The subterranean in crime fiction: examining Edinburgh’s underground in Ian Rankin’s John Rebus novels

Abstract

Given the prominence of subterranean settings and imagery within crime fiction, this article critically examines the genre's representation of the subterranean. Influenced by scholarly work on the subterranean, I focus on the writing of one prominent crime novelist, Ian Rankin, and his Edinburgh-set John Rebus detective novels. From a relational standpoint, two issues are focused on: subterranean place (namely the attachment of meaning to the subterranean, the power relations that run through the subterranean, and the underground's connections to the aboveground) and subterranean time (notably the role of the subterranean in shaping the relationship between the past and the present). Traversing Edinburgh's basements and graves, as well as hell and the underworld, I demonstrate that Rankin uses subterranean place and time to accentuate some of the hidden harms, inequalities and injustices of urban life.

Full text

The subterranean in crime fiction: examining Edinburgh’s underground in Ian Rankin’s John
Rebus novels
Ian R. Cook, Northumbria University
To be published in Social and Cultural Geography
Abstract
Given the prominence of subterranean settings and imagery within crime fiction, this article critically
examines the genre’s representation of the subterranean. Influenced by scholarly work on the
subterranean, I focus on the writing of one prominent crime novelist, Ian Rankin, and his Edinburgh-
set John Rebus detective novels. From a relational standpoint, two issues are focused on: subterranean
place (namely the attachment of meaning to the subterranean, the power relations that run through the
subterranean, and the underground’s connections to the aboveground) and subterranean time (notably
the role of the subterranean in shaping the relationship between the past and the present). Traversing
Edinburgh’s basements and graves, as well as hell and the underworld, I demonstrate that Rankin uses
subterranean place and time to accentuate some of the hidden harms, inequalities and injustices of urban
life.
Keywords: detective novels, place, time, harm, relationality
Introduction

In the opening chapter of Ian Rankin’s (1994) crime novel Mortal Causes, the protagonist Detective
Inspector John Rebus walks through a door on the side of the City Chambers in Edinburgh’s Old Town.
He descends some stairs to reach a barely lit series of subterranean alleyways called Mary King’s Close,
‘three or four storeys beneath road level’ (ibid., p. 8). The close is a real and unusual place – associated
with the plague of 1645, partly built over in 1753 and partly demolished in 1853 – and many years later
in Rankin’s Edinburgh, Rebus sees a dead body there. Hanging from a hook inside a former butcher’s
shop, the body has been shot in the head, elbows, knees and ankles. It is identified as Billy Cunningham,
the estranged son of a recurring gangster in the Rebus series called Morris Gerald Cafferty. Cunningham
has been ‘six-packed’, Rebus claims, a form of punishment associated with terrorist organisations in
Northern Ireland (a clue that encourages Rebus to explore religious and political divides in Edinburgh
and Belfast). ‘The hidden city, quite a revelation’ exclaims the pathologist Dr. Curt upon his arrival into
the crime scene (ibid., p. 10). A group forms – all male, except one – and they try to distinguish a word
that appears to have been written in the earth by Cunningham’s dangling toes:
‘Is that Neno or Nemo?’
‘Could even be Memo,’ offered Dr Curt.
‘Captain Nemo,’ said the Constable. ‘He’s the author of 2,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea.’
‘Jules Verne,’ said Curt, nodding.
The constable shook his head. ‘No, sir, Walt Disney,’ he said. (ibid., p. 12)
What is striking about this opening chapter – aside from the unnamed Constable’s misremembering of
the title of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – is the ‘subterraneanness’ of both its setting and
intertextuality. Mary King’s Court is a dark and hidden place, holding secrets and shadows, and used
metaphorically by Rankin. Its metaphorical use becomes clear in this passage from the subsequent
Rebus novel, Let It Bleed:

As he [Rebus] walked through the main door of the City Chambers, he looked down at the
floor, aware that directly beneath it was Mary King’s Close, Edinburgh’s buried plague street.
They covered the street up and built on it anew: that was the Edinburgh way, to bury and forget.
(Rankin, 1995, p. 161)
Mary King’s Court is one of many vivid subterranean settings in the Rebus novels. In fact, the Rebus
series reflects a wider, long-standing fascination with the subterranean in crime fiction (and in popular
culture more generally). In this article, I reflect upon representations of the subterranean within crime
fiction, using a case study of Ian Rankin’s John Rebus detective novels. In doing this, I speak to the
growing academic literatures on what I call literary subterraneans (e.g., François, 2021; Cohen, 2023;
Pinkus, 2023) and subterranean geographies (e.g., Squire and Dodds, 2019; Woon and Dodds, 2021;
Bosworth, 2023). Inspired by these and other studies, I focus on the themes of subterranean place
(specifically the attachment of meaning to subterranean space, the power relations that permeate the
subterranean, and the underground’s connections to the aboveground), and subterranean time (notably
the role of the subterranean in shaping the relationship between the past and the present). Examining
graves and basements, hell and the underworld, I demonstrate that Edinburgh’s subterranean place and
time are used by Rankin to emphasize some of the hidden harms, injustices and inequalities of urban
life.
By critically examining the subterranean in the Rebus novels, this paper starts to make up for
the limited attention that academics – across disciplinary boundaries – have given the subterranean
within crime fiction. This paper also calls for more geographers to study crime fiction. So, while there
has been some engagement with crime fiction by geographers and in geography journals (see, for
instance, Howell, 1998; Schmid, 1995; Brosseau and Le Bel, 2016; McLaughlin, 2016; Kingsbury,
2023), the genre has largely been overlooked by the discipline. Yet, crime fiction has much more to

offer geography. Even though some crime fiction is formulaic, predictable or lacking depth (cf.
Brewster, 2017), the genre frequently provides nuanced insights into the social world – a point made
by crime novelist Val McDermid on BBC Radio 4’s A Point of View (2018, n.p.):
Writing [crime] fiction allows us to turn a critical eye on the society we live in and raise
awkward questions for our readers. We want to leave them with something to chew over
afterwards. And isn’t that what all writers are supposed to do? Murder. Violence. They are just
the carnival barkers’ pitch to get you inside the tent.
The insights offered by crime novelists are useful for geographers to ‘chew over’. In fact, crime
novelist Ann Cleeves hints at a commonality between crime novelists and geographers during her
appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs (2019, n.p.): ‘I quite like the idea that what I do is
human geography; I’m interested in community’. More similarities can be drawn out: both groups
usually cast a critical eye on society; both situate individual actions within wider social and spatial
contexts; both are interested in places, especially cities; and both ask awkward questions about the
social, economic, political and environmental fault-lines and injustices within society. The ideas of
crime fiction novelists are, therefore, useful for geographers to reflect on.
Understanding the subterranean
In a recent article in Progress in Human Geography, Bosworth (2023, p. 1) identifies a recent growth
in academic studies focusing on the ‘vertical, voluminous, subsurface, subterranean/subaqueous,
geological, or underground’. Indeed, an impressive array of scholarly writing has now been published
that examines subterranean practices, infrastructures and places (e.g., Fernandes, 2021; Garrett, 2016;
Hine and Mayes, 2022; Slesinger, 2020; Squire, 2017). Yet, as Bosworth reasons, we should avoid
claiming this upsurge in interest as geography’s recent discovery of the subterranean. Not only has there

been a longer-than-usually-acknowledged history of academics studying the subsurface, writings on the
topic also come from a variety of disciplines. A pertinent example here is recent work on literary
subterraneans conducted by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds – a set of literature that I
bring into dialogue with work on subterranean geographies in this section.
Studies of literary subterraneans critically analyse literary representations of the subterranean
(e.g., Crane and Fletcher, 2016; Redford, 2016; François, 2021; Cohen, 2023; Gomel, 2023; Pinkus,
2023). Across this work, several genres have been examined, including thrillers (Crane and Fletcher,
2016) and horror (Gomel, 2023), yet crime fiction has received little attention. François (2021), for
instance, examines literary depictions of Mexico City’s subterranean, casting a critical eye on its
political, ecological, historical and aesthetic dimensions. Cohen’s (2023) Going Underground, by
contrast, explores literary subterraneans in the nineteenth century United States. Using ‘manifestos,
songs, speeches, newspaper reports, poetry, travel writing’ (p. 133), Cohen demonstrates that
a range of writers turned their attention to subterranean spaces and invested them with new
possibilities. In these works, caves, tunnels, mines, volcanoes, and cellars become sites of
agitation, collective refusal, freedom, or simply living otherwise. (p. 133)
Focusing on the intersection of race and space, Cohen reasons that not only have ‘ideas of racialized
Blackness shaped ideas of the underground, ideas of the underground [have also] shaped ideas of
racialized Blackness’ (p. 9). Subsurface (2023) by Karen Pinkus, meanwhile, brings into dialogue
current debates on climate change with 19th century fiction set in the subterranean. Returning frequently
to the work of Jules Verne, Pinkus considers the changing portrayals of cracks, extraction, burial, depth
and subterranean futures.

In contrast to much of the literary subterraneans literature, the academic literature on
subterranean geographies often takes its cues from studies of verticality and volume (e.g., Elden, 2013;
Graham, 2016; Harris, 2015; Jackson et al., 2019; McNeill, 2019). Here, subterranean geographies
scholarship – written often, but not always, by geographers – investigates different subterranean
practices, infrastructures and places, typically connecting them with wider political, economic and
cultural processes (Bosworth, 2023). There are occasional references to literary subterranean work
within subterranean geographies literature (and vice versa). A lot of recent subterranean geographies
literature is written by those interested in geopolitics, and this work has successfully framed the
subterranean as an important site of colonialism, exploitation, extraction, nation-building, occupation,
resistance and struggle (see, for instance, the special issues edited by Squire and Dodds, 2020 and Woon
and Dodds, 2021). Away from geopolitics, Lahiri-Dutt (2023) explores the gendering of the
subterranean through a feminist political ecology lens. Urban scholars, in addition, connect the urban
subterranean to wider processes of urbanisation, urban development and urban inequalities (Burrows et
al., 2022; Connor and McNeill, 2022; Melo Zurita, 2020; Ruming et al., 2021).
There are two themes, I argue, that are important to consider when analysing crime fiction’s
subterranean. These are subterranean place and subterranean time. Both themes appear unevenly in
literary subterraneans and subterranean geographies literatures – ranging from highly visible in some
work to absent in others. I consider these two themes in turn, starting with subterranean place. Place, of
course, is a key concept within geographical research (e.g., Cresswell, 2015; Edensor et al., 2020), and
place has been widely discussed in the study of literature (e.g., Alexander, 2017; Anderson, 2015;
Gabellieri, 2022; Geherin, 2008; Hausladen, 2000; King, 2020; Pezzotti, 2012; Tuan, 1985). Three
aspects of place are particularly useful to consider when thinking about the subterranean in crime
fiction. These are (1) the meanings associated with subterranean places (nodding to early humanistic
studies of place, e.g., Tuan, 1977); (2) the power relations that run through subterranean places
(influenced by critical studies of power, inequality and resistance in place, e.g., Harvey, 1996; O’Hare,
2020); and (3) the connections between underground and aboveground places. The latter aspect speaks

to relational thinking about place (e.g., Dovey, 2020; Massey, 1993) and relational understandings in
literary geography (e.g., Anderson, 2015). It also resonates with much subterranean geographies
scholarship – and with some of the literary subterraneans literature (e.g., Cohen, 2023) – where the
connections and mobilities between the underground and the aboveground are closely examined. Such
work challenges the view that ‘the subterranean is a world apart, detached from the sociopolitical worlds
of the surface, and instead focus[es] on the complicated relations and processes that remake and weave
meaning into often unseen depths’ (Marston and Himley, 2021, p. 2). Viewing the subterranean in this
way requires us to acknowledge that it is not an exclusively ‘top-down’ power dynamic – the
aboveground dictating activity underground – as the underground shapes the aboveground too.
Research on the urban regeneration and planning in Newcastle (Australia) by Ruming et al. (2021)
illustrates this:
the material agency of Newcastle’s mining past […] affects the planning and development
processes shaping the city’s current and future development. While the underground mining
ceased long ago, the shafts used to mine coal and the underground voids that remain have
emerged as material presences (and absences) that shape, configure and inhibit social, physical
and economic development in the city […] The materiality of the coal which catalysed urban
development in the early 19th century left underground voids which have emerged as barriers
to urban redevelopment and regeneration initiatives in the early 21st century. (ibid., pp. 161-
162)
The underground, for Ruming et al., is neither passive nor inert; but ‘actively agentic in the
configuration of aboveground development’ (ibid., p. 160, see also Hine and Mayes, 2022). The
underground and aboveground should, therefore, be seen as co-constitutive.

The temporalities of the subterranean is the second theme that can help us make sense of crime
fiction’s subterraneans. The roles of time and temporality within fiction has been much studied. Here,
scholars have considered issues such as memory, ageing, speed, the night, the past/present/future, the
experience of time, as well as time’s relationship with place and space (cf. Silber, 2009; Howell and
Beckingham, 2015; Martin, 2016; Cook, 2022). Subterranean studies, by contrast, have usually focused
on the spatial rather than the temporal. However, a handful of studies of subterranean geographies have
brought the issue of temporarily into focus. Garrett’s (2021) work on underground bunkers and
doomsday preppers, for instance, shows the importance of the future in the preparation, construction
and discourse of bunkers. Childs (2020), meanwhile, reasons that both space and time are important in
understanding the geopolitics of deep-sea mining. Elsewhere, work on subterranean lead mining soughs
by Endfield and van Lieshout (2020) identifies a variety of temporalities that shape sough development,
such as ‘changing flows of water underground over time, the waxing and waning of sough developments
depending on changing economic, political and social configurations and the cross-generational nature
of the legal disputes which were raised over soughs and the productive landscapes they drained’ (p. 68).
Together, these studies send a clear message that temporality is important – if not, necessary – to
consider when making sense of the subterranean.
We can build on these insights by reflecting on the influence of the subterranean on the ways
in which time is experienced, produced, manipulated, governed and, like place, infused with meaning.
Investigating the role of time in the relationship between the aboveground and underground is important
too. Once again, a relational ontology is helpful as it brings into view the relations between places,
between place and time, and between different forms of time – of particular interest here is the influence
of the past on the present (a familiar trope in crime fiction).
Situating the subterranean within Rankin’s Edinburgh

This section starts with two observations. First, the subterranean within the John Rebus novels is
typically an urban subterranean. Indeed, the Edinburgh-set Rebus novels echo crime fiction’s ‘long-
standing engagement with the city’ (Plain, 2018, p. 151; see also Andrew and Phelps, 2013; Knight,
2016; Willett, 1996; Brosseau and Le Bel, 2016). Second, Ian Rankin does not depict the subterranean
as being separate to the city of Edinburgh; instead, the subterranean is an important component of the
city assemblage (cf. Ruming et al., 2021). Rankin connects Edinburgh’s subterranean to the
aboveground in a myriad of ways, and the author imaginatively uses the subterranean to illustrate his
thoughts on, and experiences of, urban life. Given the urban and relational character of Rankin’s
subterranean, it is important to reflect first on Rankin’s broader portrayal of Edinburgh before heading
underground.
Ever since Rebus’s full-length introduction in 1987’s Knots and Crosses, Edinburgh has been
central to the Rebus series. Its protagonist lives and works in Edinburgh – in fact, Rebus resides on the
same street (Arden Street) that Rankin inhabited as a student. Rebus and Rankin are intrigued and
confused by Edinburgh. Rankin often compares Edinburgh to a puzzle – one that the author, detectives
and readers attempt again and again to piece together. Mirroring the depiction of cities by other crime
novelists, Rankin repeatedly portrays Edinburgh as a violent, threatening and secretive place, haunted
by its past failures and injustices (Cook and Rowe, 2023). It is a place engrained with patriarchy and
toxic masculinity, as well as a territory fought over by male gangsters.
Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of Rankin’s Edinburgh is its duality. Here Rankin
takes inspiration from the Edinburgh-born author Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). In Knots and Crosses, for instance, Rankin describes Edinburgh as ‘a
schizophrenic city, the place of Jekyll & Hyde sure enough’ (Rankin, 1987, p. 193). Rankin views Jekyll
and Hyde as metaphors for the dual personalities of Edinburgh: its respectability and deviance, day and
night, visibility and invisibility, surface and subsurface. Rankin is particularly interested in revealing
the hidden – or Hydden – side of Edinburgh that tourists rarely see. It is perhaps no surprise then that

the Rebus novels cast a light on a multitude of concealed social harms – such as deprivation,
exploitation, corruption and murder – that manifest above and below Edinburgh’s surface, whose
victims are disproportionately from marginalized groups.
Rankin is keen to accentuate the verticality of Edinburgh. Here, Rankin describes Edinburgh as
a ‘precipitous city’, one that ‘contains an intensity of heights and depths’ (Rankin, 2009, p. 2). Viewing
Edinburgh in this way, Rankin is influenced once more by Stevenson, who used the phrase precipitous
city in The Weir of Hermiston’s dedication (Stevenson, 1896). Rankin’s Edinburgh retains the steep
hills, crags and crevices as well as many of its tenements that Stevenson (1878) described many years
prior in Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. Rankin complements these features with more recent ones such
as high-rise estates and penthouse apartments. Importantly, Rankin emulates Stevenson further by
showing that the city extends vertically beneath the surface, by peering into different subterranean
places such as basements and graves.
Edinburgh’s verticality is used by Rankin to emphasize discomfort and danger. Two small but
telling examples are Rebus struggling with stairs during his 60s and 70s (with his health declining) and
his occasionally mentioned fear of heights. These vertical nuances reveal a protagonist who is ill at ease
with the precipitous city that he resides and works in. Another example is the large number of people
in Rankin’s Edinburgh who metaphorically and literally fall. We read, for instance, of several deaths
by hanging in the novels as well as those who fall from great heights. Did they jump or were they
pushed? That’s the question frequently posed to the detectives and readers. One recurring character,
Father Conor Leary, suffers a heart attack and falls over a railing after giving a speech in Surgeons’
Hall in The Falls. An exchange after the event between Rebus and Donald Devlin links this fall to the
ideas of Stevenson:

‘He’d just made a fascinating speech,’ Devlin said. […] ‘The fall of man, that was his starting
point. […] The fall of man, and then he fell […] Perhaps Stevenson was right.’
‘What about?’
‘He called Edinburgh a “precipitous city”. Maybe vertigo is in the nature of the place …'
Rebus thought he knew what Devlin meant. Precipitous city … each and every one of its
inhabitants falling slowly, almost imperceptibly (Rankin, 2001, pp. 154-155)
This extract echoes wider cultural associations with falling and downwards movement – for instance,
fear, failing and a lack of power (Claid, 2021; Winters, 2014). These associations are important to bear
in mind as we descend into the depths of Rankin’s subterranean Edinburgh.
Subterranean Edinburgh, Rankin-style
Depictions of the subterranean in popular culture – and crime fiction especially – are sometimes
positive: intriguing and beautiful, a site of shelter, resistance, adventure, endurance and possibility
(Redford, 2016; Woon and Dodds, 2021; Cohen, 2023; Pinkus, 2023). More frequently, however, they
are represented in a negative light. Crime fiction shares some (toned down) similarities here with the
horror genre regarding their representation of the subterranean (cf. Gomel, 2023; Raine, 2021; Winter,
2014): both portray the subterranean as dark and dangerous, a place engulfed in a claustrophobic and
frightening atmosphere, where innocent victims are trapped, outsiders and deviants are banished, and
secrets are buried. Rankin tends to draw on these negative associations when writing about the
subterranean but, as we shall see, he challenges some of them too.
Edinburgh’s underground in the Rebus novels is a place where simultaneously the
disadvantaged are most likely to be trapped or buried, and the powerful are more able to occupy (of

their own accord), work and play illicitly, hide and bury their secrets. As we will see, Edinburgh’s
subterranean is a patriarchal place where men (typically powerful and wealthy) control who enters and
what happens there, operating out of the gaze of the police. The subterranean is used by Rankin to
express his belief that Edinburgh – with its cultured veneer and genteel, morally upstanding façade – is
a corrupt place full of hidden secrets. For Rankin believes that Edinburgh is ‘all appearances […] fur
coat and no knickers’ (Rankin, 1987, p. 193) – ‘the perfect Jekyll and Hyde city, its secrets tucked away
quietly beneath apparent probity’ (Rankin, 2005, p. 30). There is an important spatiality to Rankin’s
suggestion: secrets are not only hidden; they are often buried beneath a literal or metaphorical surface.
The subterranean is one such storage facility, where harms, immoralities and injustices are concealed.
In a related way, Edinburgh is presented as a city where things are regularly ‘swept under the carpet’ –
a frequently-used metaphor in the novels, especially when the detectives cynically discuss the actions
of Edinburgh’s elite and their police colleagues (with the Rebus series often exposing corrupt, rule
breaking and violent practices of the police).
The temporalities of buried secrets within Edinburgh are important too. Rankin suggests that
this is a long-standing practice, one that is both futile – as secrets will inevitably resurface in the future
(Cook, 2022) – and harmful – as secrets haunt residents of Edinburgh during and after their burial
(MacDonald, 2012). The burying of secrets adds to Rankin’s message that the past lingers and
‘contaminates the present’ (Plain, 2007, p. 134). Forgetting is not possible in Rankin’s Edinburgh. The
resurfacing of the past is vividly captured in the extract below taken from the epilogue of Deal Souls,
when we encounter Rebus observing a demolition site in the Old Town where the Scottish Parliament,
the offices of the Scotsman newspaper and a (never-to-arrive) theme park were due to be built:
Demolition had stopped for the day […] They’d all be ready for the twenty-first century. Taking
Scotland into the new millennium. Rebus tried to raise within himself a tiny cheer of hope, but
found it stifled by his old cynicism.

No longer twilight now. Darkness had fallen. Shadows seemed to rise all around him as a bell
tolled in the distance. The blood that had seeped into stone, the bones that lay twisting in their
eternity, the stories and horrors of the city’s past and present … he knew they’d all come rising
in the digger’s steel jaws, bubbling to the surface as the city began its slow ascent towards being
a nation’s capital city. (Rankin, 1999, p. 405)
The difficulty of containing the illicit past under the surface is symbolized further by the
frequent appearances in the Rebus novels of dead bodies floating in water (such as the city’s canals and
docks). Death occurs sometimes before and sometimes after they enter the water. Either way, the bodies
are unlikely to remain submerged; their buoyance representing the almost inevitable rise to the surface
of the illicit.
Police work in the Rebus novels is also frequently described using more positive subterranean
metaphors. We see detectives – such as Rebus in Resurrection Men (Rankin, 2002) – going ‘undercover’
as ‘moles’. The police are often described as ‘scratching the surface’ and ‘digging’ into cases. When,
for example, Rebus discusses a case with Cafferty in Even Dogs in the Wild, he remarks that Detective
Constable Christine Esson ‘did the digging – she’s as thorough as any gold miner’ (Rankin, 2015, p.
290). This focus on what François (2021, p. 239) calls ‘digging as truth-seeking’ is given a temporal
dimension in several of the books when Rankin compares police work with archaeology. When an
archaeologist guides a team of detectives around Queensbury House in Set in Darkness, Rankin (2000,
p. 14) writes: ‘Digging up the past, uncovering secrets… it struck Rebus that they [archaeologists]
weren’t so unlike detectives’; both occupations are, as Rankin (1993, p. 52) suggests in The Black Book,
interested in ‘old bones and hieroglyphs, trying to make the dead come to life’.
Graves and basements in Rankin’s Edinburgh

The Rebus novels visit a variety of subterranean places, some places that are literally underground while
others are more figurative places. This section explores two noteworthy examples of the former (graves
and basements) and the next section examines two important examples of the latter (hell and the
underworld).
Starting with graves, they are commonplace in cities and crime fiction, and feature regularly in
the Rebus series. This is especially so in Standing in Another Man’s Grave (Rankin, 2012) where graves
are central to the narrative. The novel begins with Rebus attending a funeral of a former colleague at an
unnamed cemetery in Edinburgh. Later an ‘all-too human hand, jutting up from [a…] makeshift grave’
(Rankin, 2012, p. 254) is discovered, hinting at the easily punctured divide between the underground
and aboveground. Four more graves are unearthed, all five located in the woods at Edderton
(approximately 200 miles north of Edinburgh). Rebus then watches television footage of the funeral of
one of those found in Edderton – Annette McKie – and soon after the funeral, her brother – the youthful
Edinburgh gangster, Darryl Christie – kidnaps the suspected serial killer and forces them to stand in a
shallow grave during the climax of the novel (before Rebus and his ally Detective Inspector Siobhan
Clarke intervene). Of course, there is also the grave in the novel’s title.
Whether legal or illegal, in Edinburgh or elsewhere, graves and their aboveground
accompaniments, headstones, regularly appear in Rankin’s gothic-inspired novels. All too often, neither
the grave nor the headstone, the dead nor the mourning appear peaceful. In Dead Souls (Rankin, 1999),
for instance, Rebus discovers that his father’s headstone is splattered with paint, while Fleshmarket
Close (Rankin, 2004) features children using a skull from a desecrated tomb as a football. These
instances sit alongside Rankin’s regular mentions of Edinburgh’s real-life resurrectionists who sold
exhumed bodies (and sometimes bodies they murdered) to surgeons during the 17th and 18th century.
Rankin gives us a clue as to how to interpret the graves and headstones in The Hanging Garden: ‘In the
past, it had been a history lesson to Rebus – headstones telling the story of nineteenth-century Edinburgh

– but now he found it a jarring reminder of mortality’ (Rankin, 1998, p. 146). Graves and headstones,
therefore, are signifiers of a grim past and, perhaps, an equally grim future.
Graves and headstones are also accompanied by ghosts in Rankin’s novels, all of whom are
reminders of the painful past haunting Edinburgh, its denizens and Rebus especially (MacDonald,
2012). Indeed, Rebus is continually reminded of the dead; he is drawn to graveyards, is regularly visited
by ghosts, and is tormented by the difficulties of achieving justice for the dead (Cook, 2022). Graves,
headstones and ghosts contribute towards an image of the past acting like a palimpsest in the present;
‘superseded, even covered, but never erased’, and at any moment ‘liable to rise up and insinuate itself
into the present’ (Cook, 2014, p. 144).
Venturing indoors, basements appear regularly in crime fiction too. Sharing some similarities
with the horror genre once more, crime fiction depicts basements as having menacing atmospheres;
places ‘in which unspeakable horrors lurk […] invariably associated with murder, the concealment of
terrible crimes and illicit burial’ (Murphy, 2009, pp. 154-155). While basements appear only
periodically in the Rebus series, they are important places and, like graves, feed into the wider cultural
associations between depth, deviance and death. Furthermore, Rankin’s basements echo the
temporalities of basements within popular culture, having gruesome pasts and terrifying futures. One
notable appearance is in the second Rebus novel, Hide and Seek (Rankin, 1990) – a novel that
underscores the Jekyll and Hyde duality of Edinburgh. Hide and Seek culminates in a police raid on a
basement club, symbolically named Hyde’s Club. It is situated in a Georgian terrace – presumably in
the city’s New Town – accessible via some hidden stairs in a casino named Finlay’s. The owner of the
basement club, Finlay Andrews, along with lawyer Malcolm Lanyon, orchestrate illicit and harmful
activities that are hidden beneath the surface:

Calum McCallum […] had told Rebus all about the rumours he’d heard, rumours of a little club
within a club, where the city’s increasingly jaded begetters of wealth could place some
‘interesting bets’. A bit out of the ordinary, McCallum had said. Yes, like betting on two rent
boys, junkies paid handsomely to knock the daylights out of one another and keep quiet about
it afterwards. Paid with money and drugs. (Rankin, 1990, p. 244)
Run and frequented by men, the basement club allows voyeurs to watch others have sex through a see-
through mirror. Andrews and Lanyon secretly take photographs of attendees which are stored as future
bribery aides. What happens underground, their threat goes, may not stay underground if you do not
comply (the porosity of the subterranean coming through once more). Hyde’s Club embodies the
division and concealed exploitation within Edinburgh. Hyde’s Club also acts as the subterranean
expression of Edward Hyde, while the casino plays the ‘above-board’ role of Henry Jekyll (Geherin,
2008). After the raid, when Rebus worries that the powerful elite of Edinburgh will cover up the
basement and the associated deaths, the novel returns us to the trope of the illicit being buried:
‘They’re going to bury it, Brian,’ Rebus said, his voice an angry vibrato. ‘They’re going to bury
it, I know they are, and there’ll be no cross marking the spot, nothing. A junkie died of his own
volition. An estate agent committed suicide. Now a lawyer [Lanyon] tops himself in a police
cell. No connection, no crime committed.’ (Rankin, 1990, pp. 258-259)
Once more, Edinburgh’s powerful – and predominately male – elite collude in the burial of secrets. This
‘cover up’ is yet another subterranean reminder that Rankin’s Edinburgh is corrupt and rotten, ‘built on
double standards and dark secrets’ (Plain, 2018, p. 17).
Hell and the underworld in Rankin’s Edinburgh

The terms basement, cellar, grave, cemetery or headstone are not used in the Rebus novels as often as
another subterranean term: hell. Across the series, up to and including A Heart Full of Headstones
(Rankin, 2022), hell or variations of it average a considerable 35 mentions per novel. Used largely in
the dialogue, hell is mostly used as an interjection, with the term hellish or hell also being used to
describe a miserable and insufferable situation or place (usually a place aboveground). For instance,
Inspector Anthony McCall describes the fictional Edinburgh estate of Pilmuir as ‘[b]loody hell on earth’
in Hide and Seek (Rankin, 1990, p. 18).
Temporality runs through wider depictions of hell, situating hell as (1) retributive punishment
in the future for sins of the past and present, and (2) a subterranean site of eternal damnation. These
temporalities are not conjured up in the Rebus novels, although the repetitive use of the word does
emphasize the length and intensity of suffering by residents, victims and the police. Temporality is
important too in the moments when Rankin’s characters invoke hell to suggest that morality is declining
over time. For instance, when Rebus visits London in Tooth and Nail, Detective Inspector George Flight
states:
Everything’s going to hell in this city, Arnold, and I’m inclined to just shrug my shoulders and
join in. Understand me? Why should I play fair when nobody else does, eh? (Rankin, 1992, p.
224, emphasis added)
Meanwhile, Chief Superintendent “Farmer” Watson evokes Hades when lamenting Edinburgh’s
growing drug problems (Hades being both the land of the dead in Greek mythology and a pseudonym
for hell in popular culture):

You probably know that I’m interested in this city’s drug problem. Frankly, the statistics appal
me. […] Here, Inspector, it’s Hades. Plain and simple […] this city is turning into Hades.
(Rankin, 1990, p. 28, emphasis added)
Importantly, the Rebus novels regularly refer to hell’s most infamous resident, the devil.
Indeed, devil or variations of the term appear in all but one of the novels, typically used in dialogue that
playfully or aggressively refer to other characters. The gangster Cafferty is frequently called the devil
– an association stressed in Rather Be the Devil (Rankin, 2017) where Cafferty comes out of
‘retirement’, removing his rival Christie (who is imprisoned) and symbolically taking over Christie’s
basement club on the Cowgate called the Devil’s Dram. It is a nightclub where, under Christie’s
ownership, ‘[p]lastic gargoyles leered from the ceiling, while bearded satyrs cavorted along the walls’
(Rankin, 2017, p. 94), with ‘the smell of disinfectant heavy in the air’ (p. 96) and whose music sets
Clarke’s ‘teeth on edge’ (p. 96). A hellish, masculine and subterranean place where Christie and
Cafferty feel at home.
Rankin is not superficially dressing up people, places and situations through references to the
devil, hell and Hades; instead, he is giving them nuance and depth. When Rankin describes Cafferty as
‘a kind of devil, who is always standing behind Rebus with this seductive voice saying ‘It feels good to
do bad things, why don’t you give it a go[?]’ (quoted in Plain, 2002, p. 13), we can see that Cafferty is
used to demonstrate how tempting it is to cross the line. When Rebus tells Cafferty ‘[w]e all look like
hell’ in Rather Be the Devil (Rankin, 2017, p. 232) and comments ‘we all have a bit of devilment in us,
don’t we?’ in the additional material of In a House of Lies (Rankin, 2018, p. 9), Rankin is able to subtly
ask his readers this question: do we all have an Edward Hyde inside us?
These metaphorical ideas about the subterranean are taken one step further in several of
Rankin’s latter novels. Here he draws on the notion of the underworld. It is an evocative but vague term

which, since the early twentieth century, has been widely used to describe ‘the alternative habitat of the
criminal, the deviant, and the dangerous outsider’ (Shore, 2016, p. 171). Geographically, the term is
often associated with cities and, while it has subterranean associations, it is a label for a variety of places
above and below the surface. Rankin draws on existing understandings of the underworld and
reformulates them in Edinburgh. The term underworld is first used within the Rebus series in A Question
of Blood (Rankin, 2003), but it is in the next novel, Fleshmarket Close (Rankin, 2004), where the author
challenges our understanding of it. Here, Rebus says to Detective Sergeant Ellen Wylie, ‘I’ve got this
theory […] We spend most of our time chasing something called ‘the underworld’, but it’s the
overworld we should really be keeping an eye on’ (Rankin, 2003, p. 118). In writing this, Rankin speaks
to the corrupt and harmful practices of the ‘legitimately’ powerful in Edinburgh such as senior figures
in business, government and the police. Later novels develop this idea, making the case for the co-
existence and intertwining of the underworld and overworld. They also demonstrate that occupants of
both ‘worlds’ crave power and use harmful means to achieve it. Rankin uses Cafferty to illustrate the
interconnectedness and complexity of the underworld and overworld:
Big Ger Cafferty had for many years been king of Edinburgh’s underworld. These days, he
lived a quieter life: at least on the surface. But with Cafferty, you never could tell. (Rankin,
2004, p. 129)
Cafferty had, to all purposes and appearances, gone legit. A few friends in the right places and
deals got done, fates decided. […] It was, Rebus realised, how things worked in the overworld
[… The] buzz Cafferty got, buying drinks for businessmen and politicians … Cafferty:
unfinished business, and likely to remain that way if Rebus heeded [Chief Constable James]
Corbyn’s orders. Cafferty unfettered, free to commute between underworld and overworld.
(Rankin, 2007, pp. 188-189)

Cafferty’s occupation of both the underworld and overworld is illustrated in recent Rebus novels when
Cafferty not only takes over Christie’s basement club but also moves soon after into a ‘penthouse duplex
in the Quartermile development, just across the Meadows from Rebus’s tenement’ (Rankin, 2018, p.
99) – away from his former ‘house on a wide leafy street in Merchiston’ (Rankin, 2017, p. 29). The
vertical symbolism is important: Cafferty is rising, reclaiming his city, surveying his turf from up high
– using his telescope, introduced in A Heart Full of Headstones (Rankin, 2022) – pulling the strings
from above and below, and taunting Rebus in plain sight. His ease of movement between the underworld
and overworld – aided no doubt by his gender and wealth – reminds us that Edinburgh is a complicated
web of corruption.
Conclusion
He could scream all he liked.
They were underground, a place he didn’t know (Rankin, 1994, p. 1)
The subterranean, as this article demonstrates, is an important yet under-examined place in crime
fiction. Taking cues from the expanding literatures on literary subterraneans and subterranean
geographies, I have started to address the lacuna by critically exploring the subterranean in Ian Rankin’s
Edinburgh-set John Rebus novels. To summarize, this article has shown that Rankin’s subterranean is
a place rich with meaning (associated with uncertainty, death, deviance, secrecy and injustice) and
imbued with power relations (being an unobserved, soundproofed and accessible haven for wealthy
men while also being a site where disadvantaged groups are disproportionately harmed and trapped).
Edinburgh’s underground is not a self-contained place; instead, it is an important component within the
city’s verticality and assemblage. The underground and aboveground are interwoven, and this is
demonstrated by the blurring of the underworld and overworld in the novels and the frequent rising to
the surface of buried secrets. Place and time, of course, are entwinned too, with the subterranean in the

Rebus novels having noteworthy temporalities. For many of Rankin’s characters, the experience of time
is shaped by the subterranean – take, for instance, the uncertainty of the future (when or if people will
resurface), the length and intensity of suffering that a metaphorical hell suggests, or the painful wait for
answers and justice for family and friends of the (possibly) ‘dead and buried’. The subterranean is
central to the relationship between the past and the present too; it is a place where characters – usually
the powerful – attempt to hide and forget the past, but it is also a place where the past can rarely be
contained, creating a lingering, palimpsestic imprint above and below the surface. In sometimes familiar
and sometimes original ways, Rankin uses the spatiotemporality of the subterranean to illustrate and
critique some of the injustices, inequalities and harms hidden beneath the cultured façade of Edinburgh.
Looking ahead, I hope that this article encourages three types of conversations. First,
conversations about the role and representation of the subterranean in crime fiction (and in other
genres). Second, conversations about crime fiction that involve geographers and occur during working
hours (after all, I’ve met many geographers who regularly read crime fiction outside of work). Third,
conversations about the subterranean that involve academics from different disciplines. Fingers crossed
some, or all, of these conversations happen, and I look forward to participating.
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