With the news that crotchety Edinburgh D.I. John Rebus is on the verge of retirement in the 17th entry of Ian Rankin's popular mystery series (Exit Wounds), it's a good time to do some catch-up with the TV version of this irascible homicide detective. Acorn Media's newest frill-free Rebus set, number three in the series, features four 66-minute mysteries (originally broadcast on ITV in 2007), all of based in varying degrees on Rankin's novels. How close these adaptations hew to the books has long been a bone of contention for many fans of the written series, though it's my suspicion that the further they stray from the plot specifics of the novels, the better they work as teledramas.
This has long been an issue with televised mysteries, of course: a good twisty mystery novel should be too detailed to comfortably fit within the confines of ninety-minutes-with-commercials. In America, for instance, Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason lasted eleven years on television as an hour-long teleseries, and in most cases the least successful entries were those based on one of the eighty-plus novels featuring the character: the books' plots were too dense to compress into a single hour of commercial television. As a result, they frequently came across as a series of disconnected events with only a tenuous connection to the characters.
You can see this occurring in the first of the new Rebus set's episodes, "Resurrection Men." It opens with a scene where our hero throws a fit (and a tea cup) at his superior DCS Gill Templar (Jennifer Black) in the middle of a briefing. The tantrum sends him to "retraining" with two thuggish fellow coppers, but since we never accept the act that sent him to the class in the first place, we instantly recognize it as a story ploy to send our hero undercover.
More believable are the "The First Stone," which pitches Rebus against the Church of Scotland, and "Naming of the Dead," wherein our man knocks against sinister security types while investigating a suspicious death at the World Trade Summit. In both cases, Ken Stott's Rebus remains his bulldoggedly tenacious self. In a way, he could be considered the Anti-Columbo: where the former wheedled his moneyed and high-profile murder suspects through his ineffectual seeming mannerisms, Rebus bullies and pushes his upper-echelon suspects with a willful disregard for social niceties. In the fourth episode, "Knots and Crosses" (fast-and-loosely based on the very first Rebus novel), his approach derails a trial after his reputation as a rough interrogator gets a murder case thrown out of court. Throughout it all, our hero remains his unapologetic hard-drinking, hard-assed self.
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