Detective as a younger man

IAN RANKIN’S “Watchman” ain’t the cutest pulpy puppy to take home before the mean men at the shelter put it to sleep, but it is a fascinating portrait of the detective novelist as a young man.

Written as a stand-alone title during Rankin’s hungry years in the late 1980s, right after the first Inspector Rebus book came out, “Watchman” concentrates on British intelligence operative Miles Flint, an “invisible man,” your garden-variety civil servant assigned to track cagey characters for the government.

Despite Miles’ apparent expertise at making “himself as innocuous as possible,” he gets easily distracted by a girl and blows a surveillance operation, thereby permitting a murderer to run through the streets of London casually garroting important figures.

From here, the plot gets more baroque, involving the Irish Republican Army, a scummy CIA agent, a nervous newspaper reporter, multiple underworld figures -- indeed, more characters than you’re likely to find in a chapter of a Robert Jordan epic fantasy.

But Rankin’s cast of thousands is too full of twig-like stereotypes, including a prostitute egregiously “saving up to open her own boutique, or -- last month’s notion -- a bookshop” and a computer geek who is too busy programming the game ArmorGeddon 2000 to have a social life.

But there are also such peppy side figures as Jim Stevens, a disgraced journalist trying to put together the jigsaw puzzle and jig his way back to credibility. This is an especially arduous task because, this being 1988, the poor man doesn’t yet have the technology to set up a blog.

There are characters named The Organ Grinder and Mad Phil who are, in truth, not nearly as menacing as their agnomina. Rankin gives Miles an interest in beetles and can’t stop riffing on the word, whether it’s Miles’ wife driving a Volkswagen Beetle or Miles offering to show one of his nemeses “where the Beatles made ‘Abbey Road.’ ” Miles even compares people to beetles, classifying fellow camouflage experts as tortoise beetles.

But in light of the book’s preoccupation with women, I was surprised that Rankin missed an opportunity to toss in an Alfred C. Kinsey entomological reference. (The noted sexuality researcher was a great student of insects.)

Rankin is clearly too much of a merry prankster to emulate the writing of, say, a John le Carre. In fact, one of the book’s endearing qualities is seeing Rankin desperately attempting to reel in his quirks from the hard and choppy waters of espionage. But he can’t. When a Parliament member shows up, one expects him to speak up about all the terrorist bombings, but it’s the avocado dip he detests: “The very color was an insult to him and so many parties these days seemed to find a bowl of such sludge de rigueur.”

Rankin’s prose often rummages for precision. He hasn’t yet mastered the telling detail. We watch as “[a] ragged creature shuffled his feet to a tune played on the harmonica.” An operative is introduced “looking tired, his tie hanging undone around his neck,” when the dangling cravat would really be enough. Rankin’s cartoonish syntax is likewise imprecise.

At one minatory point, Miles makes “a sweeping gesture with his arm” -- the ominous mood compromised by this banal description. A pistol is described as “some huge, anonymous, nonregulation model.” When a window explodes, “shards of glass poured down like silver.”

Sometimes, Rankin’s phrasing is outright nutty, such as his choice to have a gun “pointing at [a] pineal eye” or a man both kissing a beautiful woman and “laying custodial fingers on her neck.” He is also taken with dichotomous descriptions pertaining to the face. An agent’s visage “had the sincerity of a president and the teeth of an alligator.” A duty manager has a “voice colder than his eye and his eyes as cold as icicles.”

This is clearly a writer still struggling to find his voice. But despite these descriptive gaffes, “Watchman” does foretell plentiful flickers of the taut novelist to come. Like in the early Rebus novels, Rankin here is skillful with close omniscient voice, barraging the reader with rapid-fire internal rhetoric as the narrative progresses.

The younger Rankin is also capable of firing off a few rudimentary but effective barbs. When journalist Stevens remembers an unsuccessful night with a woman, Rankin writes, “She had not fallen for his charm, but he had fallen to her gracefully executed karate chop to the neck.” “Watchman” features a number of pleasant comic symbols. A Graham Greene novel appears with two pages missing. Stevens starts out with a toothache, and this funny evocation of courage suggests how hard-core he can choose to go in pursuing his story. (Indeed, Stevens’ slinky and more stable aide-de-camp is described as having “no fillings in her mouth.”) Miles stays in a hotel where he sees “a flat rooftop where the matted carcass of a cat lay as though it had died of boredom.”

The espionage world wasn’t an apposite place for Rankin’s talents. Fortunately, he would return to his cynical Scottish detective and produce one of the most enjoyable contemporary mystery series. “Watchman” may not be the best Rankin, but until the final Rebus volume hits stateside, it’s intriguing mood music before the final exit.

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Edward Champion is a Brooklyn writer and host of the literary blog Return of the Reluctant at www.edrants.com.