Mental Borders in Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue

Abstract

Published in 1997, Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue describes the police procedure in Scotland around the mid-1990s. Throughout the book, Detective Inspector John Rebus works to resolve four murders and discovers that the killings are similar to those of a late 1960s “Bible John” case (mistakenly concluded with a scapegoat). While the police force at Craigmillar deploys a speculative search for clues, Rebus undertakes a more intuitive search for evidence. After offending his senior officials, he launches an exile among Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and then goes on to Shetland and the North Sea. Meanwhile, TV journalists investigate Rebus over a miscarriage of justice some thirty years ago. This essay aims to explore how the victimized female body is psychically constructed. Conversely, it explores how the process of legal inscription of the body constructs a psychical interior. Through these questions, I propose that readers may look at the female victimized body from the viewpoint of internal criminal motivations, and that they may also look at the internal victimized body from the viewpoint of external class divisions. If the individual body involves a metaphor of the city as an institutionalized body, then how is the body of the city imagined, and psychically and socially produced? This essay offers observations on one corporeal aspect of Scottish underground culture, in relation to fictional criminal discourse.