![]() ![]() And after five years, I found a way to bring him back-as a civilian working for the police.” I had no idea he was going to stick around this long! Sixty is retirement age for detectives in Scotland, so he retired at 60 at the end of Exit Music, the 17th book. “I thought, How can you show things changing over time if your detective’s the same in every book? I made a decision early on that he would live more or less in real time-problematic when you’ve made him 40 in Book One. “I wanted to write about how Edinburgh was changing-socially, politically, economically-and the way Scotland was changing,” Rankin explains. And unlike many central characters of crime fiction, Inspector Rebus has been allowed to age. Arminta Wallace of The Irish Times hailed the detective for “his love of a wee dram, his distrust of authority, his bizarre conversations with barmen, and his habit of falling asleep in his armchair looking out over Edinburgh.” Readers love his tenacity, prickliness, and quick wit. Rebus is keenly aware of his city and its criminal underground-witness his strange bond with the crime boss “Big Ger” Cafferty. Today, fans everywhere know the crusty, contrarian, slightly out-of-control Rebus, a man with a mysterious past in the SAS, the British special forces unit. Rebus wasn’t an instant sensation, Rankin wrote, “but that would change.” The character eventually grew so popular that Edinburgh now offers Rebus Tours, taking fans to favoured haunts mentioned in the novels, such as The Oxford Bar on Young Street in New Town, which Rebus and Rankin also frequent. I stared from that window to the tenement opposite, and decided Rebus would live there…at 24 Arden Street.” In a later edition of Knots and Crosses, Rankin wrote, “I started writing on an electric typewriter at the table by the window. ![]() “I didn’t really know Rebus then.” But author and detective were close from the start. “It was meant to be a one-off,” Rankin says. ![]() ![]() The result was Knots and Crosses (Bodley Head, 1987), the first appearance of the irascible Detective Sergeant (DS, later Detective Inspector) John Rebus of the Edinburgh Police. An idea for a novel (crime thriller) has blossomed into a whole plot…it’s all there in my head.” He wrote in his journal that night, “It’s happened. He had written poetry and some stories, had one novel rejected and another- The Flood (Polygon, 1985)-published to little response. He was a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh when the idea for a crime-fiction story found him. And when the panic sets in, the adrenaline gets going, the antennae start twitching, and you find the story-or the story finds you.” When the deadline is looming, then the panic sets in. “I’m sitting with the newspaper, I’m doing the crossword, I’m doing the Sudoku, I’m going to the pub, I’m organizing stuff, I’m just hanging out. “What do I do when I’m not writing?” He smiles. Raised in a small village and born to a family of modest means, Rankin has learned to accept compliments and honours, including the Diamond Dagger, for lifetime achievement, from the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), “for services to literature.” Nevertheless, he insists that he’s “the laziest hard-working writer I know.”Ī youthful 58, Rankin says he wants to slow down, to ease the pressure to produce. 1 on London’s The Sunday Times fiction bestseller list. What follows, wrote Britain’s Elly Griffiths, is “tense, twisty…very funny…a real joy.” The book quickly rose to No. When police find a decomposed, manacled body in the trunk, a missing-person cold case is suddenly a murder. We met in Toronto the day after his stage appearance.Īs the latest novel begins, four schoolboys discover a rusting Volkswagen hidden beneath leaves and branches in a deep forest gully. Among writers of crime fiction, this lean, dark-eyed Scot is something special, an author who regularly raises the genre to a high level. Worldwide, his much-heralded novels have reached 60 million copies sold and been translated into 26 languages. Canada has long been a Rankin stronghold. Rankin’s October appearance during Toronto’s International Festival of Authors kicked off a Canadian tour to launch In a House of Lies (Orion, 2018), the 23rd of his Edinburgh-set Inspector Rebus crime novels. Rankin grins and raises a glass to his fans. To the mock horror of his interviewer, fellow crime writer Linwood Barclay, the Scottish novelist peels off his sweater to reveal a black T-shirt emblazoned with the word “CANADA” in big red capital letters. It’s getting warm up here,” says Ian Rankin, standing beneath the stage lights of a sold-out Toronto theatre. His tales of crimes committed and solved are gripping, but his real subject is Edinburgh ![]()
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