![Ian Rankin in Edinburgh](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2017/06/15/TELEMMGLPICT000131706072_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqek9vKm18v_rkIPH9w2GMNtm3NAjPW-2_OvjCiS6COCU.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Ian Rankin interview: 'I became a crime writer to support myself without begging for handouts'
![Ian Rankin in Edinburgh](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2017/06/15/TELEMMGLPICT000131706072_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqek9vKm18v_rkIPH9w2GMNtm3NAjPW-2_OvjCiS6COCU.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Mop-topped, pallid, dressed in black T-shirt and trainers with dazzling neon laces: from a distance, the figure striding towards me through the Edinburgh drizzle could be a member of the Arctic Monkeys.
But in fact this is Ian Rankin OBE, recently elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and multi‑millionaire author of the Inspector Rebus novels. Close-up, the wrinkles and grey hairs are apparent, but he is still remarkably boyish for 57. I meet Rankin outside the Oxford Bar, a pub in the city’s New Town which has found fame as John Rebus’s favourite watering hole. “I started drinking in here when I first came to Edinburgh, as a student,” he tells me. “A lot of cops drank in here then, in the early Eighties, and a lot of them had busted relationships and were drinking too much. There’s a lot of them in Rebus.”
![Ian Rankin in Edinburgh](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2017/06/15/TELEMMGLPICT000131705802_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqek9vKm18v_rkIPH9w2GMNtm3NAjPW-2_OvjCiS6COCU.jpeg?imwidth=350)
I have never been to the Oxford before but in my mind’s eye I have followed the good Inspector here down this cobbled street dozens of times. We walk in, and Rankin stops to chat about the election result with some of the regulars before we sit down at Rebus’s own favoured table by the window. There is a photo of Rankin behind the bar, plus one of the actor Ken Stott as Rebus in the ITV adaptation. Rankin points to another picture, of the pub’s late proprietor John Gates, whom he immortalised in his novels as pathologist Professor Sandy Gates. “He was delighted – he never even went to college, and suddenly he’s a professor.”
His fans know that if they send mail to him here it will reach him – he has just picked up a bumper crop after being on tour in Australia and New Zealand, including birthday cards, he says. Some leave cash behind the bar to buy him a drink. We haven’t been talking for long before a large group of anorak-ed tourists sit down nearby and start staring and whispering. I hope they are staying on to the end of the month, when Edinburgh is hosting a three-day RebusFest, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses.
In honour of the old boy’s love of music, booze and tramping round Edinburgh, there will be a concert, a whisky tasting and walking tours, plus workshops, film screenings and a quiz. The Writers’ Museum is holding an exhibition of Rankin ephemera, including the agent’s letter reporting that five publishers had turned Knots and Crosses down, his first contract with the Bodley Head from 1987, and correspondence about a proposed TV adaptation. “They were going to set the book in London and Leslie Grantham, Dirty Den from EastEnders, was going to play Rebus. It seemed like huge money, so I was over the moon.” Nowadays he is more careful about television adaptations; indeed, he bought back the rights to his novels after ITV started to reduce the length of each episode to an hour (including ad breaks) per book. He hopes there will be a new series dealing with one central narrative split across multiple episodes à la Broadchurch, with the acclaimed playwright Gregory Burke writing the scripts. “At the moment, as far as I know he’s immersing himself in the books. We’ve got no idea yet which book or books he’s gonna tackle, how he’s gonna tackle them, or what age Rebus is going to be.”
![Ken Stott in ITV's Rebus](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2017/06/15/rebus_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BquFDNyDbu6vGgF0j7ynYPnl4Nw4M_B3EHPPqOFDD_i0Y.jpg?imwidth=350)
The anniversary has prompted Rankin to riffle through his diaries; he kept them from his teenage years until he was 32. According to these, the publication of Knots and Crosses when he was 26 was not a joyful time: “There’s a lot of angst. ‘No reviews, I can’t find the book in the bookshop, nobody wants me to do events’ blah, blah, blah.”
Rankin began to write fiction when he was supposed to be working on a PhD on Muriel Spark at the University of Edinburgh. The irony is that if he’d finished his thesis instead of his first novels, it seems unlikely that today he would be the owner of the table on which Spark wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – a recent birthday present from his wife. He chose to write crime fiction because, as the novelist Allan Massie told him while he was still a student, “you won’t get the kudos but you might get the cash.”
“I wanted to be able to support myself without begging for handouts from the state. All of the writers I knew when I was a student were all getting grants from the Scottish Arts Council. I dunno whether it was to do with my parents, we were working‑class – but it was important to‑me to be self-sufficient.”
![ITV's Rebus](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2017/06/15/rebus2_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNkFc6yK0cyft6aVzqQMrxq9Cq6C4PuHYlu6QPgw_h9M.jpg?imwidth=350)
However, the Rebus series was slow to take off, and Rankin endured many years of indifferent sales. His wife Miranda, whom he had met at university, suggested that they move to France so that he could devote all his attention to writing.
“She said it will be perfect: there’s no other job you can get there, you can’t speak French.”
Their financial situation became more pressing after their sons Jack and Kit were born in quick succession – not least because Kit was born with Angelman syndrome, a rare genetic condition that means he has severe physical and mental disabilities.
But Rankin thinks that the despair and pain he felt when Kit was diagnosed may have helped him to come of age as a writer. His eighth Rebus novel, 1997’s Black and Blue, had an edge and depth absent from the previous books, and it was the first one to win him prizes and serious acclaim. Now the money his bestsellers bring him helps to fund care for Kit, who is now 22 and lives in a care facility for young adults.
![Ian Rankin in Edinburgh](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2017/06/15/TELEMMGLPICT000131705790_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqtt-PMhmmlxqdgRPvuJG6C_36TkPi4jZ3eU8IBZq6ki0.jpeg?imwidth=350)
“I’ll always be looking at that as a factor in how I vote in any election or referendum – provision for people with special needs,” he says, adding that he has no allegiance to any particular party. And although his novels often dissect Scottish politics, he rarely comments on these issues publicly in his own right: “Never put my head above the parapet. I don’t want people booing me in the street.”
However he, like everybody else, was surprised by the election result. “Some of the Labour MPs in Scotland who got elected were the ones who distanced themselves from Corbyn, so the Corbyn effect in England might not be the reason Labour had a bit of a revival in Scotland.
“A lot of what happens in Scotland has to do with independence and the possibility of a second referendum that’s still hanging around. The Conservatives seem to have come back in rural areas where they had a strong showing in the Sixties, when they were the dominant party. But I’ve not digested it yet. It’s going to take weeks or months to work out what it means and whether I can use any of it.”
Rankin’s approach to research is not that of some bestselling fellow crime writers (such as Peter James), who spend hours out with the police. “I don’t hang out with cops. I don’t want the books to become PR exercises for the police, I want to have the freedom to write about cops who cross the line, bad cops. And if all the police I met were nice cops who were helpful, maybe I would feel a little bit duty‑bound to make my cops nice people. I go to the police when I’ve got a specific question or an issue I need to get cleared up.”
He drains his beer and stops to talk to the tourists as he leaves; they are from Sweden, touring the city they know so well from his novels, and ask him how many books he has written and which is the corner of the pub Rebus sits in. It may have taken him 30 years, but how satisfying it is that Rebus, the old walking disaster area, has become Edinburgh’s best-known ambassador.
RebusFest takes place across Edinburgh, June 30-July 2. Rather Be the Devil is published by Orion in paperback, £7.99