| Some writers have fans, others have a following. In the case of Ian Rankin, his famous detective John Rebus has attracted what could be better described as a cult. Readers have faithfully followed his Edinburgh mysteries for almost 20 years, although as Rankin points out, writing crime thrillers wasn’t his original intention.
"I became a crime writer by accident," says the novelist, interviewed prior to his standing-room-only appearance at WordFest last week. "I wasn’t trying to become a mystery writer. I was in university, doing a PhD on the Scottish novel, and I thought that I was writing an update of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Having spent years studying things like James Joyce’s Ulysses, I really wanted to write books that people wanted to read, not books you were forced to read in high school or college. So I thought, instead of making my good guy a doctor, I’d make him a cop. I found that everything that I wanted to say about Scotland I could say quite nicely in a crime novel. So why write anything else?"
The success of Rankin’s novels is due to the Rebus character and, just as importantly, his evocation of Scotland. Edinburgh becomes more than a place for his characters to inhabit; it has its own dark, smoky entity.
"The new book Fleshmarket Close started off with the murder of an asylum seeker in Glasgow, a racist murder. And I just thought, ‘What if that happened in Edinburgh?’ And it got me thinking about who are the Scots anyway, because it’s a huge melting pot. You know, my mother was English, I married a woman from Northern Ireland, and I have family that moved to Canada. You know it’s a mongrel nation. But right now, with this new (Scottish) parliament, we’re asking ourselves some big questions about who we are; do we have a special identity that’s different? I wanted to look into the fact that we actually dissuade people from entering the country, but on the other hand we need them – Scotland’s got a problem with depopulation. We actually need people to come and live in the country and pay taxes. So all these things were jumbled in my head, but the murder of an asylum seeker gave me the impetus, it gave me the start of a plot."
Rebus, even after more than a dozen novels, remains elusive, as Rankin finds new ways to see into the heart of his detective. And, as the novels evolve, other characters are being given greater space and characterization.
"There’s still stuff I don’t know about Rebus," says Rankin. "He still intrigues me, and I still don’t think that I’ve got to the centre of what makes him tick, what drives him, what motivates him. But there are some characters that started off as minor characters in the books – Cafferty, who’s the villain who runs Edinburgh, he started off in book three as just a cameo appearance, but he got under my skin, so he’s in all the books now. And then Siobhan, she was just another colleague of Rebus’s, but then I found that there were very interesting things that I could do with her and her relationship with him, so she’s now got half of each book.
"She’s my insurance policy for when (Rebus) does retire," he adds. "Maybe I can keep writing books with her as the central character."
Rankin isn’t interested in gratuitous violence, but fascination with the darker aspects of life has informed his fiction from the beginning.
"The first thing I ever had published was a poem I wrote when I was 17 called ‘Euthanasia,’" he says. "So even as a 17-year-old I wasn’t writing about how great the world was. With the crime novel, you start with a pebble dropped in the water, which is the murder, or the crime, and then the ripples are the effects that it has on the world and society around it; the effect it has on the victim’s family, the perpetrator and the detectives who are investigating it. I don’t like neat and tidy endings in crime novels because the real world isn’t like that. When a murder is committed, the world has shifted and it never goes back to being the same."
The quality of, and approach to, mystery fiction differs widely, but Rankin has stuck to the formula and instinct that has guided his novels thus far.
"I’m interested in character and theme, I’m not so interested in plot, and I’ve got no interest at all in red herrings and misleading the reader and taking them down false alleyways, and trying to find more obscure poisons or outrageous ways of murdering people," he says.
Still, he has occasionally shied away from getting too deep into a character. "I wrote one of the Rebus novels, Dead Souls, which is about a pedophile, and I was going to go inside his head, first person, and I just didn’t want to go there," he reveals. "I’ve got two young kids, and I just backed off from that."
Despite the demand for new Rebus novels, Rankin says don’t expect to see another one in the immediate future. "I used to write two books a year, then went to a book a year. I’m now slowing down; I think it’s going to go to a book every two years," he says. "I’m very conscious that my hero is aging; he lives in real time. When we first meet him he’s 40, but he’s now 56 and he has to retire at 60. If you’re a cop in Scotland you have to go at 60. So he’s only got four more years left, and I want to slow time down for him slightly, which is why I’m going to write a book every two years."
Still, Rankin adheres to his routine. "I can only write at home, with my computer in my office and music playing in the background," he says. "It’s got to be instrumental music; I play a lot of stuff like Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor. In the morning when my kids go to school, I go and sit in the café for two hours reading the paper and doing the crossword, drinking coffee. I get a six-hour day in. If it feels forced, I walk away and wait for the muse to come back, and so far the muse has always descended." |
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