Ian Rankin - The Impossible Dead

review by Malcolm Martland on show nov 2011

Product Description
Malcolm Fox and his team from Internal Affairs are back. They've been sent to Fife to investigate whether fellow cops covered up for a corrupt colleague, Detective Paul Carter….But what should be a simple job is soon complicated by intimations of conspiracy and cover-up - and a brutal murder, a murder committed with a weapon that should not even exist..etc.

My Review
I thought the first Malcolm Fox novel, The Complaints, was a bit lightweight compared to the Ian Rankin’s Rebus series. I though this one was going to go the same way with the rather lacklustre and teetotal DI Malcolm Fox getting nothing but derision, contempt and lack of cooperation from Kirkaldy CID as he attempts to investigate a complaint against a fellow officer. DC Paul Carter has been reported by his retired policeman uncle Alan, for allegedly offering young ladies leniency for their crimes in return for “favours”. DC Carter is found guilty in court but the sherriff commented that his fellow officers were either wilfully stupid or wilfully complicit.

Fox and his team are drafted in from Edinburgh and are offered a broom cupboard to work from. This is so inadequate that they tend to meet at the local café, The Pancake Place. Unlike Rebus’s passion for a pint of 80/- at the Oxford Bar, Fox has long given up alcohol and dinks mainly Big Tom (a spicy tomato juice). The team’s job is solely to discover whether Paul Carter’s colleagues have been complicit in his professional misconduct and not to be judge and jury on DC Carter. But it isn’t as simple as that as DI Fox soon discovers.

Fox sets off to interview the original complainant, Paul’s uncle Alan Carter. He finds him in a remote cottage, aptly named Gallowhill Cottage. They get on amiably enough and Fox notices that the place is piled high with newspapers and magazines from the mid 1980’s – one paper he picks up dated April 85 which Alan Carter laughs off as the time Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis at snooker.

The next day Alan Carter is found shot in the head. Suspicion falls on his nephew, Paul, but things don’t add up to Fox. Ballistics reports on the bullet find it was shot from a gun that is recorded as having been destroyed 20 year previously. Telephone records and garage CCTV both implicate Paul, who of course denies he killed his uncle despite ample motive. Despite being on a complaints job the detective in Fox gets the better of him and he revisits the cottage finding that all the magazines and papers had been strewn across the floor, maybe to make it look like burglary. The police investigating take exception to him poking his nose in but he goes back later when they have gone, finds a key under plant pot and has a good snoop around himself. He soon discovers that most of the literature concerns not a snooker match but the death, apparently suicide, of an activist Scottish Nationalist, Francis Vernal. But again not all is clear, he apparently crashed into a tree late one night and then still conscious, shot himself. Police reports of the incident are suspiciously lightweight and Fox finds himself investigating the man’s possible murder. He uncovers that MI5 were tailing him at the time of the crash but, despicably, took no action to assist him. He tries to find what happened to the car but gets nowhere until he just happens to discover the wreckage of it in the locked garage at Gallowhill Cottage, curiouser and curiouser!

Coincidentally explosions are going off in woods around the area; it looks like the Scottish nationalists are getting active again. And Fox has his own domestic demons to contend with too, a sick father and a difficult sister.

So instead of just doing his job he becomes embroiled in an investigation to Scottish nationalist terrorism in the 1980’s and a real group called the Dark Harvest Commandos. He uncomfortably exposes some ruthless militant activists who have since risen to high rank in the new Scotland, a comparison with Northern Ireland which is remarked on in several places.
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I thought it was a bit slow to get going and the plot overly complicated (there is a lot I’ve left out), some nice descriptions of the inhabitants Kirkaldy though “scroungers, walking wounded, coffin-dodgers, jakey’s and ASBO’s”…and worse! I had to look up quite a few Scottishisms to work it all out. By the end I was really quite hooked. There is some clever writing but to me still not as enjoyable as the best Rebus.

Malcolm Martland, broadcast on Radio Scilly 107.9FM, 24 November 2011