Scottish Writers > Ian Rankin Author Profile

From the second book that I wrote, Knots & Crosses, which was the first of the Inspector Rebus books, I went for a guy who people couldn't say was anything like me. I mean he was a policeman and I'd had nothing to do with the cops you know. He was 38, I was 23. He'd been married, I'd never been married. He had a kid, he had a mortgage, he had a car. You know he had a job. And here I was sitting in a bedsit in Marchmont in Edinburgh writing about this guy who was just a cypher really.

It was terribly easy to place him in a story as he was just meant to be a way of getting the readers through the story. There was a certain kind of plot and he was the good guy.

I thought that I was updating Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to 1980's Edinburgh. I'd very grand ambitions! Because there I was sitting at University doing a Ph.D. on Scottish Literature with especial reference to Muriel Spark, and suddenly I thought in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie she updated Jekyll and Hyde and brought it to Edinburgh, and I thought I can do the same thing in the 1980's.

In a crime novel of course, you're always looking at the dark side of life I'm afraid. So you do tend to get these darker similies and metaphors, darker images coming at you all the time. So it's probably part of my personality and part of the kind of book that I'm writing that makes me come up with some of the fairly dark .... I think it's Rebus's mind. It's how he works. It's not necessarily how I would see the world, but it's how he sees the world.

Rebus is a mischief maker, I think. He's a kind of levelling force and if he's approached by someone who appears bumptious or just represents big business, then he will try and take them down a peg or two, immediately. By pretending to have misinterpreted something or in the case of Black & Blue with the oilfield where he says to the guy, "It's called Bannock. Why did you name it after an oatcake?"

So everything I wanted to say about modern Scotland, I could say perfectly well in a crime novel. And as long as crime novels continue to tell the kinds of stories I want to tell and say the kinds of things, and deal with the kinds of themes that I want to deal with, then I'll keep writing them.

Ian Rankin