As Ian Rankin's detective Rebus nears retirement, the author tells John Connolly about the time that language failed him in real life.
People don't usually get dismembered in the affluent Edinburgh suburb of Merchiston, so when the segmented remains of one Alan Wilson, a convicted sex offender, were discovered in a shallow grave on Merchiston Avenue last year, some well-plucked eyebrows were raised in surprise. Those eyebrows were lifted significantly higher the next day when it emerged that one of Merchiston's respected residents had taken it upon himself to go and have a gander at the crime scene, landing himself on the front pages of a national tabloid newspaper as a result.
The residents of Merchiston do not hang around crime scenes. It is most certainly not the done thing. After all, one of its streets alone is home to three of Scotland's most famous living writers, and if an errant meteorite were to strike their houses and send them all to meet their maker, the Scottish revenue commissioners would be in mourning for years. Alexander McCall Smith, author of the amiable if rather twee Precious Ramotswe books, lives there, as does JK Rowling, creator of a certain teenage wizard. The third is Ian Rankin, the most famous - and easily the most successful - crime novelist on these islands, and it was he who ended up as tabloid fodder for expressing an interest in the circumstances surrounding Wilson's demise.
"Oh God," says Rankin, reddening at the memory. "It was the first murder there in 60 years and I'd never been to a crime scene. Anyway, it was just around the corner, so I got my jacket and went out. All I did was walk up and down the street. I wanted to see what kind of crime tape the police used, and did they wear those things on their feet like on TV. Then I went back home and thought nothing more of it.
"The next morning the front page of the Sun had the headline 'Ghoulish Author Visits Crime Scene', and they had me climbing over walls, bribing the neighbours, looking in windows. It was absolute nonsense. Then I got a knock on the door that afternoon: Alexander McCall Smith, who lives two doors up from me. And he said: 'We're so disappointed in you . . . ' It was tongue-in-cheek, like I'd brought murder to the quiet, leafy streets of Edinburgh, but I did get into a little trouble for that."
If Rankin does not quite bear sole responsibility for introducing violent crime to Edinburgh, he has certainly done more than any other writer in recent years to explore the city's criminal underbelly. It is testament to both the quality and quantity of his work that his books are said to account for 10 per cent of all crime novels sold in Britain. Although only 45, he has already published 25 books, and has received every major international crime fiction award.
This year was supposed to be his "year off", but he has just released Rebus's Scotland, a series of reflections on Scotland, its people, and one John Rebus, the central character in Rankin's celebrated series of police novels, illustrated with some striking photography; he has also just reissued The Flood, his first novel, originally published in 1986, with a new introduction; he has written a set of new introductions for each of the Rebus novels, which are also about to be reissued in new formats.
He has toured with the Scottish singer Jackie Leven and collaborated with him on an album, Jackie Leven Said; and he has researched and hosted a series of programmes for BBC Radio 4 about crime writers and music entitled Music to Die For. In addition, he has found time to fit in a brief cameo in the ITV adaptation of his most recent paperback, Fleshmarket Close, with Ken Stott taking over as Rebus from the miscast John Hannah. At the very least, this suggests a rather fluid concept of taking time off.
Rebus's Scotland is interesting, particularly for fans of the novels, and nicely produced, although Rankin is such a perceptive observer that one rather wishes for more text and fewer pictures.
The Flood, meanwhile, is very much a young man's novel, as Rankin himself is quick to admit, and were it not for its author's later fame it is unlikely that it would be troubling bookshelves today.
It's not that the book, set in a thinly disguised version of Rankin's home town of Cardenden in Fife and suffused with sexual longing and a certain Scottish Presbyterian grimness, is necessarily bad. Rankin's talent is clear, even in this uneven early work, and The Flood's use of Scottish mythology is clever. The depiction of the single mother at the book's heart is often finely drawn and always sympathetic, and it's not hard to connect it with Rankin's own feelings about the early death of his mother. There is, too, a real tension to its closing chapters, but ultimately it strains for significance. It tries too hard. It wants to be acclaimed as a serious piece of literary fiction, but that need is too obvious.
What is interesting is that it was written almost contemporaneously with Knots and Crosses, the first of the Rebus novels, probably the most acclaimed British crime series of the past 50 years. The difference between the two books is striking. While Knots and Crosses lacks the fluidity and range of the later books, one can almost sense Rankin's immediate comfort with the genre.
In the figure of the Edinburgh copper Rebus - older than Rankin, troubled, unhappy - there is a kind of portrait of Rankin as he might have been; the mines, the police or the army were the three career options open to most of his poor, working-class peers.
"I think I consciously knew that I wanted to write something that was going to be more widely read," says Rankin, "and that would also be the kind of thing my dad would read, because the only books my dad read were thrillers: Freddie Forsyth, Alastair MacLean. I set the first book in Edinburgh because it's quite a complex city. It's easy to imagine dark shenanigans behind those net curtains and thick, Georgian walls under cover of night. It's also got this incredible criminal history: Deacon Brodie, acts of cannibalism in what is now the Scottish parliament. There's always something happening in Edinburgh."
It was the eighth Rebus novel, Black and Blue, that arguably marked the point at which Rankin became a major Scottish writer. There were signs of this approaching transformation in some of the earlier novels, particularly Mortal Causes and Let it Bleed, but Black and Blue was a significant step forward, masterfully interweaving the tale of the real-life Scottish serial killer Bible John with an examination of the changes in Scottish society being wrought by the oil industry. It was, in effect, a state-of-the-nation book, and a powerful riposte to those who would dismiss the capacity of genre fiction to make profound statements on the nature of the world in which we live.
The writing of Black and Blue coincided with one of the bleakest periods in Rankin's personal life. He and his wife Miranda had moved to France in 1990, and his children, Jack and Kit, were born there. Kit had been slow to make progress, and French doctors diagnosed Angelman syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes severely arrested development. Kit does not walk or talk, and the purchase of the large house in Merchiston allowed the family to give him what amounts to his own level in the home.
"We were living in France and going through the process of diagnosis which, as I couldn't speak much French, was bloody awful. My wife, who does speak French, was so upset that she wasn't always comprehending what the specialists were saying. They're using jargon in a foreign language and you're also trying to read between the lines of what they're not telling you, so language was actually letting me down.
"Then we would drive 50km [31 miles] back to the house and I would climb the stepladder up into the attic, sit at the computer and have complete control over the world in a way that wasn't happening in my real life, and have complete control over language, because the language in that book changed.
"There's a lot of James Ellroy in the early sections, very short staccato sentences and paragraphs, but partly I was just enjoying language because I could make things happen in my writing that weren't going to happen in the real world. A lot of the anger and frustration was channelled into that book, and Rebus reaches his lowest ebb in it. I was using him as a punch bag. Rebus is my form of therapy. He's saved me a fortune in psychiatrist fees, because I just give him all of the shit in my life and he deals with it."
Rankin's concerns for Kit's future are perhaps among the reasons he has been so prolific.
"I don't spend liberally on many things. The only things I buy are CDs and DVDs. I'm always conscious that I could buy the big sports car but that's money that could go to Kit's trust fund. We have to pay for his personal care, and that's quite expensive. Thank God we've got the money. How parents of disabled kids manage when they've not got money, I don't know.
"Well, I mean I do know: they fall back on family a lot of the time, or on the local pub for a whip-around or a charity run, but in a lot of cases they don't manage and it's usually the husband who runs away, who can't cope. It's hard enough looking after a disabled kid, but a single parent looking after a disabled kid? Christ Almighty . . . It's ironic, though: I do think the books started to get really good because of Kit, because of all that anger and frustration and asking 'Why me?', which is the question everybody asks themselves when they have a disabled kid. Why me? Why not somebody else? Why not you, is the answer."
With Rebus approaching retirement age, it appears that the series is drawing to a natural conclusion, with only two more planned at present. There are possibilities for extending it, such as the 30-Plus programme, which enables Scottish policemen to stay on after retirement to share their skills with younger officers but, as Rankin points out, Rebus doesn't have the kind of skills that his superiors would like to see transferred to clean-living young coppers. Siobhán Clarke, Rebus's detective sergeant and the character closest to Rankin's own personality, would make a natural successor should he decide to continue to write about crime and Edinburgh, but he has yet to make a final decision.
Instead, as he leaves, he reflects on music (he once sang in a group called the Dancing Pigs, and most of the Rebus novels have taken their titles from songs or albums) and the rather curious journey that has led him to his current position at the top of his chosen profession.
One of the first pictures in Rebus's Scotland is of a street sign. It reads "Ian Rankin Court" and it is in his native Cardenden. Rankin attended the unveiling, even though he had pressed them to opt for Rebus Court, or even just Rankin Court. He seems both proud and slightly embarrassed by the honour.
"I'm just waiting for it to be vandalised," he says. "It's only a matter of time." I point out that Ian is a hard word to change to something obscene, and he brightens momentarily before another thought strikes him.
"Yeah," he says, "but you can do quite a lot with Rankin . . . "
The Flood and Rebus's Scotland are published by Orion, priced £14.99 and £20 respectively. Music to Die For will be broadcast soon on BBC Radio 4
