Wombat Diet

Henning Mankell and Ian Rankin are two of my favourite crime writers. Both write about characters who inhabit places we get to know through their eyes and via their imperfect, messy lives and relationships. Rankin’s Inspector Rebus lives and works in Edinburgh. Mankell’s Inspector Wallander lives in Skane, in Sweden. They are more sympathetic characters than my erstwhile neighbour Sherlock Holmes — he supposedly lived around the corner at nr 221b Baker Street. The continuity of their lives in a series of books was more satisfying than Holmes’s set pieces.

Mankell’s writing about Skane from Mozambique, where he lives, seems reminiscent of Joyce writing about Dublin from exile. Does he, I wonder, quiz visitors to see if they can remember consecutive shop fronts?– What a futile exercise that would be nowadays. Does he go back? Joyce never did.

I watched a BBC TV program entitled Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh this evening. He recounted Rebus’s career and pondered how he would be killed off in his next novel. It was an affectionate and sometimes funny portrait of a complex city with many pairs of sides, rich and poor, old and new, legal and illegal etc. Rankin ruminates on the Scots and their relationship with food and drink and self-destruction generally. The responses to his solicitation for euphemisms for being drunk rolled off tonques that, you could tell, had uttered these words often. Rebus is approaching retirement and will probably not go quietly. Will it be drink and a bad diet that finishes him off? Or a Holmesian plunge to his death at the hands of a latterday Moriarty? Rankin hasn’t decided yet. He created Rebus easily enough but finds finishing him off hard, understandably.

I will need a new detective!

A very long time ago I recall a poll of Sunday Times readers on the greatest detective novel ever written. The winner was The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett. I found it in a jumble sale years later, never got around to it, and now it is lost. At the top of my list to read again someday are some of the crime novels of Edgar Wallace. As a boy I greatly enjoyed The Ringer, Again The Ringer and The Flying Squad and the foggy London they evoked. I read them by torchlight under the bedclothes on cold winter nights when I should have been sleeping. I can still recall the very sinister silhouetted hand with a smoking revolver on the spine of The Ringer and the musty smell of the book. Periodically, years afterwards, I would stumble on these sensory landmarks of my childhood when checking the bookshelves at my parents house. I believe all these too are long gone.

Tags: Books, London