A missing person becomes a question without an answer

The Rebus author Ian Rankin on why he supports our bid to launch SafeCall – a lifeline for young people who disappear

- 

Detective stories depend on a mystery which is to be investigated and hopefully resolved.

They most often end with a happy resolution - the murderer is revealed; justice is done. But several times in the course of my writing career, I have had my main character, Detective Inspector John Rebus, encounter a missing persons case, and in the real world, those cases don’t always end with any kind of resolution, leading to a lifetime of questions, confusion and unutterable sadness for those friends and family members left behind.

I went about researching such cases for my novel Dead Souls, and discovered that there are many different explanations as to why people disappear from the world. They may be escaping a fraught set of circumstances at home, school or work. A relationship could have ended messily. Maybe there are people they need to get away from. Perhaps the life they’ve been living has just become too much to cope with.

I remember reading a brilliant nonfiction book by Andrew O’Hagan around that time. It was called