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A Good Read Dark Road by Ian Rankin and Mark Thompson


As Rankin says in his introduction, Dark Road was written in response to a query about why we see crime fi ction dominating television and bestseller lists, but not on the stage.


‘It started,’ he says, ‘almost as a dare’. Following a widely praised


run at the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, the script has now been released in book form. Initially, there were some groans from die-hard fans who had hoped


for, or expected, the inclusion of Rankin’s most famous creation, John Rebus. But whilst the characters here inhabit the same world, Rebus is not present even as a shadow, and the play works better for it.


Reading a script is diff erent to reading a novel, and it is clear that Rankin found the process diff erent too.


Here the dialogue has to carry and develop the characters. The central character, Isobel


MacArthur, is as successful on the page as reviews suggest she was on the stage. As she approaches retirement from a distinguished career, Scotland’s fi rst female Chief Constable is drawn to revisit one of her earlier cases: that of Alfred Chalmers, convicted for the murders of four young women twenty fi ve years previously. Chalmers has always protested his innocence, and the key evidence in the case has been conveniently lost…


The scenes between Isobel and Chalmers are tautly written and full of menace. As a counterpoint, the black humour of Frank Bowman and the tapes of the original interviews, which Isobel obsessively revisits, take us into familiar territory. Unfortunately, the relationship between Isobel and her daughter is less convincingly drawn, and this weakens the ending – perhaps here the gap between page and performance is most evident. Nevertheless, the script will stay with you, and there is certainly evidence that the dare has paid off . Here’s hoping it is not Rankin’s last foray into scriptwriting.


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