Making a Scottish/British Crime Series Powerfully New Again: MIDNIGHT AND BLUE, Ian Rankin

A quick count suggests that MIDNIGHT AND BLUE is the 24th novel in the deeply admired Inspector Rebus series from Ian Rankin. Along with similar protagonists, like Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, John Rebus has reached retirement age. How can a man whose life is framed by his investigative work manage the transition?

Shockingly, it seems Rebus will have to manage it in a dangerous prison, HMP Edinburgh, surrounded by criminals who have good reason to hate and threaten him. "Rebus felt hemmed in, not only by walls but bu the same daily faces too. He had visited the prison many times during his detective years — he recalled being shown the Hanging Shed, now demolished -- but this was different. The various smells were never going to be showered away.  ... Prison, nick, jail, chokey, inside -- many names but only one game: incarceration." 

There's only sparse explanation of how he's landed here with a life sentence, a result of bodily threatening a criminal who minutes later died of a heart attack. Clearly, Rebus's many slippery judgement calls and careless antagonisms of the past must have caught up with him as the courts ground him in their teeth. Protected briefly in solitary confinement, then pressed into the population of his old enemies and, of course, the antagonisms among them, it seems he's only surviving because the death that cost his freedom proved highly advantageous to gang leader Darryl Christie, who's offered to protect him (more or less). 

Of course, Christie is powerful, menacing, and in Rebus's estimation, quite mad. So that protection immediately equals additional danger. Too bad there isn't time to sort it out any further before Rebus's miseries are compounded by a death inside the prison, and fresh expectations from both the investigators and the prison's governor that Rebus will help solve this murder. To do so would quickly mean his death at the hands of the other prisoners, though. Or would it?

It's no spoiler to admit that all the action of this very high-action crime novel takes place in one dangerous week of Rebus's incarceration. Walking with him through the seeming impossibility of crime-solving while balancing threats around him is fascinating and suspenseful, and Rankin provides plenty of aggressive and startling twists along the way.

British cover.

MIDNIGHT AND BLUE will also satisfy readers who want a chance at the better side of human nature despite darkness and violence. Rankin's final acknowledgment shows he knows exactly what he's painstakingly built into this book: "I am grateful to staff and inmates (present and past) who spoke to me and allowed me to tour the facilities. I have taken a few necessary liberties, but I hope I have also managed to show that prisons are places where compassion and hope can be manifested on all sides."

In other words -- you might think you know the author, and the series, but this is a must-read to add to the experience. On my bookshelves, it's hanging around for a second delicious reading over the winter. 

Oh yes, the publisher is Mulholland (aka Little, Brown); I like the British (Scottish) cover design better than the American.

Three Teenaged Girls in 1850s Northern Vermont: My Protagonists for The Winds of Freedom

When I wrote THE LONG SHADOW, the story of Alice Sanborn's discovery of injustice and loss in her home village of North Upton, Vermont, I reached for integrity: not just for Alice and her family as they continue their commitment to the abolition of American enslavement, but also for how we see that time, that piece of our past. I wanted to give readers an experience of aromas and tastes as much as possible, along with the binding constraints of the layers of women's garments at the time, and the ways family could be both supportive and harsh. When Alice's uncle rages about the politics of the time, I want you to feel with Alice the scary and exhilarating moment of seeing someone take a stand for a difficult position.

In fact, I was so immersed in this 295-page novel that when I completed it. I was startled to hear the editor at Gale/Five Star, the publishing house, say "I hope we'll be seeing more of Alice!" "How much more are you thinking?" I asked. She responded, "Until everyone is free." That is, from 1850 to 1865.

Well, why not? Alice's interactions with her younger Black friend Sarah and the innkeepers' daughter Jerushah came to a natural end at the end of that novel. But as we all know, when one friendship ends or changes, another often comes along.

 

For THIS ARDENT FLAME, I chose a very different sort of new friend for Alice: Caroline Clark. Because of her inability to hear, Caroline's spent her school years in a boarding school for the deaf and hearing impaired, in another state. Returning to North Upton for Caroline could be far more traumatic if it weren't for Alice. As the two teens learn to communicate in a layered set of "languages," they learn more about the diverse people around them, and develop their own fierce commitment to abolition, as well as to the linked issue of women's roles and rights.

Readers may have been startled by the decision of these characters at the end of the book: They are headed West, to a place where their presence may be critically important to how America develops the laws and freedoms of its added territories, soon to be states. How could the Winds of Freedom series continue? Was it moving West?

Not at all. When the editor invited me to develop a series for this "young adult crossover" genre -- that is, one that features young adults (teens) as protagonists, but is read enthusiastically and with curiosity by adults, including parents and grandparents -- I saw right away that pushing the sequence by a year at a time, all the way to 1865, would mean a much longer and slower sequence than I wanted to write ... and, more urgently, it would mean that after the first few titles, the main characters would no longer be teens. Not only would that break the genre, it would take me into a kind of novel that didn't interest me. I really like writing "YA crossover."

So I came up with a plan: Each book would jump forward two years, not one; and the protagonists would shift with the timing, like a relay race, passing the action to another girl growing into the responsibility of working for a more moral nation and for the freedoms of those around her.

 

That's why book 3 in the Winds of Freedom series, THE BITTER AND THE SWEET, features would-be minister in training Almyra Alexander, whose Boston mother has passed away and whose politically active father is far too busy to raise a teenager (other than perhaps planning a marriage for her!). Readers met Almyra in book 2, when she was a pesky newcomer, dressed in city fashions and ignorant of rural ways, but already interested in the role she embraces in book 3: to become qualified to lead her own church. What about the push for abolition, a necessity for a moral person of her time -- will that get in the way of becoming a minister? And who ever heard of a woman leading a church??

I'm eager to learn what you think of Almyra's choices and adventures (including with a notorious counterfeiter) in THE BITTER AND THE SWEET. Please do let me know.

And when you've finished the book, tell me who you think the next young woman (teen!) is that I've chosen for the focus book 4. Think carefully, and remember the two-year jump involved. Can you guess the right one? I want to hear your thoughts, of course!