Q&A: Ian Rankin, crime writer, 57

‘I was trying to write the great Edinburgh novel.’

Your hugely popular detective John Rebus is cynical, no lover of hierarchy or rules, dogged in pursuit at his own cost. Why do characters like this appeal to us? He’s complex, dark and brooding — but he’s charismatic. He’s someone you’d like to share a drink with in a bar. And with detectives, we like our mavericks. If the detective says to their boss, “I’m sorry, I’d love to help track down the serial killer but I’ve got to take my kids to the dentist”, well, that just gets in the way of the story.

Ian Rankin.

You’ll be back home in Edinburgh for next month’s RebusFest, celebrating 30 years and 21 novels with the character. Time to let go? The reason I keep writing more books about him is that I want to spend more time with him to find out more about the inside of his head. He’s done a difficult job and that has damaged him.

What’s a common misconception about writing crime novels? That we need to know the ending before we begin. Many crime writers just start at the beginning and feel our way towards who the villain is and why they did what they did. So the first draft is me being the detective, getting to know these characters, getting to know how they connect, finding my way towards the solution.

Your stories are realistic, with complex interlocking plots. How do you solve problems in the narrative? I go for a long walk. Sometimes when you clear your head your subconscious does the work for you. Sometimes I’ll talk it through with my wife [Miranda, with whom he has two sons, Jack and Kit]. She’ll make notes in the margin of the draft, saying, “psychologically, I don’t think he would do that”, or “she’s boring, make her a more interesting character”. By the time the reader gets the book, it’s three, four or five drafts in. It looks as though it was always meant to happen, and all the interlocking pieces were in place from the start, but it ain’t necessarily so. There’s a lot of serendipity involved. I trust that the story has a sense of where it wants to go, and I’m really just along for the ride.

How did studying Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) at the University of Edinburgh determine the course of your career? Spark is really responsible for me becoming a crime writer. Jean claims to be descended from William Brodie, a real character in Edinburgh’s history. He was a carpenter, a gentleman by day, but by night he had a gang of burglars who would break into your house … he had fitted the locks himself. He was eventually hanged on a scaffold he had built. The story probably inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The first Rebus novel (Knots and Crosses, 1987) was meant to be a literary updating of Jekyll and Hyde. When it was published and went on the crime shelf in the bookstores, I was horrified. I wrote a second novel with Rebus in it and called it Hide and Seek (1991), playing on the name, and still nobody got it, that I was trying to write this great literary fiction, the great Edinburgh novel. By then, I was stuck with this character. I liked him so much, and I thought there was a lot I could do with him.

Why the name Rebus? When I wrote that first novel I was a smart-arsed student doing a PhD in literature. A rebus is a puzzle, so I thought I’d call my detective “Inspector Puzzle”.

Are you superstitious? I have a laptop computer that is so old, it doesn’t have an internet connection. It’s my lucky charm.

Ian Rankin appears at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on May 24, 26 and 27, swf.org.au; and at The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, on May 25, wheelercentre.com. His latest Rebus novel Rather Be the Devil (Hachette, $19.99) is out now.