Tooth & Nail

Tooth Nail Inspector Rebus [3] Ian Rankin (1969)

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Introduction

I lived in London for four years, from 1986 to 1990, during which time my home was a maisonette in Tottenham, not far from the River Lea. When I left for France in the summer of 1990, some friends took on the maisonette. We kept in touch. Tooth & Nail was eventually published in the spring of 1992, only it wasn't called Tooth & Nail it was called Wolfman, the name of the serial killer who stalks the book. A few months after publication, my friends in Tottenham sent me a photo they'd taken of a subway between my old home and the river (where the first murder in the book takes place). The subway's, gloomy interior comprised white tiles, and on this surface, in six-foot-high black capitals, someone had painted the name 'Wolfman`.

I keep the photo close at hand even now, to remind myself that there are some fans an author just doesn't want to meet.

Ever.

It was my editor in the USA who mentioned that Wolfman made my story sound like a horror novel, and it was his idea to rename the book Tooth & Nail for the American audience. The title seemed resonant, and chimed with my first two Rebus adventures. When my current publisher Orion got hold of the rights to the book, I persuaded them that it should become Tooth & Nail in the UK too.

The book is set in London, the only Rebus novel so far to take place outside Scotland. Basically I wanted Rebus to be more of an outsider than ever. In London, he's a fish out of water. He can't begin to comprehend the city, doesn't even know what a bagel is, and no one around him understands his accent and dialect (to such an extent that passages from the book have become teaching aids in some Scottish primary schools). In essence, I was using Rebus to explore my own feelings about the London I had known, just at a time when I was preparing to leave the place.

From the early 1970s until May 1990, I'd kept a page-a-day diary. For whatever reason, I stopped soon after arriving in France. However, an entry for 11 March that year reads: 'I've started, half-heartedly, a new Rebus novel, though I .know I should plan more and research more before I really get into it. It's going to be called Wolfman, if it ever gets off the ground.' I think some of the impetus for the book came from the spectacular success of the American author Thomas Harris. I'd spent a sleepless night reading The Silence of the Lambs from cover to cover. The man had a huge talent and sales to match, and I wanted some of the latter. The serial killer was in vogue and there seemed an endless fascination with the psychology and pathology of evil. It was fortunate for me that my, editor, Euan Cameron, was not as easily seduced by trends. I remember that when I sent him the first version of the manuscript, he told me there was far too much sex and violence in the story and asked for cuts in both departments. I'd learned a valuable lesson: that the two can be suggested without having to show either graphic and voyeuristic detail.

During my time in London, I'd served jury duty at the Old Bailey, a bizarre and unsatisfactory experience which was to provide me with an abundance of detail and anecdotes for the Old Bailey scenes in Tooth & Nail. The trial I'd attended had been full of farcical moments, starting with an arresting officer called De'Ath, a prosecutor who didn't know the difference between 180° and 360°, and a juror who said, 'I think he done it, but I don't want him going to prison for it', then voted Not Guilty, leading to the prisoner escaping sentence. (The police foul-up in the book which allows Tommy Watkiss to go free actually happened during my trial, but in real life no one noticed except we jurors.)

I took lots of notes about the Old Bailey its interior layout security issues; the route from the courtroom to the jury room—and was stopped one day by a security guard as I left the building. He asked to see my notes, seemed horrified by them, and tore them up in front of me. I thanked him and stepped outside, where I proceeded to write them all down again as he watched helplessly through a window.

Tooth & Nail is notable for introducing the character of Morris Gerald Cafferty—aka 'Big Ger'—the gangster who runs Edinburgh. In this book, he has a cameo only, but it was enough to persuade me that I could do more with him. I also started to introduce Scottish words into the text, perhaps to ensure that I wouldn't lose them entirely. After all, living in rural south-west France I had few opportunities to say things like 'wersh' (meaning sour), 'winching' (going steady) and 'hoolit' (drunk). In time, some of these words would even start to creep into the Oxford English Dictionary, with the Rebus novels cited for reference.

Crivvens.