REBUS THE YOUNG REBEL
The iconic Scottish detective is back — reimagined as a hard-drinking young copper who breaks all the rules
Nearly 20 years after John Rebus was last on our screens, the world-weary Scottish detective is back — but not as we know him. Ian Rankin’s beloved sleuth of 29 novels was made into a TV series between 2000 and 2007 starring John Hannah and then Ken Stott. The new Rebus, played by Outlander’s Richard Rankin (no relation), reimagines him as a younger maverick detective sergeant pounding the streets of Edinburgh in the present day.
He’s a hard-drinking, chaotic young divorcee with a messy love life who breaks the rules with relative impunity. Apart from the age shift (he went from 40 to 70 in the books, here he’s back to around 40), peripheral characters in the books such as Rebus’s brother Michael have been turned into major players. It gives the detective a whole new lease of life, but Ian Rankin expects some readers to be unsettled by the new incarnation.
‘I think long-term fans will get a shock because they’re seeing young Rebus,’ says Ian Rankin. ‘They’re getting the quite macho Rebus from the early books but set in contemporary times. We get him as quite a gung-ho cop, but set against the contemporary issues, politics and problems that people have.’
Ian says he ‘didn’t do enough’ with certain characters in his books and is delighted that screenwriter Gregory Burke has put John’s troubled brother Michael (The Ipcress
File’s Brian Ferguson) at the forefront of the action. ‘During our conversations early on, Greg zoned in on that almost “blood brothers” thing, or that Jekyll & Hyde thing where you can have two brothers who love each other but can potentially destroy each other,’ explains Ian. ‘That’s a really interesting route for the series to follow.’
As the six-part series opens, the police are facing a rising tide of drug-related gang crime in Edinburgh, and Rebus has a runin with a familiar foe from the books, organised crime boss Ger Cafferty (Stuart Bowman), while his brother Michael, down on his luck but needing to support his family, turns to crime.
Richard Rankin, 41, explains how Rebus’s approach to life and work is taking a toll on the young detective. ‘Gregory uses the Scottish word “thrawn” to describe someone who makes life as difficult as possible for themselves,’ he says. ‘Frequently faced with easier choices, Rebus will take the difficult path.
‘He has the potential to be a great detective, but he gets in his own way, often self-destructively.’
Edinburgh has a starring role in the new Rebus, its Gothic beauty and darker underbelly showing two sides to the Scottish capital. ‘We’ve put Rebus in a street where he can walk out of his front door and see Edinburgh Castle, which is a bit of a cheat,’ says Ian Rankin. ‘That’s not where he stays in the books! But in the TV version, if he looks to his left he can see the castle. So we get lots of lovely establishing shots.’
The new Rebus also introduces a new sidekick, Detective Constable Siobhan Clarke (Ten Percent’s
Lucie Shorthouse), a fast-tracked detective who Rebus treats with some disdain. ‘Siobhan has come up through the accelerated pathway scheme,’ explains Lucie, 33. ‘For people like Rebus, who came via the more traditional route, it’s seen as the easy way. So Siobhan has to prove herself... also she’s a woman in what is still a very male-centric institution.’
The new Rebus is a pacy, exciting thriller offering a fresh take on a much-loved character. ‘A lot of crime stories on TV these days are interested in forensics or the crime scene,’ says Ian Rankin. ‘This is really about what the job of being a cop does to you. So it harks back in some ways to the kind of classic macho crime stories a lot of us grew up with. But at the same time, it’s got all the modernity you could ask for.’
▪ Episode one airs on May 18 on BBC1.