Doors Open, however, is not one of Rankin's novels featuring his famous detective, Inspector Rebus; instead, it is the story of an audacious art theft, in which genuine paintings are replaced by copies made by a gifted art student. The author brings the Edinburgh that is respectable and well heeled together with the Edinburgh of criminal gangs, thus dissolving the distance between them.

The characters are convincing and the plot amusing; one cannot help noticing its resemblance to a real crime in the art world, in which, at the behest of a swindler, a teacher in a provincial art school forged paintings by famous artists of the 20th century. The swindler then sold them to gallery owners and curators at prices that must have alerted their suspicions; but greed and ambition got the better of their judgment, and once they had bought they were in no position to expose the swindler.

There is acute psychology and social commentary in Doors Open. The emptiness of modern prosperity is suggested by the predicament of one of the main participants in the plot, a young computer entrepreneur who has made a quick fortune. He turns to audacious crime because of a lack of purpose and excitement in his life once he has sold his business.

No murder takes place in the book, but it ends with a scene of disturbing violence. Rankin does not allow us the comfort of believing that there is a respectable, decent and honest world into which crime intrudes as an alien force; in the world he describes, everyone is on the make and respectability but a veneer. This, in its own way, is as much a fable as the genteel England of the golden age.