The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories

The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories (2015) Ian Rankin

This is a collection of all the Inspector Rebus short stories.

‘Dead and Buried’ (2013)
‘Playback,’ ‘The Dean Curse,’ ‘Being Frank,’ ‘Concrete Evidence,’ ‘Seeing Things,’ ‘A Good Hanging,’ ‘Tit for Tat,’ ‘Not Provan,’ ‘Sunday,’ ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ ‘The Gentleman’s Club,’ ‘Monstrous Trumpet’ from A Good Hanging (And Other Short Stories, Featuring Inspector Rebus) (2002)
‘My Shopping Day’ (1997) Herbert in Motion and Other Stories in Great Britain
‘Facing the Music’ (1992) Beggar’s Banquet
‘Trip Trap’ (1992) 1st Culprit by Chatto & Windus
‘Talk Show’ (1991) Winter’s Crimes 23
‘Castle Dangerous’ (1993) Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, October 1993
‘In the Frame’ (1992) Winter’s Crimes 24
‘Window of Opportunity’ (1995) Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 1995
‘No Sanity Clause’ (2000) Daily Telegraph, December 2000
‘Death Is Not the End’ (1998)
‘Tell Me Who to Kill’ (2003) Mysterious Pleasures
‘Saint Nicked’ (2002) Radio Times
‘Atonement’ (2005)
‘Not Just Another Saturday’ (2005)
‘Penalty Claus’ (2010) Mail on Sunday
‘The Passenger’ (2014)
‘A Three-Pint Problem’ (2014)
‘The Very Last Drop’ (2010) (written to help the work of Royal Blind)
‘Cinders’ (2014) Mail on Sunday

I was at a loss as to what I wanted to read, and since I’ve been loaning the Ian Rankin mysteries to a friend, I thought I’d jump back into them myself, with this mystery collection.

One of the reasons I love the Rebus stories is that Rebus himself is so damned complicated.

He parked in front of the tenement, guided by a uniformed officer who had recognised the badly dented front bumper of Rebus’s car. It was rumoured that the dent had come from knocking down too many old ladies, and who was Rebus to deny it? It was the stuff of legend and it gave him prominence in the fearful eyes of the younger recruits.

(H)ow did you make safe a man like that? The Army had designed a weapon and that weapon had become misadjusted, its sights all wrong. You could dismantle a weapon. You could dismantle a man, too, come to that. But each and every piece was still as lethal as the whole.

A dangerous book, the Bible. It could be made to say anything, its meaning in the mind of the beholder.

He had half a dozen tickets lying around, any one of which could be his fortune. He quite liked the notion that he might have won a million and not know it; preferred it, in fact, to the idea of actually having the million in his bank account. What would he do with a million pounds? Same as he’d do with fifty thou– self-destruct.

Only faster.

I still can’t manage to re-read the first book, but I might try jumping back in at book three or so and go from there.

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Rating: 8.5/10

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