The Beat Goes On

Prologue

A few words about these stories.

‘Dead and Buried’, which opens this collection, is one of the most recent stories I’ve written. We’ve placed it at the very start because it takes place in the mid-1980s, when Rebus was learning the ropes at Summerhall police station (as featured in my novel Saints of the Shadow Bible). There then follow the twelve stories from my collection A Good Hanging and Other Stories. These were written to comprise a chronological year in Rebus’s life, so ‘Playback’ is set in March, ‘A Good Hanging’ in August (while the Festival Fringe is in full swing — as it were), and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in December. After this come seven stories from Beggars Banquet along with the novella ‘Death is Not the End’ (part of which ended up ‘cannibalised’ in my novel Dead Souls). Additionally, we’ve included six uncollected stories — these were mostly written for magazines and newspapers, sometimes for the Christmas edition, which is why the festive season crops up. Then there are two brand new stories — ‘The Passenger’ and ‘A Three-Pint Problem’. The final story in the collection, ‘The Very Last Drop’, is set immediately after Rebus’s retirement at the end of Exit Music and was written to be read aloud at a charity night at Edinburgh’s Caledonian Brewery — you’ll see why when you reach it.

I hope you get as much fun reading these stories as I had writing them.

Ian Rankin