In his latest adventure, he investigates a murder of quality. The subject of his enquiry is not a corpse found rotting under the floorboards of a dosshouse but the murder of a well known investigative journalist, Rhoda Gradwyn, in an exclusive and luxurious clinic for plastic surgery.

The clinic is in a beautiful Elizabethan manor house in Dorset, a wing of which has been converted for that purpose by an eminent surgeon, Mr ­Chandler-­Powell. The victim has a terrible facial scar, inflicted upon her in childhood by her drunken father (in a scene brilliantly and convincingly evoked by the author), which the surgeon repairs. She is then strangled in her hospital bed as she recovers from her operation.

The elements of the classic ­country-house murder are in place. There are old retainers, a small number of possible culprits and (as it emerges) several people with strong motives for killing her. All that remains is to find which of them did it.

The problem is that gentility hardly exists nowadays, and therefore murder even in the most luxurious surroundings does not allow for the same resolution and comforting denouement as it did in the golden age. The world is not restored when the culprit is discovered. P.D. James keeps us reading to the last page, but we do not experience afterwards the warm glow that the classic novels of the golden age gave us.

Ian Rankin is our foremost crime writer of the rough school. His beat is the dark underside of Edinburgh's elegance, the mean streets of the Scottish capital rather than the Georgian squares. Indeed, he inverts the relationship between the elegance and the meanness, so that it is the meanness that seems primary and the elegance secondary. In Rankin's world, respectability is false, degradation is real.