Ian Rankin Books in Order: The Complete Rebus Series Guide

Ian Rankin published the first Inspector Rebus novel in 1987. He was twenty-seven years old, a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, and he had set out to write a serious Scottish novel that happened to have a detective in it. Nearly forty years later, the result is one of the most sustained and significant bodies of work in British crime fiction: 24 novels following a single detective through the full arc of a career, set against an Edinburgh that Rankin has mapped more thoroughly than any other living novelist.

The term tartan noir — Scottish crime fiction with a social conscience and a specific sense of place — describes a genre that Rankin did not invent but essentially created as a commercially viable and critically respected form. Before Knots and Crosses, Scotland appeared occasionally in British crime fiction as atmosphere. Rankin made it the subject: the politics, the class tensions, the relationship between Edinburgh’s Georgian grandeur and its post-industrial decay, the particular darkness of a city that has always presented one face to tourists and kept another for itself.

Inspector John Rebus is, alongside Adam Dalgliesh and Morse, one of the great detectives of British crime fiction. He is also the least comfortable of the three: difficult, self-destructive, constitutionally incapable of letting things go, sustained by whisky and old vinyl and a moral stubbornness that has cost him nearly everything. He is not a figure of reassurance. He is a figure of persistence in a city that resists easy answers.

Quick answer: Read the Rebus series in publication order, starting with Knots and Crosses (1987). If you want to begin at the series’s peak, Black & Blue (1997) is the Gold Dagger winner and works as a self-contained introduction. Either way, you will want to read all 24 books.

The Rebus Series at a Glance

Where to Start

There are two defensible entry points into the Rebus series. Every other approach — beginning in the middle, reading by reputation, sampling at random — loses something that is hard to recover.

Start at the beginning: Knots and Crosses (1987)

Knots and Crosses is the most psychologically raw novel in the series. A serial killer is targeting young girls in Edinburgh. Rebus is receiving anonymous letters containing knots and crosses cut from paper. The case and the letters are connected, and the connection runs through the most damaged part of Rebus’s past — his time in the SAS, a recruitment experiment gone wrong, the thing he cannot discuss and cannot forget.

Beginning here gives you the origin. You understand from the first novel why Rebus drinks, why he cannot sustain relationships, why he is drawn to cases that others would rather leave alone. The later books will make more sense — the accumulated weight will feel earned — if you have started at the point where that weight began to accumulate.

The novel is shorter and more gothic than the middle-period Rebus books. It reads slightly differently from what the series becomes. This is not a flaw. It is accurate: Rebus in 1987 is not the same man as Rebus in 2007, and the gap between them is one of the more honest depictions of a life in crime fiction.

Start at the peak: Black & Blue (1997)

Black & Blue is the first genuinely great Rebus novel, and it is the point at which Rankin and the series became something beyond a reliable Edinburgh procedural. It won the Gold Dagger — the Crime Writers’ Association’s most prestigious award — and it deserved it.

The novel runs two narratives simultaneously: Rebus investigating a current murder while also obsessing over the Bible John case, a real 1960s serial killer who murdered three women near Glasgow dance halls and was never identified. The interplay between the historical case and the present investigation is structurally brilliant, and the novel’s reach into Scottish industrial decline — the closing oil fields, the Thatcher-era damage still visible in Aberdeen and Glasgow — gives it a scope that the earlier Rebus books had not achieved.

Black & Blue works as a standalone entry point because it is long enough and self-contained enough that the prior Rebus history functions as enrichment rather than requirement. You will pick up what you need. You will also want, immediately upon finishing, to go back to the beginning.

The Best Rebus Novels

Black & Blue (1997)

The Gold Dagger winner remains the series’s signature achievement. Rankin uses the Bible John case — genuinely one of Scotland’s most disturbing unsolved crimes — as a lens through which to examine both the Rebus of 1997 and the Scotland of the 1990s: a country still living with the damage of deindustrialisation, the oil boom faded, the Thatcherite settlement embedded in ways that official politics was only beginning to address.

What makes Black & Blue extraordinary is its ambition. Rankin was no longer writing Edinburgh procedurals. He was writing a novel about Scotland, using Rebus as the instrument through which that landscape could be felt and understood. The investigation ranges from Edinburgh to Aberdeen to Glasgow. The villain, Johnny Bible, deliberately invokes the original Bible John, and the question of what the original killer meant to Scottish culture — the fear he embodied, the failures of investigation he exposed — runs beneath the contemporary murder plot. This is crime fiction as social history, and it is done without ever losing the reader as an engaged mystery audience.

The Falls (2001)

By the twelfth novel, Rankin had found a way to use the internet — then newly pervasive, still unsettling to people who had not grown up with it — as both a plot device and a thematic instrument. A student goes missing. The case connects to a series of miniature wooden coffins found in Arthur’s Seat, the hill that looms over Edinburgh. The coffins are connected to a real Victorian mystery: seventeen small coffins discovered on Arthur’s Seat in 1836, containing carved wooden figures, their purpose never satisfactorily explained.

The Falls is the Rebus novel most explicitly about Edinburgh as a city of layers — historical, literary, architectural — and it is one of the most atmospheric. The Holyrood Palace construction site appears; the new Scottish Parliament is going up; and against this background of national reinvention, a detective committed to old methods is investigating a case that began in cyberspace. Rankin handles the contrast with subtlety. Rebus is not mocked for his resistance to new technology; he finds what matters in the places he knows, while his younger colleague Siobhan Clarke navigates the digital trail. The partnership between Rebus and Clarke — which deepens throughout the second half of the series — is at its most clearly established here.

Exit Music (2007)

Exit Music was written as Rebus’s retirement — his final case before being forced out of the police at the mandatory age. A Russian poet is found dead in Edinburgh during a visit by a delegation of Russian bankers. The investigation leads Rebus into the financial networks and political accommodations that underlie the surface respectability of Edinburgh’s business community.

Rankin has said that he did not originally intend to bring Rebus back after this novel. He had written what felt like a genuine conclusion: Rebus clearing his desk, walking out of St Leonard’s police station, looking at Edinburgh with the eyes of a man who no longer has official reason to be there. The elegiac tone of Exit Music is the series’s most controlled emotional achievement. The novel knows it is a farewell, and it allows itself to be one without sentimentality.

That Rankin eventually brought Rebus back — in Standing in Another Man’s Grave in 2012, as a retired consultant who cannot stop working cases — does not diminish Exit Music. It remains the most complete single novel in the series. If you only ever read one Rebus book, this is the one that earns its ending.

A Song for the Dark Times (2020)

The penultimate novel — before Midnight and Blue in 2023 — is the series’s most personal late-period achievement. Rebus’s daughter Samantha calls him to the north of Scotland: her partner has gone missing on a remote stretch of the Sutherland coast. Rebus drives north into a landscape that has nothing to do with Edinburgh, nothing to do with the city he has spent his career navigating.

The novel is a meditation on ageing, on the limits of what a damaged man can still do, on whether the skills that have defined Rebus — the stubbornness, the refusal to follow official channels, the willingness to make enemies — serve him when he is operating in isolation rather than as a detective with institutional backing. It is quieter than the middle-period novels. It has the quality of late work: a writer and a character who have both learned what they are, and who are no longer pretending otherwise.

The Malcolm Fox Series

Running alongside the main Rebus timeline, Ian Rankin created a second detective in the form of Malcolm Fox — a character who began as Rebus’s institutional opposite and became something considerably more interesting.

Fox works for the Complaints, the police complaints department — the internal affairs division that investigates fellow officers. He is sober where Rebus drinks, rule-following where Rebus bends everything, cautious where Rebus charges. He is also, in his quieter way, as obsessive and as lonely.

The Complaints (2009) introduces Fox investigating a colleague suspected of corruption. It is a tighter, more procedural novel than the Rebus books, and its portrait of the institutional culture of policing — the resentments that internal investigators face, the way that investigating fellow officers puts you outside every natural professional alliance — is as sharp as anything Rankin has written.

The Impossible Dead (2011) extends Fox’s story and deepens his character before Rankin brought him into the Rebus series proper, beginning with Even Dogs in the Wild (2015). From that point, Fox appears alongside Rebus as both colleague and foil, their different approaches to the job generating a productive tension that refreshes the main series in its later stages.

The Fox novels stand alone as procedurals and are worth reading independently. But their greatest value is as preparation for the dual-protagonist structure of the late Rebus books, and readers who encounter Fox in those later novels before reading his own series will find that going back to The Complaints and The Impossible Dead enriches their understanding of who he is and why Rankin needed him.

Does the Series Need to Be Read in Order?

Yes, though perhaps not for the reason that most series require sequential reading.

The individual Rebus novels are, in the main, self-contained mysteries. Each book has a case, an investigation, and a resolution. You will not be lost in the plot of book fifteen if you have not read books six through fourteen. This is a deliberate structural decision: Rankin has always written to be accessible to readers picking up the series at any point.

But Rebus ages in real time. This is the feature that distinguishes the series from almost all comparable crime fiction and gives it its particular weight. Each novel takes place in the year it was published. The Edinburgh of Knots and Crosses is 1987’s Edinburgh — Thatcher’s Britain, before the Scottish Parliament, before devolution, before any of the cultural and political changes that the series will go on to document. The Edinburgh of Midnight and Blue is 2023’s Edinburgh, and Rebus is in his seventies, marked by the same accumulation of decades that has marked the city.

The result is that reading the series in order is not merely a plot matter but an experience of time. You watch a man age, make the same mistakes repeatedly, learn things slowly and incompletely, lose people, outlast his own career, and keep going anyway — not because he is heroic but because he does not know how to stop. This emotional arc is the series’s real subject. The mysteries are its vehicle.

Individual novels are self-contained. The series as a whole is something else: a portrait of a life and a city across four decades. That portrait only accumulates one way.

Tartan Noir: What Makes Rankin Different

The term tartan noir was coined, semi-jokingly, in the 1990s — often attributed to the American author James Ellroy — to describe the wave of Scottish crime fiction that followed Rankin’s commercial breakthrough. Rankin has both embraced and been ambivalent about it. As a marketing category, it is useful. As a description of what distinguishes the best Scottish crime fiction from its English and American counterparts, it points to something real.

What it points to is this: the best Scottish crime writing — Rankin’s especially — uses the crime novel as a vehicle for political and social commentary in a way that most English crime fiction does not. The Rebus novels are about Scotland. They are about devolution, the Scotland Act, the new Parliament, the legacy of industrial decline, the class tensions in a city that is simultaneously tourist spectacle and lived experience. Rankin uses Edinburgh’s literal geography — the Old Town and New Town, the castle on the rock, the schemes on the outskirts — as a map of social stratification. Rebus moves through all of it, and his movement is always freighted with awareness of what the geography means.

The fallen hero is the other defining element. Rebus is not a detective who triumphs. He solves cases, sometimes, at considerable cost to himself and others. He fails relationships. He drinks too much. He makes enemies of the wrong people and allies of the occasionally right ones. He is the kind of detective who functions in the moral middle ground — understanding criminals because he recognises their logic, understanding corruption because he has been tempted by it, understanding violence because he has been shaped by it.

This is a long way from the detectives of golden-age crime fiction, and it is a long way from the American hardboiled tradition too. Rebus is not Poirot — not a puzzle-solver bringing order from outside the mess. He is not Philip Marlowe — not a knight of the mean streets maintaining his own purity. He is a compromised man in a compromised city, doing work that matters imperfectly, because he cannot see any alternative.

The Edinburgh setting is not incidental to this. A city that contains both the Royal Mile and Craigmillar, that houses both the Scottish Parliament and some of the worst poverty in western Europe, is the right city for this kind of crime fiction. Rankin knows it with the thoroughness of forty years of attention — its pubs, its history, its weather, its light in November, the way it feels on the morning after the Hogmanay crowds have gone. When Edinburgh itself is one of the novel’s subjects, the city becomes a character in the full sense: shaped by its past, contradicted by its present, never quite what it presents itself to be.

What to Read After the Rebus Series

If the Rebus series has given you a taste for literary crime fiction rooted in a specific place and preoccupied with the social reality of that place, the natural progressions are clear.

Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad is the most direct heir to what Rankin built. French works in Dublin rather than Edinburgh, in first person rather than third, with a rotating roster of narrators rather than a single returning detective — but the fundamental commitment is the same: crime fiction as a serious form for examining a specific society’s wounds. The series begins with In the Woods (2007), which is as good a debut as the genre has produced in the past twenty years.

Ann Cleeves’s Vera Stanhope and Shetland series share Rankin’s investment in landscape and regional specificity. Cleeves works in Northumberland and Shetland with the same thoroughness that Rankin brings to Edinburgh, and Vera Stanhope — unglamorous, brilliant, difficult — belongs to the same tradition of uncomfortable detective protagonists as Rebus.

Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series offers the Scandinavian version of the same project: a deeply flawed detective working a specific Nordic city, with the crime novel carrying the weight of social commentary that Rankin pioneered in the British context. The Hole series is the best argument that tartan noir’s real achievement was proving a model that crime writers across northern Europe could follow.

For the Best Mystery and Crime Books

For the definitive guide to mystery and crime fiction — from Agatha Christie to Tana French — see our Best Mystery Books of All Time list.

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