“Polarities within an Entity”: The Case of Burke and Hare and Ian Rankin’s The Falls (2001)

The cultural profile of the literary haut lieu that is Edinburgh marked by a strong interest in violent history city, specifically, its legacy crime. This preserved variety material and immaterial archives, including substantial body fictional non-fictional literature, inscribed cityscape. It also commodified so as to attract international tourist trade. Using prime example Ian Rankin’s 2001 Rebus novel Falls, this paper sketches one notorious criminal case, William Burke Hare. In particular, it discusses spatio-temporal referentiality texts about Hare situates them wider context Scottish tradition.