I haven’t got a CLUED
He’s one of the world’s best writers of crime fiction but as he launches his Murder Island whodunnit TV show, Ian Rankin admits when it comes to working out who killed who...
FOR a man who makes a living out of crime fiction and is the creator of one of the country’s favourite detectives, Ian Rankin makes a surprising confession: ‘I’m absolutely rubbish at Cluedo. I get the killer wrong every time.’ Fortunately for the bestselling author, the guessing has been taken out of the equation for him as the writer of a new whodunnit game show for television that producers hope will have the nation sitting on the edge of their sofas as they pit their wits against contestants and retired senior police officers.
It may never rival the dizzy heights of Love Island, but those in the know predict Rankin’s Murder Island, which begins on Tuesday night on Channel 4, could become as big a draw for viewers as the channel’s popular former series, Hunted, which saw members of the public trying to evade capture by ex-intelligence services officers.
The Edinburgh-based author, whose Inspector Rebus novels were turned into a long-running hit TV series, admits the switch to a more interactive reality TV format for his work has been a ‘helluva lot of fun’.
He said: ‘What’s happening here is you have a game show, you’ve got a classic whodunnit with lots of twists and turns but, on top of that, for the audience at home, it’s like watching Crime Scene Investigation 101.
‘It’s like three shows for the price of one and the public are being taught how detectives would go about a criminal investigation, while trying to figure out the killer.
‘At the same time, there are contestants who applied to come on this show and the ones who were successful are keen on whodunnits, or watch a lot of crime on television, or have family members who were or still are police officers, and like to think they would know how to solve a murder.’
And with the prize for winning the six-part show, which sees contestants leave at the end of each episode, set at £50,000, the stakes are high for all those involved. The plot centres on a young woman being found dead on a Hebridean island – the series was shot on Gigha, off the coast of Kintyre, Argyll, over several weeks during the summer – and everyone’s a suspect.
But it is also set up as a proper drama for the viewing public to enjoy, with a team of actors portraying the events and incidents in the lead up to the murder.
Rankin said: ‘Writing six hours of television, with frequent advert breaks, meant that there had to be a lot of twists, so we needed five big twists for the ends of episodes one to five.
‘But we needed wee twists before each advert break so that people will keep coming back after they’ve made their cup of tea.
‘I sat in my office in Edinburgh during lockdown and put together a plot with lots and lots of twists and lots of possible directions it could go because, unlike writing a novel, I couldn’t control everything.
‘Famously, when I write my novels, I fly by the seat of my pants. I don’t know when I start who the killer is or possibly why they did it. I find that out during the first draft. With this, I gave the production a range of possible people who could be the killer and said if it looks like the contestants are getting very close, you can tweak it slightly, so there are things built into it that suddenly gives another twist.
‘It’s a bit like these old role-playing games of the 70s when you rolled a dice and if you threw that number you went to that page, or if you opened door No 1 that would take you to a different part of the adventure. There are different locations
on the island that the teams can visit but not every team will visit every location and talk to everybody, so some of them will have information that the others don’t have and it’s what they do with that information that counts.
‘It’s an education for everyone, whether you are a competitor or watching at home. I just think it’s a helluva lot of fun and that’s how it felt while I was writing it.’
Overseeing the four competing teams are real-life retired police officers: Detective Chief Superintendent Parm Sandhu, formerly the highest ranking Asian female police officer in the Metropolitan Police, the senior officer on duty when Drummer Lee Rigby was murdered in London in 2013, and who has worked on the investigations into the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Daniel Morgan; Detective Chief Inspector Simon Harding, who recently retired after 27 years – his cases included assisting in the Sarah Everard investigation; and Detective Inspector Graham McMillan, formerly of Bedfordshire Police’s Serious and Organised Crime Unit and who has appeared in TV series 24 Hours in Police Custody.
Mr McMillan said: ‘It’s a different story from being sat on a sofa at home thinking,
‘I could do that, I could do a good job’ to the reality of you’re there in a soco suit with a mask and there’s blood everywhere, someone’s been murdered.
‘Some of the rookies were like rabbits in the headlights and didn’t know what to do at the crime scene. Murder Island is the perfect vehicle to let people have a go – then you see the reality hit home.’
MS Sandhu added: ‘When we first arrived at the jetty, they looked terrified as the reality sank in. They’re on this island with no escape unless they finish the exercise. We tried to keep it real, we’d be Sir and Ma’am and Boss. But our reputations were at stake as well – if we didn’t know who did it, we’d have been left red-faced.’
She is the only one of the three who has met Rankin, briefly, at a recent book signing in London. Ms Sandhu said: ‘I cannot describe what it felt like to be inside one of his stories. I’m a big fan and before we went to the island, my suitcase was full of his books and I was reading them frantically.’
But what would Rankin’s famous fictional detective have made of the Murder Island wannabes?
Ms Sandhu said: ‘Rebus doesn’t suffer fools, so he would have probably sacked all of the detectives on day one. He wouldn’t have tolerated much.’
The man behind Rebus, however, thinks he may have taken a more collegiate approach, just enjoying the fact he’d been invited as a retired detective to be an investigating officer on a show.
Rankin, who has only seen the first episode ahead of its launch, adds: ‘The three real detectives have got different personalities and they make for a lot of fun viewing as well. It’s a lovely blend.’
The author was in daily contact through Zoom with the crew throughout filming on Gigha. He said: ‘The island looks fantastic on the show because of several weeks of good weather and, for me, this was as collaborative a process as I’ve ever worked on. With the Rebus shows, I was never involved with the script and I went on set a couple of times and had some wee cameos. But this was daily meetings on Zoom, polishing it, tweaking it, so that it would work.
‘I don’t want to give away too much but in the first episode there are a couple of fairly obvious things at the murder scene that they get wrong almost immediately and they get pulled up on that fairly quickly by the police officers, so that’s when I think it starts to dawn on them that they were pretty cocky when they arrived and were not as well equipped to do this as they thought they were.’
Murder Island is on Channel 4, Tuesday, 9.30pm
I put together a plot with lots and lots of twists