Let it bleed

A new release by Ian Rankin, originally written under a pseudonym in the 1990s, is missing the polish and focus
of his later Inspector Rebus novels, writes Natalie Moore Ian Rankin likes to work with big-picture stories, taking a wide-ranging topic and honing it to play out on the streets of Edinburgh. His most recent Inspector Rebus novel, Fleshmarket Alley, wrestled with issues of race and illegal immigration, taking an unsettling look at unscrupulous employers, government detention centres and brutal housing projects. Rankin prides himself on his realism, scoffing at the mildewed detective genre of yore. “Forget Miss Marple and arsenic in the crusted port,” he once wrote in the introduction to an anthology of crime stories. “Today's crime writers are dealing with the real world, real problems, real dramas.”
Bleeding Hearts was originally published in Britain in 1994, under the pseudonym Jack Harvey. Rankin has said that his Harvey novels provided “ways of playing with ideas and structural problems outside the scope of my detective series”, which was then still very young.
Rankin does not discard the big-picture focus in Bleeding Hearts. However, the novel breathes the spirit of 1994, not 2006, and much of the impact of Rankin's story is dissipated because of bad timing. The inclusion of a sinister religious cult, for example, seems dated. Bleeding Hearts is not quite mildewed, but it is a touch yellowed around the edges.
The novel begins in the first person. We meet Michael Weston, a hired assassin, on a night when a job goes terribly wrong. Weston hits his target, but the police arrive on the scene immediately. He narrowly escapes.
Weston must now involve himself in the details of a hit for the first time. He has to find out who his employers are, why they wanted the victim killed and whether he was set up.
When the action shifts away from him, the narrative moves into the third person. This technique should draw the reader closer to Weston, but little, if any, personality colours the first-person narrative. He is, in effect, an invisible man.
Weston stands in stark contrast to an American named Leo Hoffer, a fast-talking, coke-snorting, sausage-and-eggs-eating private detective who has been snapping at his heels for years. Hoffer is less a character than a mixture of other hard-boiled, cynical ex-cops. Rankin is often credited with a sharp ear for dialogue and a gift for pungent writing, but he feeds Hoffer clunker after clunker. “She'd been as much help as codeine in a guillotine basket,” he muses at one point.
The two figures dance around each other throughout the novel – Weston following his own investigation, Hoffer taking off on a mission to capture the man who has eluded him for so long. They catapult from London to Yorkshire, up to picture-postcard Scotland, before the story draws them to America. Jumping from setting to setting does nothing to ground the novel. When the action moves to the United States, things verge on the fantastical; wild shootouts in downtown Seattle apparently draw no unwanted attention from the police. A reader's credulity stretches only so far.
Bleeding Hearts is clearly the work of an author still learning his craft. In fact, there are several nice touches that foreshadow the Rankin to come. (Who else would invent a haemophiliac assassin?) Nonetheless, the characters here are often overfilled or underfilled, and there is little of the nuanced dialogue and complex relationships that appear in his later works. Rankin's attention to realistic detail serves only to lend this book a slightly oldfashioned feel – with none of the romance of, say, arsenic-laced port.
Finally, the novel is missing a home. Without a narrow focus, without Edinburgh, without the grouchy, slouching John Rebus, Ian Rankin's ideas fail to take root.π
©New York Times