Masterful Scottish Police Procedural

Edinburgh is a city of bridges, not over water but over ravines. A castle looms at one end, while at the other sits Holyrood Palace, domicile of Mary Queen of Scots before Queen Elizabeth took the unfriendly action of lopping off her head. The Georgian elegance of the New Town lies to the north, the teeming labyrinth of the Old Town, lair of Deacon Brodie (mass murderer and model for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll), to the south.

Edinburgh reeks of violence and history and literature, often the three combined, and these days the city--almost in itself a metaphor, its many complexities and contradictions contained within an area you can walk around in a day if not an afternoon--is home to the best crime novels coming out of Britain, and some of the best being written anywhere.

Their author is Ian Rankin. His genre is a familiar one, the police procedural, but finish one of his books and you feel you’ve been taken inside the riven body of Edinburgh from top to the darkest bottom, a journey that calls Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to mind as often as it does Inspector Morse.

These Edinburgh streets aren’t merely mean--they’re bleak, cold, miserable, vistas where disenchantment and violence are racing certainties and not just the norm.

Rankin’s latest, “Set in Darkness,” begins, not with one dead body, but three: a 20-year-old corpse, found bricked up in the splendid old building that is being converted into the newly independent Scotland’s House of Parliament; a vagrant, who takes a dive from one of those bridges and plunges through the leaky glass roof of Waverly Station (said vagrant is discovered to have left a little less than a million dollars in his savings account); and a politician from one of the region’s richest and most powerful families, his skull caved in.

As senior cop, Rankin’s hero, John Rebus, gets the most high-profile of these cases (the politician), with the qualification that he work alongside Derek Linford, an upwardly mobile and indecently ambitious young officer from another precinct, who sees all this as a swift route to promotion. Rebus’ protege Det. Siobhan Clarke is given the vagrant, while two of his junior officers start poking around in the history of the 20-year-old corpse. The yuppie Linford takes a fancy to Clarke, who Rebus is determined to protect.

Meanwhile, after much skilfully written sexual fencing, and a drunken night in a local boozer, Rebus commits an absolute no-no and finds himself in bed with the 40-something but still sexy sister of the privileged murder victim.

Thus Rankin erects the framework for one of the things he’s extremely good at: the depiction of complex interaction, scenes in which every crackling exchange is a power play, a more-or-less subtle move for sexual, social or professional supremacy. His characters wield words like broken bottles, Darwinian dialogues that are only a faithful reflection of the environment they flesh out. Rankin’s people are always wanting something, even in the most seemingly innocuous exchange, and many of them don’t care how they get it.

It was Benjamin Disraeli who coined the useful phrase “two nations,” to describe the divide between the rich and poor, and it can equally be applied to a north-south division in the country. The concept still holds true, certainly in the way Britain tends to be represented in literature: on the one hand there’s the landed England of “Howard’s End” and “A Handful of Dust,” on the other “Trainspotting” and Ken Loach. Rankin doesn’t opt for the pretty picture, but his portrayal of Edinburgh feels harrowingly truthful. Of course, Rankin faces the inevitable problem of all genre writers: just how to make this cops-and-robbers material feel original.

Rebus obviously owes much to Scottish writer William McIlvanney’s inspired creation, the Glasgow-based Laidlaw. Rebus’ cultural references run along the lines of poet Hugh MacDiarmid and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page rather than Laidlaw’s Camus and Mozart, but they’re pretty much the same sort of guy: prickly middle-aged loners, in touch with the street, out of touch with their superiors and long-suffering spouses and family. Needless to say they’re partial to a dram or two, some single malt preferably.

And then there’s the matter of connecting the seemingly disconnected events that gave the narrative such a supercharged jolt in the first place. Just how--some 350 pages later--do all those messy bodies relate to each other?

It’s the moment in the story that readers and writers approach with equal dread, tidy explanations being less enchanting in fiction, if not in life, than energizing and anarchic problems. “Set in Darkness” hurtles past the inevitable car wreck of its own contrivance with aplomb, with the trick of a veritable magician, in fact. A whole new plot emerges in the last third of the book, involving Rebus’ cunning and evil nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty, a powerful gangster recently emerged from jail, a gutter Moriarty--who once again proves Faulkner’s dictum that the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even the past--and soon has Edinburgh’s shriveled heart, and our hero’s courage, in his paw.

Thus Rankin avoids the groan of a too-neat ending, and niftily sets himself up for a future episode in this series, whose primary excellence is its ability to evoke a dingy urban world entire. Nobody--not Michael Connelly, not even James Ellroy--is quite doing that for Los Angeles. Perhaps L.A. is too huge and sprawling, too amorphous and essentially ungraspable to allow that sort of ownership any more; perhaps Rankin is just doing his job with a broader brush. A big bestseller in Britain, this terrific writer certainly deserves to be more popular here.

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Richard Rayner is the author of “The Blue Suit” and the forthcoming “The Cloud Sketcher.”