Don’t be expecting the new John Rebus to solve a crime in the first episode – although he may well commit one. He’s not that sort of detective. Or, rather, it’s not that sort of cop show.
Sir Ian Rankin’s world-weary Edinburgh detective is “reimagined” as a younger, more chaotic man in this new reboot of the BBC series that wrapped in 2007, and he’s making his way in the present day (any doubt about that is removed when he grizzles about being surrounded by “Instagrammers” in an Edinburgh cafe). In the hands of series writer Gregory Burke and lead actor, Outlander star Richard Rankin (no relation), he’s a very different man to the one played by Richard Hannah then Ken Stott in the original series.
But Rankin, the writer, told the BBC he is more like the character in the early books of his ongoing series (Rebus is in his 70s now and Rankin is working on the 30th book). “I think long-term fans will get a shock because they’re seeing young Rebus. Richard Rankin is not in his 70s or his 60s or his 50s, so they’re getting the quite macho Rebus from the early books but set in contemporary times. We get the strength of Rebus as a quite a gung-ho cop, but set against contemporary issues, contemporary politics and contemporary problems that people have.”
But perhaps the biggest departure in Burke’s writing is its move away from the episodic structure of the old show. There’s nothing procedural in his opening episode, which is largely given to introducing characters and constructing the predicament at the heart of a longer story arc. Rebus begins the episode as the “walking wounded” after a suspicious car crash and ends it with the air of a man with his head in a vice.
Rankin was frank in 2012, when he regained the screen rights to his stories, that he would never again agree to a format like the original series, which compressed an entire novel into a single 45-minute episode. Three hours to tell a story would, he said, be a “minimum”, so that “characters aren’t just running through the plot”.
He has his wish – the new Rebus is a six-episode limited series telling a single story. The story is new, but Burke has – with Rankin’s enthusiastic approval – treated the books as a canon to be worked with. Most notably, Rebus’s brother Michael, who appeared in the very first book, 1987′s Knots and Crosses, as a wealthy but wayward stage hypnotist, has been reinvented as traumatised war veteran scratching a living in Fyfe, where they were born.
“Rebus’s brother was an interesting character in the books, and eventually I just let him go, and he never returned,” says Rankin. “During our various conversations, Greg zoned in on that almost blood brothers thing, where you can have two brothers who are close to each other, who love each other, but potentially can destroy each other.”
Rebus’s offsider, DC Siobhan Clarke (Lucie Shorthouse), is still a university-smart, freshly minted detective constable, but is much closer in age to her boss here. Their relationship is tense – to be fair, there is apparently no one the new Rebus interacts with that he doesn’t have a tense relationship with – to the point that it makes the old one seem like The Brokenwood Mysteries. Throw in violence, drugs, compromised loyalties and modern social issues and it is clearly a very different show.
Rankin told the BBC he expected viewers to be “shocked” by the new depiction of Edinburgh’s underbelly. “To be honest, I was shocked by it.”
Rebus streams on ThreeNow from Wednesday, November 27.
