Beggars Banquet

Beggar's Banquet is something of a departure for Ian Rankin and a
very welcome one. Over the years, Rankin has built up an imposing
portfolio of short stories. Appearing in crime magazines, written for
personal appearances, or as one-off radio specials, they all resound
with the singular energy and idiosyncratic characterisation of his best
full-length novels. A previous collection, A Good Hanging,
combined some first-rate tales with more workaday material, but this
time round there isn't a single weak link, and the range of stories here
is astonishing; this is a panoply of Rankin's approach to crime and
mystery writing, and is that rare thing in short story collections: a
book in which the tales can be read one after the other with
ever-increasing pleasure.

We are taken into territory that is horrific (The Hanged Man), grimly ironic (The Only True Comedian) and even sociological (Glimmer
is a hard-edged picture of how the optimism and hedonism of the 60's
was swiftly eroded). And who could resist lines such as the following
(in Unknown Pleasures):

He could feel the sweat,
even though it was more viscous than sweat⦠more like a sheen of
cooking oil. The tenement stairwell smelt of deep-fried tomcatâ¦

But perhaps you're the kind of reader who fights shy of short story
collections? Well, if you're any kind of a DI Rebus fan (and what crime
enthusiast isn't?), there are eight--count them--eight stories featuring
our favourite Scottish copper. And who could say no to a collection so
rich in Rebus? --Barry Forshaw