Rankin’s lost sitcom and crime drama series unearthed
● Forgotten scripts are in treasure trove gifted to the National Library of Scotland
Best-selling author Ian Rankin has uncovered long-forgotten scripts for a sitcom and a crime drama series in a vast personal archive he has gifted to the nation.
The crime writer revealed neither he nor his wife Miranda had any recollection of the projects he attempted to pursue before his Inspector Rebus books took off.
He hopes that other long-lost material could be unearthed on a number of floppy discs in the archive which he has been unable to access, but which are now in the collection of the National Library of Scotland with the rest of his archive.
The scripts could see the light of day next year in a forthcoming exhibition of highlights drawn from more than 50 boxes of manuscripts, letters and other paperwork kept by Rankin, a self-confessed “utter hoarder”, for five decades.
R ankin has been unable to track down the earliest draft of the first Rebus novel Knots and Crosses – in which he killed off the detective at the end of the book. However when he was packing up before his recent move he discovered two fulllength script she could not remember writing. He said: “There was script for a sitcom set in a supermarket. I don’t even know if I ever sent to the BBC or ITV. There was also a script for a drama series about an undercover cop investigating the drugs trade in London. There was screeds and screeds of it. Miranda and I couldn’t really remember them at all. My agent only had very vague memories.
“Nothing is lost. Any producer is free to come in and look at the archive and see if there is anything they want to take away and turn into a film or TV show! I think it will be really interesting for writers of the future to see that I was scrabbling around and looking for things that would maybe make a buck and that not everything I wrote was successful.
“You can definitely see a real progression from when I first came to Edinburgh and was only writing poems, to writing for the student newspaper, reviewing book festival events, writing short stories, winning a few prizes, and getting the first novel published, then making a real go of it as a full-time writer.”
Rank in, who revealed he is paying for the National Library to hire a curator for the archive, hopes an exhibition will be staged next year to mark his 60 th birthday. He said he had no alter native but to find a new home for his archive, which goes back to 1972, after he and Miranda decided to downsize from their long-time home in Marchmont to a new apartment in the Quarter mile development overlooking the Meadows, as it had “hee-haw” storage space.
Rank in added :“We spent years gradually upsizing and eventually ended up with a really big house.
“We had a huge attic, a workshop, and a garage full of boxes and books, and my office was really cluttered as well. I’m getting on for 60 now. Old houses with big gardens need a lot of lo oking after, and I didn’t want to leave all the clutter to my kids.”
Rankin admitted that going through personal correspondence from writers who had passed away in recent years, including fellow Scot Iain Banks, Inspector Morse cre - ator Colin Dexter and crime writer Ruth R en dell, had made him “hugely sad.” He has also kept cards and letters from JK Rowling and Val Mcdermid.