Ian Rankin's Doors Open – Review

Rebus Has Retired but Edinburgh’s Crooks and Rogues Keep Grifting

Aug 1, 2009

With his new paperback delving into the fearful fallout from an art heist, Ian Rankin shows he's still in the frame as Britain's leading crime author.

Doors Open refers to those annual days when fascinating buildings invite the public to have a look round at treasures and architecture normally hidden from them behind locks and security systems.

In Ian Rankin’s career, of course, it’s also the book that marks one door closing on his immensely popular, damaged detective – the now retired Rebus – and another opening on unfamiliar characters and standalone plots.

Best-Selling Crime Series

It was a brave move by Rankin to abandon the hero of a 20-year, best-selling crime series for new hustles. So does he pull off his first caper? The answer is, like an old lag.

Three friends toy with the audacious idea of ‘liberating’ works of art from the National Gallery of Scotland, whose collection is so big much of it never finds wall space for public view.

The Thomas Crown Figure

The trio of unlikely ‘freedom fighters’ would not be acting from profit, of course, but from a love of art, their selected paintings being cherished in private and not flogged to the nearest dodgy dealer.

Mike doesn’t need the money, anyway. Rich from the sale of his software company, these days he is bored. He’s the Thomas Crown of the crew, and acquisitive in a way only the very wealthy can be. He wants something money can’t buy, a Monboddo portrait of ‘Beatrice’, who happens to resemble the woman he loves, Laura. (Monboddo, by the way, is a fictitonal artist, though Rankin worked with a real illustrator, Max Schindler, to bring this portrait to life for a competition to publicise the book – see it here).

Professor Robert Gissing is an art historian nearing retirement who’s always railing against the greed of corporate collections and galleries that keep beautiful works hidden from the eyes of devotees.

Muscle, Weapons, Getaway Van

And then there’s Allan, a banker, dull but dependable, who wants to prove himself better than his wife’s lover and his unappreciative bosses by taking part in a daring art raid, one that would reward him with masterpieces beyond the wealth of his rich clients.

As their wishful thinking moves into the realm of practical planning, the enterprise becomes more serious – and perilous. The threesome needs muscle, weapons, a stolen getaway van.

Edinburgh Godfather

Mike bumps into a thug he remembers from school, Chib Calloway, former playground bully turned Edinburgh godfather. Chib could do with some collateral in the shape of valuable art, but brings a lot of gangster baggage onboard – namely a goliath of a Norwegian Hell’s Angel enforcer called Hate, who wants payment for a missing drugs consignment. Chib is also being targeted by the local detective inspector, who’s monitoring Calloway’s every move.

Further complications come with the forger they recruit, Westie (a Banksy wannabe), one of Gissing’s dope-head students, who has a ballsy girlfriend called Alice.

Reservoir Dogs

Doors Open Day is ideal for their gaining access to the art treasures. The heist itself is not the most gripping part of Rankin’s yarn. That’s because, as ever, it is his characters and their travails and flaws that pull the reader along.

And as every story of plunder from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Reservoir Dogs demonstrate, nabbing the swag is the easy part. Divvying it up is more dicey.

Their story is fraught and emotionally compelling as Mike and his cohorts flounder in doubt and fear. If things go tits-up, as one character puts it, it’s not just jail they face but horrific retribution from Chib or Hate, or both.

Jekyll and Hyde City

Rebus may be gone but Rankin’s deft storytelling and dry humour are present and enthralling. As is his skill at conjuring distinctive characters that the reader feels as though they know (see the chapter that introduces Westie, for example, done with economy and precision).

Readers who have missed Rankin’s riff on the Jekyll and Hyde city, with its tourist-clogged streets on one level and hard men in pubs ‘for drinking’ on the other, should pick up Doors Open straightaway and walk right in.

Be quick. His new hardback, The Complaints, about a cop who investigates other cops, is out in September.

The copyright of the article Ian Rankin's Doors Open – Review in Mystery/Crime Fiction is owned by Robin Jarossi. Permission to republish Ian Rankin's Doors Open – Review in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.