Hide and Seek

Publication and place in the series

Ian Rankin’s Hide and Seek is a crime novel first published in 1991 by Barrie & Jenkins. Set in Edinburgh, it is the second novel in the Inspector Rebus series, following Knots & Crosses and preceding Tooth and Nail. It belongs to the detective-fiction tradition, but its concerns extend beyond the mechanics of solving a case: the investigation brings the reader into neglected urban spaces and the lives of people whom society is inclined to overlook.

The investigation

The case begins when a drug user is found dead in a squalid Edinburgh squat. At first, the death appears to be a heroin overdose. The arrangement of the scene, however, is disturbing and conspicuously deliberate: the victim’s arms are spread in a cross-like pose, the lower half of the body is wrapped in plastic, a pentagram is painted on the wall, and candles have been placed nearby. Detective Inspector John Rebus is unwilling to accept the apparent explanation. Evidence that the heroin was mixed with rat poison makes the death harder to dismiss as an accident, while the absence of the victim’s camera raises another question about what happened in the squat and why the scene was staged as it was.

The ritual appearance encourages speculation about occult motives, but the novel’s central detective-fiction tension lies in testing that impression against physical evidence and human motives. Rebus must distinguish the details intended to mislead or frighten from those that can explain the victim’s death. The apparently sensational scene gradually directs attention back to the realities of drug use, violence, and social abandonment. The victim’s marginal status matters: an overdose might be treated as routine precisely because of who has died, even when the circumstances demand closer scrutiny.

Themes and significance

Rankin combines a tightly framed murder inquiry with a view of Edinburgh as a city of sharply different experiences. The novel is interested in the gap between the visible surface of a crime and the conditions beneath it. Its staged body and occult-looking clues create an atmosphere of uncertainty, while Rebus’s work depends on scepticism, persistence, and attention to people and details others might disregard. The title also resonates with the story’s concealments: the circumstances of the death are hidden behind an apparently legible scene, and the investigation seeks what has been kept out of sight.

The book comes from an early period in Rankin’s career. His first Rebus novel, Knots & Crosses, appeared in 1987; his novel The Flood had been published in 1986. Hide and Seek therefore belongs to the formative stage in which Rankin was establishing both his detective and the series’ Edinburgh setting. Rebus is already stubborn and difficult, traits that make him an imperfect but compelling investigator. Rather than treating the city as picturesque scenery, the novel uses its neglected interiors and social divisions as part of the crime’s context.

As the second Rebus novel, Hide and Seek is an important early expression of the series’ approach: a crime offers a puzzle, but solving it also exposes the human and civic circumstances surrounding it. The Rebus books went on to become Rankin’s best-known work and have been translated into many languages. This novel remains valuable to readers following the series from its beginnings, and to readers interested in how its recurring detective, urban setting, and social concerns were taking shape.