Knots and Crosses — An Inspector Rebus Novel

The Beginning of Rebus

Knots and Crosses is Ian Rankin’s 1987 debut and the first appearance of Detective John Rebus, the damaged, contradictory Edinburgh policeman who would go on to anchor the defining Scottish crime series. Rebus investigates a series of murders of young girls while receiving taunting, cryptic messages from someone who seems to know his buried past — a past that reaches back to his service in the SAS and the trauma he has never resolved. Shorter and darker than the books that followed, it reads more as a psychological thriller than a police procedural.

Rankin conceived the novel less as the start of a series than as a literary reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with Edinburgh as the divided city hosting both halves of a single personality. Rebus is not yet the fully formed figure of the later books, and the plotting is less sophisticated than Rankin’s mature work, but the elements that would make the series great — the specificity of place, the detective’s productive damage — are all present.

The First Rebus

Knots and Crosses was published in 1987 by The Bodley Head as Ian Rankin’s debut novel, though it was not immediately recognised as the beginning of a major crime series. Rankin initially conceived the book as a literary novel with crime elements — a dark retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with Edinburgh as the divided city that hosts both aspects of a single personality. The Jekyll-Hyde parallel is explicit: Detective John Rebus has a respectable surface life and a buried violent history, and the city he polices is itself split between the Georgian New Town and the decaying housing estates and heroin-ridden communities of the post-industrial South Side.

The novel sold modestly; Rankin’s publisher did not immediately commission a sequel. It was only with the third Rebus novel, Wolfman (Tooth and Nail in the US, 1992), that the series began to find its readership. Knots and Crosses was subsequently republished in a revised edition that addressed some first-novel roughness.

The Rebus Series

Ian Rankin published eighteen Rebus novels between 1987 and 2007, when Exit Music marked the detective’s retirement from the Edinburgh police. Rebus returned in Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012), followed by further novels through the 2020s; Rankin also introduced Detective Malcolm Fox, a police complaints investigator, as a secondary protagonist in an interleaved series. The Rebus novels have been adapted for television twice: with Ken Stott in the lead role for the ITV series (2000–2007), and in a 2024 adaptation for Britbox. The series is the defining crime fiction portrait of Edinburgh, a city whose literary respectability (Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle) has been consistently expanded by Rankin’s unflinching accounts of its social geography.

Rankin’s Edinburgh

The Edinburgh of the Rebus novels is as much a character as Rebus himself: the specific tension between the city’s tourist image (the Castle, the Royal Mile, the Festival) and its social reality (drugs, poverty, political corruption, post-industrial unemployment) generates the moral energy of the entire series. Rankin grew up in Fife and moved to Edinburgh to study at the University; the outsider-insider perspective — loving the city and refusing to sentimentalise it — is built into Rebus’s own character, a detective who understands the city’s secrets because he is both product and critic of it.

Edinburgh’s Social Geography

The Edinburgh of the Rebus novels is structured around a contrast that the city itself promotes: the cultivated public face (the Castle, the Festival, the Georgian New Town, the whisky heritage) and the hidden private reality (heroin, poverty, political corruption, the aftermath of industrial decline). Rankin uses this contrast structurally: the murders in Knots and Crosses occur in the well-maintained spaces that Edinburgh presents to the world, but their origins are in the spaces it conceals. Rebus’s own psychology — the trauma he carries from his SAS service, his failed marriage, his alcoholism — mirrors the city’s structure: a respectable surface over a damaged interior.

The Jekyll and Hyde Architecture

The Stevenson influence is not incidental decoration but the novel’s organising principle, and it repays attention. Rankin builds Knots and Crosses around doubling at every level: a city split between its genteel public face and its concealed deprivation, a detective split between his respectable present and his buried, violent past, and a crime whose solution depends on recognising that the hunter and the hunted are bound together by a shared history. The taunting messages Rebus receives — the knots and crosses of the title — are a private language only the damaged can read, and the case can only be solved by a man willing to look into the part of himself he has spent years refusing to confront. This Jekyll-and-Hyde architecture gives a slim debut more thematic weight than its plot alone would carry, and it establishes the template Rankin would refine across two decades: the investigation as a means of excavating both a city’s secrets and a detective’s.

The Verdict

Knots and Crosses is the essential starting point for one of crime fiction’s great series, and a darker, more psychological novel than the procedurals it would spawn. The writing is less assured than Rankin’s later work and the mystery less intricate, but Edinburgh is already rendered with genuine specificity, and Rebus’s damage — the SAS past, the failed marriage, the drinking — is established as the series’ real subject. For readers of place-rooted British crime fiction, it is where everything begins.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The first Inspector Rebus novel: darker and more psychological than the series would become, but the Edinburgh atmosphere and Rebus’s contradictions are already vivid — an essential starting point.

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