EXTRAORDINARY EVERYMAN
The King of Tartan Noir has sold almost 30 million books thanks largely to his deeply flawed anti-hero, Detective Inspector John Rebus. But, asks Stuart Kelly, just who is author Ian Rankin?
Stuart Kelly profiles the King of Tartan Noir, Ian Rankin
The poet, critic and creative writing lecturer Michael Schmidt once told students that genre fiction was a little like an escalator. It was very easy to step on to it, but if halfway up you decided to go back down it was rather more strenuous. He was not talking about Ian Rankin, arguably Scotland’s most successful crime writer, but it had some resonance. Rankin famously never wanted to be, or thought of himself as, a crime writer. Yet he has now written 22 novels featuring the detective John Rebus, and is nearing book sales of almost 30 million. If it is an escalator, it has taken him to the top.
Anecdotally, at one point a fifth of all Scottish novels sold in Waterstone’s were by Rankin. They have earned him numerous awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association’s prestigious Gold Dagger, their lifetime achievement award the Diamond Dagger – always a worry one would think to get a lifetime award before writing another sixteen different texts – the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year, an OBE and being, unusually for a genre writer, elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, in addition to sixteen other prizes.
He became so famous that he even appeared in an equally famous writer’s series, Alexander McCall Smith’s cheeky 44 Scotland Street, where the precocious and naïve child Bertie remarks to Rankin that he has seen his books – mostly in charity shops.
Rankin was born in 1960 into modest circumstances in Cardenden, Fife, the son of a grocery shop owner and a school dinner lady. He did well at Beath High School in Cowdenbeath, thanks in part to his nurturing by an inspirational English teacher, but even before his teens he took an obsessive interest in his village library, poring over comics – his first literary love – and taking out as many books as the librarian would let him take. His early preference was for action-packed page-turners: at 12 he read The Godfather because he wasn’t allowed to see the film, and the same went for A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jaws and The Exorcist. ‘I wanted to know this world that was taboo, that I wasn’t supposed to know about,’ he said.
Despite his obvious love of books, his parents expressed more than a little scepticism at his hope of going to the
University of Edinburgh to study English Literature. He nevertheless graduated in 1982 and began, but did not complete, a doctorate on the works of Muriel Spark. Spark is a hovering presence over his first novel, The Flood, published in 1986 by Polygon, then under the editorship of Peter Kravitz, who brought on a whole generation of Scottish writers. The Flood is the might-have-been novel. It is a vaguely gothic work, suffused with melancholy, about a woman who is tolerated rather than accepted by a small town Fife community: her hair had been bleached white after falling into the run-off from a local mine. Now a single mother, her son has fallen for an eerie, homeless girl.
There is a crime in it, but it’s not a crime novel as such. There is some impressive psychological acuity in the vexed relationship between mother and son, but it is very clearly a young man’s novel, ventriloquizing his literary idols more than ‘finding his own voice’. In the same year as it was published, he married Miranda Harvey, who he met at university: they would go on to have two sons.
There were two pieces of advice which seemed to be the genesis of Rebus. One was from the novelist Allan Massie, then teaching Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh, who challenged Rankin with the question: ‘Do you think John Buchan ever worried about whether he was writing literature or not?’
The other, perhaps more significant, intervention came when he gave his father a novel by James Kelman. In Rebus: The Early Years, Rankin recounts his father’s abrupt dismissal that it wasn’t ‘written in English’ and was boring. It made him resolve to write the kind of novel his father would like to read. The result was the first Rebus.
By that stage he had lived in Tottenham for four years and rural France for six years before returning to Edinburgh. There was a time in the Nineties when elaborate and almost facetious author biographies were de rigueur, and Rankin’s is a classic of its kind: his says that before becoming a full-time author he was variously employed keeping pigs, picking grapes, being a taxman, writing about music, working as a college secretary and an alcohol researcher.
The strangest thing about the first Rebus novel, Knots And Crosses, is that it is not a crime novel either. It is better to think of it as an homage to Robert Louis Stevenson, and in particular his gothic novella Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll And Mr Hyde. For a great part of the novel, the reader does not know if Rebus is actually the murderer, suffering from fugue state deliriums caused by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The original intention was that Rebus would die while confronting the real murderer, which his editor argued against. ‘The best advice I was ever given,’ is how Rankin described the decision to keep Rebus alive at the end.
The outlines of Rebus are already there in the first novel. Lugubrious, cynical, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, incapable of emotional engagements, and above all, as his name suggests, a puzzle. Later novels would, to an extent, soften the edges, but the core remains: a Caledonian ‘soiled Galahad’, to quote Raymond Chandler; a figure more from Mickey Spillane than Dorothy L. Sayers. He is the kind of detective that in the dogged pursuit of the truth is willing to twist his ethics.
Having graciously allowed Rebus to live, he reappeared (after the Deighton-like thriller Watchman) in Hide And Seek. The Stevenson theme continued, with the inclusion in the book of an underground club called Hyde’s. The series continued with a novel which Rankin openly – and wryly – admits as his worst, Tooth And Nail, published in the United States as Wolfman.
Rankin was, he says, attempting something more akin to the serial killer fiction exemplified by the soar-away success of The Silence Of The Lambs. It also meant sending Rebus down to London to crack the case. William Hazlitt once said of Walter Scott that, like the giant Antaeus, his strength leaves him when he leaves his native soil.
What it did seem to clarify was that the Rebus novels needed two characters. One was Rebus and the other was Edinburgh. It also introduced, since every detective needs a nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty, an Edinburgh gangster. Over the following books there would develop a love/hate relationship between the two, with Rankin soliciting illicit advice and Cafferty pleading for a blind eye in turf wars. It is not exactly Holmes and Moriarty, but it whets the character of Rebus in a good fashion. Who is the villain? Who is the one who rights wrongs?
Edinburgh – its reality and its mythology – has become intrinsic to the novels. From Fleshmarket Close and ‘Bible John’, to The Resurrection Men (full of Burke and Hare), to the
“He kept pigs, picked grapes, wrote about music, and was also an alcohol researcher
Scottish Parliament and to the fairy coffins found on Arthur’s Seat in The Falls, from the oil industry to the legendary sorcerer Major Weir, from Mary King’s Close to sectarian rivalry, a topic which many Scottish writers find too toxic to touch.
Rankin has said that one of the freedoms of crime fiction is that you can ‘go anywhere’. The novels allow Rebus to be close to privilege and poverty in the same pages. He can also venture forth, usually unhappily, into other parts of Scotland. This is not the dinner-party novel, where important ideas are discussed by the well-heeled, but it does have a sociological importance. How can this be a country of immense wealth and extreme need? How can we be forensic and superstitious at one and the same time?
Rankin decided early on that Rebus would age alongside the books. He would not have him as the Bairn from the Broons or Bart Simpson, perpetually and sometimes ironically stuck in their original years. It has made things impending for Rebus, and, one suspects, for Rankin. The novels have tracked contemporary events, such as the Gleneagles G7 summit or suspected Russian assassinations.
Rebus has also aged, and in later novels he is suffering from emphysema. When Exit Music was sent to reviewers it was ambiguously titled ‘Rebus XX’, as if it were a kiss goodbye, and widely trailed as the last Rebus novel. It wasn’t – the bad penny has turned up five times since his retirement, usually with Malcolm Fox.
Fox was intended as a kind of anti-Rebus. He was quiet, diligent, dutiful and stayed at home listening to ambient music rather than punk (Rankin inserted his own punk band, The Dancing Pigs, into a novel, giving them the fame they never actually enjoyed. He now has released a single and played at the Kendal Calling music festival with a new outfit called ‘Best Picture’).
Exit Music wasn’t the exit, but it was a sort of ending. In the novel, Siobhan Clarke, who first appeared in The Black Book as a savvy, different kind of cop, and later becomes his superior, chastises him with the awful phrase ‘sometimes things are less than they seem on the surface’. Rebus had thought up a grand conspiracy, and she brought him back to sordid reality.
Rankin has experimented in other forms. He has written thrillers under the pseudonym Jack Harvey; he has written graphic novels featuring a character he did not create with a work, Dark Entries, featuring DC Comics’ anti-hero John Constantine; stage plays; opera libretto and even a comedy caper, Doors Open, about a smart theft of art works, which was filmed featuring Stephen Fry. But Rankin is still thirled to Rebus, as if he were the arch-enemy, rather than the hero.
He is always eloquent about the problems of writing in his particular genre, and fiercely defensive of it. He once said to me that ‘the interest in it for me is that the crime novel can be about contemporary urban existence and that the problems that exist in the real world, whether it’s problems with asylum seekers, drugs, prostitution, people’s fears, political
shenanigans, corporate mismanagement, all these things,’ praising at the same time the ‘messiness’ of crime fiction and being askance at the ‘geometric’ solutions that are offered by Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle.
During the independence referendum, Rankin was conspicuous as a non-combatant. He refused to be drawn on his voting intentions, but would happily say which way Rebus, Clarke, Fox or Cafferty might vote (despite actor Ken Stott’s loud protestations to the contrary, Rankin insists Rebus would have voted against Scottish independence). During that period, his ability to work the stage came to the fore. He knows the audience wants the curmudgeon with a witty aside, and delivers. At the same time, there is a sense of anxiety in that the audience wants him not to be the creator of Rebus but to be Rebus.
When he mentioned Rebus standing on the rail at the foot of the Oxford Bar, his and Rankin’s notorious haunt, there were many communications stating that in fact the Oxford Bar did not have a foot-rail. Getting a tiny detail wrong – and it is, remember, fiction – is an affront to the devotees of crime fiction. Yet that is only because he has so skilfully conjured the Jekyll and Hyde, Burke and Hare, Caledonian Antisyzygy City.
There is a phrase that will always be associated with Rankin – ‘tartan noir’, deemed ‘chromatically impossible’ by Christopher Brookmyre and ‘ersatz’ by the late William McIlvanney, who pioneered the form, and to whom Rankin has always graciously given credit. But the depressive, compromised, occasionally furious, often sentimental stereotype has seemed to chime with Scotland, and far further afield.
What next then? What awaits at the end of the Stairway to Heaven? Given his strictures, Rebus must die; but will it be the Reichenbach Falls? (Of course, Sherlock miraculously came back from that). Siobhan has been fleshed out as a character, and Fox, although it is always difficult to write characters who are, through choice, boring seems more and more companiable.
McIlvanney once said to me that he had a final Laidlaw novel planned – he was always planning novels – where Laidlaw would go over all the cases he never solved. A final Rebus novel might well take the direction of the master. Rankin took a year off when his friend Iain Banks died, and has often said he would like to, but can’t, give up his borderline obsession with Twitter. ‘Two novels a year I’ve wasted on it,’ he said.
So who is Ian Rankin? He may not smoke but he is a bit of a Rebus, and feels he is getting almost as old as the alter ego who made his name. He recently said that, ‘like Rebus, as Leonard Cohen famously said, “I ache in the places where I used to play”. My knees are going, my hearing’s going, my eyesight’s going, and you do start thinking: “How much longer have I got? What have I got left that I want to say?” I’m not at the stage yet of reading really short books because I might not make it to the end of a long book, but it can’t be too far away.’
Not that Rankin is on his last legs quite yet. He turns 60 in April, and although he may be a beer and whisky enthusiast (his love of a dram was a passion he shared with Banks), he also runs every Sunday with two old pals, racking up between five and ten kilometres before heading off for a big Italian breakfast in Stockbridge.
He is publically prominent but keen on his privacy. He is lauded, but scorned by some of the self-elected literati. He is recognisably anonymous, an everyman who insisted that when he had enough money to buy a country retreat at Fortrose on the Black Isle to augment the eight-bedroomed Victorian villa he until recently shared with wife Miranda and sons Kit and Jack in the Morningside area, also inhabited by fellow authors JK Rowling, McCall Smith and Kate Atkinson, it had to be within walking distance of a pub.
He’s a creature of habit who eats porridge and berries every morning; who mainlines chocolate as he churns through 3,000 words a day while he turns out first drafts in just five weeks. He is sociable, but hardly a socialite: as a boy he ‘used to hang out at the library’. He kept a diary from the age of 12 until his mid-thirties but recently re-read them ‘and thought, Jesus, Ian, it’s just so boring’. Presumably they are not among the archive of 19 boxes of letters and notes he recently donated to the National Library of Scotland, which includes the hundreds of letters he received, mainly from fellow Scottish authors, when living in France and trying to break through as a full-time novelist.
Despite some reversals – most notably his youngest son Kit’s diagnosis of Angelman syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes severe disability – Rankin has managed to retain a sotto voce enthusiasm for life, and an ability to avoid the selfconscious cynicism of Rebus. He still, for instance, loves going on promotional tours; it’s as though he still can’t believe his luck. As Rankin knows, although the escalator never stops going up, when you reach the top you can always skip down the stairs and start again.
“He is publically prominent, while keen on his privacy; lauded, yet scorned by some literati