It starts promisingly, with a cigarette in Rebus’s mouth. In Ian Rankin’s noirish crime novels, Detective Sergeant John Rebus is an antihero to whom booze, fags and violence are key. Within a few minutes of the new BBC One dramatisation, the Edinburgh copper – played by Richard Rankin, no relation – has ticked off two of those three old-fashioned vices, flicking his tab to the tarmac before seriously assaulting a suspect. That the wrong’un whose skull is cracked is Rebus’s gangster nemesis Ger Cafferty (Stuart Bowman) suggests that this Rebus will please fans of the seamy books.
This, however, is a younger Rebus, still just a sergeant, but operating in the present day: screenwriter Gregory Burke plucks themes and characters from the literary timeline, as the fancy takes him. Gill Templer (Caroline Lee-Johnson) is Rebus’s boss, and so far she’s a by-numbers chief superintendent, urging our man to “find out what happened here, and nip it in the bud!” when gangsters stab a guy in the city centre in broad daylight. Rebus’s sidekick Siobhan (Lucie Shorthouse) is a new arrival from England, fast-tracked into the detective ranks with her fancy degree in anthropology, not receptive to Rebus’s wisdom about how things work in Edinburgh. Internal affairs stickybeak Malcolm Fox (Thoren Ferguson) is prowling suavely in Rebus’s peripheral vision.
