Ian Rankin gave his spiky but oddly likable detective John Rebus a surname referring to puzzles involving images. So one of many nuanced clues in the stage play Rankin has co-written with Simon Reade is that the case confronting Rebus is crucially a pictorial challenge.
A dinner party the cop attends with a lawyer girlfriend (platonic, he regrets) in the wealthy end of Edinburgh takes place in a room so heavily hung with early 20th-century Scottish colourists that it resembles an art gallery; and these paintings prove more than decorative. Also enjoyably meta is that Rebus is helping to solve a fictional crime – set as a between-courses entertainment by hostess Harriet – when a real corpse is found. Rankin fans will relish a Jekyll and Hyde reference nodding back 37 years to Knots and Crosses, the first Rebus book, inspired by RL Stevenson’s story.
