Although not as widely read here in the States or in Canada as he is “across the pond,” Scotland’s Ian Rankin is nevertheless one of the best crime writers working anywhere in the world today. His seventeen novels featuring the moody and brooding Edinburgh Detective Inspector John Rebus are gritty, gripping and thoroughly engrossing (1). One of the most compelling elements in Rankin’s fiction is the fact that it is so steeped in Scottish history and lore. Indeed, the city of Edinburgh itself with its narrow streets, soot-covered stone and brick, and long bloody history, has become virtually a character in its own right in the Rebus novels.

At the time that the author began writing for a living, back in the mid-1980s, it was his perception that “ … in Scotland there was no tradition of the crime novel. The English crime novel was perceived as being an entertainment, a puzzle. In Scotland, the tradition I was coming from was much more the Gothic novel.(2)” From the very beginning, then, Rankin set about writing what he calls “palpably Scottish” crime fiction(3). Thus Rankin’s work is peppered with authentic bits of the Scots and Gaelic languages. Marvelous and intriguing words like howff and bing, glaur, peching, hiedyns and the toast Slainte, confront the reader on virtually every page. For the same reasons, Rebus’s cases inevitably entail unearthing what the author refers to as the “hidden Edinburgh” – the flipside of the city seen by the tourists and extolled by the guidebooks: a “city that obscures its dark past beneath a veneer of nervous gentility.”(4)

Nowhere is this more dramatically seen than in the novel The Falls, published in March 2001(5). In that story Philippa Balfour, a young university student and daughter of a wealthy and influential banker, turns up missing. The only clue to the girl’s disappearance is a small doll housed in a six-inch wooden coffin that is found at what appears to have been the scene of her abduction. In the course of his investigation DI Rebus stumbles upon an analogous series of mysterious disappearances dating back to the late 1970s. In each of those instances, too, a small coffin was similarly left behind as a sort of perverse memento mori to the victims. So far, we are in the realm of fiction. But when Rebus – much to the perpetual dismay of his superiors (what else!) – further unearths a link between those pesky little boxes and seventeen similar artifacts known as the “Arthur’s Seat Coffins” and dating from the early 1800s, we have ventured into that shadowy netherworld where fact and fancy meet in order to confront a real-life Edinburgh mystery.

In July of 1836 five boys were hunting rabbits on Arthur’s Seat, a promontory that rises to the east of Edinburgh, when they came upon a remarkable discovery. Chasing one of their dogs into a cave the lads were astonished to find seventeen tiny coffins about six inches long arranged in three tiers against the cave wall. The first two tiers contained eight coffins each while the third level held only one of the artifacts. Each coffin contained a miniature human figure dressed in period clothing with a carved face and painted black boots (6). Part of a private collection until 1901, the Arthur’s Seat Coffins were subsequently donated to the Museum of Scotland. Since then, nine of the original seventeen have literally disintegrated – owing to the fact that they had lain on the first tier in the cave where they were discovered and thus were exposed repeatedly to rainwater and mud. Three of the eight remaining coffins are on display in the Scotland Transformed gallery at the New Museum of Scotland. (7)

In the many years since their discovery numerous competing theories have been advanced to explain both the origin and meaning of the Arthur’s Seat Coffins. Whatever their original purpose may have been – and the coffins remain to this day a mystery that has never been fully solved – they are clearly related in some way to the early Victorian period’s preoccupation with death and with its increasingly elaborate burial and mourning customs(8). As Brown writes in that vein, “The Scottish Presbyterian imagination was at its most fecund in this era, particularly exercised by matters of death and resurrection, issues which the Arthur’s Seat Coffins seemed to address in a strangely opaque way.”(9) Indeed the newspapers of that bygone day, including both the London Times and The Scotsman, saw in the coffins evidence of “Satanic spellmanufactory” by witchcraft devotees working spells of death by “entombing the likenesses of those they wish[ed] to destroy.”(10) Another popular theory was that the coffins were carved and carried by sailors as good luck amulets. The idea was that, upon arriving home safely from their latest voyage, the men would then bury the coffins as a form of thanksgiving and in order to complete the ritual. In The Falls, when Rebus encounters the latter theory he reacts with the skepticism of a hardened copper: “’Sailors on Arthur’s Seat … Now there’s something you don’t see everyday’.” (11)

As a brief aside, it is worth noting that it was a visit to the New Museum of Scotland that first Inspired author Rankin to utilize the Arthur’s Seat Coffins in his fiction. Asked to do an interview about the Scottish Parliament for a French television network, Rankin suggested the Museum as the venue. He relates what happened next:

As we walked in the door, a member of the staff said: ‘You should
do something about the Arthur’s Seat Coffins’. So I went up to the fourth
floor and there were these little six-inch wooden coffins with tiny
dolls inside … I’m attracted to real-life mysteries with no ending. That
got me thinking, What if Rebus got involved in an investigation of this
hidden Edinburgh I’ve always wanted to write about? (12)

In spite of his avowed fascination with “real-life mysteries with no ending,” Rankin, within the context of The Falls, nevertheless espouses a solution to the conundrum posed by the Arthur’s Seat Coffins. Drawing on the work of two scholars, Dr. Allen Simpson and Dr. Sam Menefee, the theory put forth in the novel is that the miniature coffins relate directly to the strange case of Scotland’s most infamous serial killers, William Burke and William Hare. Burke and Hare were two Irish immigrants who ran a boarding house in Edinburgh in the late 1820’s. At that time, the Scottish city was one of Europe’s most important centers of medical education in general and of human anatomical research in particular. Scots law, however, made it very difficult indeed to obtain human cadavers in sufficient quantities to meet the growing demand for dissection specimens. The medical schools, in fact, were allowed to obtain only one body each year and even then it had to be that of an executed criminal.(13)

Ever on the lookout for opportunity, and unwilling to long pursue the rather tortuous but nonetheless commonplace and profitable practice of grave robbing, Messrs. Burke and Hare set about murdering – by a manner of strangulation that they perfected and which left no obvious evidence of a crime – unsuspecting residents of their boarding house. In that fashion the two enterprising Irishmen were able to sell to the local medical establishments fresh corpses in nearly limitless supply. All told, Burke and Hare murdered somewhere between fifteen and thirty victims from Edinburgh’s so-called Old Town. Eventually the two miscreants were apprehended and brought to trial. Loyal to the last as is the way with criminals the world over, Hare was offered immunity from prosecution if he turned King’s evidence against his former partner. So it was that William Burke was eventually hanged in January of 1829(14). In one of history’s great if not more gruesome ironies, Burke’s body was donated to the University of Edinburgh’s Medical School for what was termed “useful dissection” and his skeleton remains on display there to this day. (15)

The connection between the Arthur’s Seat Coffins and the case of Burke and Hare, at least according to Simpson and Menefee and as appropriated by Rankin and Rebus, relates to a common theological understanding held by members of Victorian society. Christians of the era believed that one could not be resurrected if one had not been properly buried or if one happened to be, say, disinterred and dissected. Taking note of the evident high-level of craftsmanship displayed by the coffins and the fact that the brass hardware used in their construction seemed to resemble boot buckles, the theory goes on to speculate that they were carved by a local shoemaker who was at the very least aware of Burke and Hare’s nefarious activities. Further supported by the fact that the number of coffins found on Arthur’s Seat matches – more or less – the number of Burke and Hare’s victims, the idea is that this anonymous individual decided to give those hapless souls who had been murdered at least a symbolically proper Christian burial.(16)

Likewise in The Falls the serial killer hunted by Rebus leaves behind tiny coffins as a macabre and twisted gesture of compassion towards his victims – individuals who like their Victorian counterparts had been denied the final comforts of funeral and interment and, who knows, perhaps of even resurrection as well!

Whether the Simpson and Menefee theory is accepted as the final word on the intriguing mystery of the Arthur’s Seat Coffins or the notion simply becomes grist for the intellectual mill of a future generation of archeologists and historians is a debate best left to the experts in those fields. One thing, however, seems fairly certain. With his unique blend of Scottish history, folklore and dialect, not to mention his evocative and atmospheric use of local color, Ian Rankin has managed to distill from those disparate ingredients a growing canon of work that is as heady and distinctively Scots as any Highland malt whisky – and one that packs the same punch. If you have not yet had the opportunity to sample his wares(17) – crime fiction that straddles both the hardboiled and the gothic traditions – it’s time to drink up! As Rebus himself might say whilst hoisting a glass in memory of Burke and Hare and of seventeen wee coffins at his favorite haunt, the Oxford Pub, “Slainte.”

Footnotes:

(1)To date the Rebus series includes: Knots & Crosses, Hide and Seek, Tooth & Nail, StripJack, The Black Book, A Good Hanging & Other Stories, Mortal Causes, Let it Bleed, Black & Blue, The Hanging Garden, Death is not The End, Dead Souls, Set in Darkness, The Falls, The Resurrection Men and A Question of Blood.

(2)Robert McCrum, Gothic Scott: An Interview with Ian Rankin, The Observer, 18 March 2001. Available on the web at Guardian Unlimited: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/crime/story/0,6000,458332.html.

(3)Ibid.

(4)Allan Brown, Coffins that Came back from the Grave, The Sunday Times of London, 17 September 2000. Available on the web at the Paranormal Pages as Mystery of the Miniature Coffins: http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/pcoffins.html.

(5)Ian Rankin, The Falls (London: Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2001). Released in the United States (November, 2001) by St. Martin’s Minotaur

(6)See Brown cited above.

(7)For a photograph of the Arthur’s Seat Coffins go to the “Transformed Scotland: Daith Comes In” page at the New Museum of Scotland website: http://www.nms.ac.uk/mos/galleries/transformed/transformed10.html.

(8)Ibid.

(9)See Brown, Coffins that came Back from the Grave cited above.

(10)Ibid.

(11)Rankin, The Falls, p.79.

(12)See McCrum, Gothic Scot, cited above.

(13)Graverobbers: The Trial of Burke and Hare on the web at: http://www.tartans.com/articles/graverobbersl.html.

(14)See Burke & Hare: Edinburgh Body-Snatchers Turn Serial Killers on the web at: http://www.highlanderweb.co.uk/burkehare.html.

(15)See, Graverobbers: The Trial of Burke and Hare cited above. For more on the fascinating case of Burke and Hare see: 1). JK Gillon, The Story of Burke and Hare at http://members.fortunecity.com/gillonj/burkeandhare.html. 2). Douglas MacGowan, Burke & Hare at CrimeLibrary on the web: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial9/burke-hare/index.html. 3). Hugh Douglas, Burke and Hare: The True Story (London: Quality Book Club, 1973).

(16)See Brown, Coffins That Came back From the Grave cited above.

(17)For more information on Ian Rankin’s work, and for some useful links to sites on the web devoted to things Scottish, see Rankin’s website at: http://www.ianrankin.com/.

(18)“To your health.”