Edinburgh loves to market itself as a controlled burn: beauty with a hint of danger, a skyline you can consume from a safe distance. Festivals. Closes. Georgian confidence. Gothic postcard gloom. The whole place packaged as “character” in the way heritage cities get packaged—so you can feel worldly without having to feel implicated. Ian Rankin looked at that sheen and did the one unforgivable thing: he treated the city as responsible.
From the start, the Rebus books weren’t interested in “a mystery set in Edinburgh” so much as “Edinburgh as the motive.” Rankin wrote the first Rebus novel while living and studying there, and you can feel that proximity: not the tourist’s awe, the resident’s irritation. He isn’t seduced by stonework. He’s watching how power moves through stonework—who gets protected by it, who gets swallowed by it, who gets blamed when the façade starts to crack.
Edinburgh isn’t a backdrop in Rankin; it’s an accomplice that keeps laundering itself in culture, then acting shocked when the bodies turn up behind the velvet rope.
Rankin’s great refusal is to separate crime from respectability. Too much crime fiction still treats violence like weather: it arrives, it passes, the city returns to normal. Rankin’s Edinburgh doesn’t get “normal.” It’s a network—politics, police, business, old money, new money, property, reputation—where wrongdoing is not an interruption but a method. The murders matter, but the deeper insult is the social choreography around them: the quiet agreement about which doors you don’t knock on, which people you don’t name, which institutions you don’t embarrass. The city’s real talent isn’t culture. It’s containment.
That’s why Rebus works as more than a grumpy cop in a long series. He’s a lever. A nuisance. A man who keeps sticking his fingers into the machinery and coming back with oil on his hands. Rankin uses him to voice distrust of Edinburgh’s polished political performance, and to insist that “civic pride” is often just the public face of private deals. When the Scottish Parliament enters the city’s story, Rankin doesn’t treat it as a triumphal monument; he treats it as another arena where ambition, compromise, and self-protection breed their own kind of violence. His Edinburgh is modern, changing, deindustrialising, rebranding itself, selling itself—and all of that becomes crime-adjacent because all of that is about who gets to win.
And crucially, he doesn’t let the reader off the hook either. The city is built to be consumed: you walk it, photograph it, drink in it, romanticise it. Rankin keeps dragging you away from the scenic overlooks and into the petty humiliations and quiet coercions that make people brittle. He writes the Old Town/New Town divide not as a cute contrast for guidebooks but as a social sorting machine. He shows how quickly “heritage” becomes a moral alibi: look at the architecture, don’t look at the eviction; admire the grandeur, don’t ask who cleaned it; praise the city’s intellect, don’t trace the money.
Rankin’s Edinburgh is a lesson the genre hates: the worst crimes aren’t committed by monsters in alleyways, but by respectable systems that make alleyways inevitable.
If you want Edinburgh as mist and romance, you can find a thousand books willing to sell it to you. Rankin’s point is that the mist is cover. The romance is branding. The “city of stories” line is convenient because stories can be curated. Crime can’t. Crime forces the question heritage culture always tries to dodge: what is the city doing, right now, to the people who live beneath its beauty?
That’s why Rankin turned Edinburgh into a crime scene and never stopped processing it. Not because he hates the place, but because he refuses to love it in the approved, harmless way. He won’t let the city pose. He won’t let it sigh and move on. And neither should you. Insist on the complicity. Insist on the mess. Insist on the hook staying in.
