Being Frank
Ian Rankin
-1992-
A Good Hanging and Other Stories by Ian Rankin, 1992.
Twelve Inspector Rebus Mysteries.
Twelve terrific stories starring Detective Inspector John Rebus: His home city of Edinburgh is not just the tartan tea-rooms and cobbled streets of the tourist brochures, but a modern urban conurbation with the full range of criminals and their victims - blackmailers, Peeping Toms, and more than one kind of murderer. It is a city that gives birth to crimes of passion, accident and long-hidden jealousy.
- 'Britain's finest detective novelist' Scotland on Sunday
- 'An outstanding creation' Daily Telegraph
- 'Top-notch, The bleakness is unrelenting, but it quite suits Mr Rankin, who does his best work in the dark' New York Times
- '(Rebus) is a superbly drawn character; matched by the edgy authenticity of the Scottish locale and dialogue' The Times
- 'Very ambitious and very confident with acute observation of the not so bonny side of Scotland' Daily Telegraph
- 'James Ellroy once called Rankin "the Scottish James Ellroy" in jest. They have the darkness in common, certainly, but Rankin has more elegance and less profanity' Time Out
- Dowload the short-story in PDF format (42 ko) click here.
- Dowload a worksheet in PDF format (33 ko) click here.
- Read the beginning below.
It wasn't easy, being Frank.
That's what everybody called him, when they weren't calling him a dirty old tramp or a scrounger or a layabout. Frank, they called him. Only the people at the hostel and at the Social Security bothered with his full name: Francis Rossetti Hyslop. Rossetti, he seemed to remember, not after the painter but after his sister the poet, Christina. Most often, a person - a person in authority - would read that name from the piece of paper they were holding and then look up at Frank, not quite in disbelief, but certainly wondering how he'd come so low.
He couldn't tell them that he was climbing higher all the time. That he preferred to live out of doors. That his face was weatherbeaten, not dirty. That a plastic bag was a convenient place to keep his possessions. He just nodded and shuffled his feet instead, the shuffle which had become his trademark.
"Here he comes", his companions would cry. "Here comes The Shuffler!" Alias Frank, alias Francis Rossetti Hyslop.
He spent much of the spring and autumn in Edinburgh. Some said he was mad, leaving in the summer months. That, after all, was when the pickings were richest. But he didn't like to bother the tourists, and besides, summer was for travelling. He usually walked north, through Fife and into Kinross or Perthshire, setting up camp by the side of a loch or up in the hills. And when he got bored, he'd move on. He was seldom moved on by gamekeepers or the police. Some of them he knew of old, of course. But others he encountered seemed to regard him more and more as some rare species, or, as one had actually said, a 'national monument'.
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