against them by cooperating with a very worrying and belated investigation, but does he sin against the code of policing in other ways? This subtitle and its false binary are all the more interesting because Rankin has long since jettisoned any references to Rebus' lost (albeit always unorthodox) Christian faith, which was relatively prominent in the early novels.  The "Bible" of the title is Scots Criminal Law, with the other Bible conspicuous by its absence. One cannot imagine the current Rebus worrying about the prospect of his own damnation.  The novels, that is, have become so utterly secular in their frame of reference that "saintliness" only registers as a bleak parody of a virtue conspicuously not on display anywhere in the story.  Given the bookends to Saints of the Shadow Bible, in which Rebus tries to get a murderer to confess, it's not clear if the concept of untainted goodness exists any longer in this particular fictional world.  

As usual, Rankin interweaves contemporary historical events with his detective tale.  The binary subtitle returns in the "Yes" and "No" campaigns for and against devolution, a subject that Rebus resolutely tunes out whenever it comes up on the radio. Similarly, the investigation at the novel's core unfolds because of double jeopardy reforms, and it becomes increasingly clear that the "Saints" at Summerhall (of which Rebus was one) had something to do with the coverup of a murder committed by one of their snitches, Billy Saunders.  Malcolm Fox, whom Rankin introduced in The Complaints, is still chasing after Rebus (as he was in Standing in Another Man's Grave)--only to wind up working with him instead.  Meanwhile, Rebus tries to figure out a strange car crash involving the daughter of a wealthy but hot-tempered English businessman.  Rebus' one-time protegee, Siobhan Clarke, is now heading up her own murder investigations.  Not surprisingly, the two crimes wind up echoing each other, not so much in content as in their implications: who has the right to do justice? What does it mean to "protect" another? Is it "saintliness" in its religious sense even possible?

Like much of Rankin's recent fiction, Saints of the Shadow Bible frequently shades into the elegiac.  Near the end of the novel, one supporting character muses that Rebus was "a breed of cop that wasn't supposed to exist any more, a rare and endangered species" (295); crossing the borders between "old" and "new" forms of policework, Rebus fits nowhere in particular.  On the one hand, Rebus attracts this kind of nostalgia.  On the other, the narrative calls this nostalgia into question: the Saints are, after all, morally compromised cops, who tamper with evidence, bribe coroners, and cover up crimes when it suits them.  But the ex-Saints, including Rebus himself, are mostly in terrible physical and/or mental shape, literally dying out.   As he did in Standing in Another Man's Grave, Rankin likes to emphasize Rebus' sagging body, his inability to get up a flight of stairs without wheezing, his excessive drinking.  He stands in stark contrast to the tight-wound Malcolm Fox, an alcoholic permanently on the wagon with a passion for things in order, as well as to the bureaucrats like his new commanding officer, James Page, with his well-buffed shoes and political connections.   Rankin's solution to his protagonist problem--neither Clarke nor Fox worked as stand-alone detectives--is to yoke Rebus, Fox, and Clarke together into a single unit, melding the last of the old Scottish force with exemplars of the new.  Although the strategy is of questionable realism (Rebus' return, even as a DS instead of DI, strains credulity), it's something of which Sir Walter Scott might be proud.