Serial thriller

It's 20 years since Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin introduced detective inspector Rebus to the world and ten years since he hit the big time; now he is planning his protagonist's retirement. Tom Bruce-Gardyne picks up some clues to the enduring popularity of the cantakerous detective

Thanks, you guys, for coming," George Bush shouted at the Gleneagles police as he sped past on his mountain bike. He raised a hand to wave, but immediately lost control and barrelled into an officer who had to be rushed to hospital. Bush skidded to a halt on his hands and knees 15ft down the track. He later laughed off the incident, saying it was time he started "acting his age".

The presidential crash was a surreal footnote to the 2005 G8 summit, which saw the leaders of the free world locked in a Scottish hotel while the campaign to end global poverty swirled outside. In his Edinburgh home, the writer Ian Rankin was transfixed. "There was so much stuff in the press about what might happen: the plans to disrupt the G8, the anarchist group that was going to arrive, the echoes of Genoa... I thought, what a fascinating backdrop to a novel." The result, published last October, was The Naming of the Dead—the latest outing for DI Rebus, Britain's best-loved fictional detective still on the beat.

"I never did find the cop," says Rankin of the constable who collided so painfully with George Bush. "I spoke to the people who run Gleneagles and to various senior police officers, but it was all very hush-hush." So he decided the president was waving at Rebus, who was there digging for clues despite his superiors' best efforts to keep him out of sight. For those who haven't met him, Rebus is a law unto himself and a constant thorn in the side of his bosses.

In character, he is much closer to those hard-boiled heroes of American crime fiction than to Morse or Miss Marple. His chief adversary is not some crusty colonel up to no good in the conservatory but a gangland boss called Cafferty who presides over his evil empire from the warmth of his hot tub. And the action, set in Edinburgh, is as resolutely urban as New Jersey or the Bronx. Rankin, dubbed "the king of tartan noir" by the American crime writer James Ellroy, calls Edinburgh a "criminologically fantastic city to write about"—though not because it is crawling with criminals. "For its size, it's got very little crime, but just enough dark episodes to make it really interesting for a crime writer." These episodes range from cannibalism and witchcraft to the evil Deacon Brodie, who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write his classic tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The sense of place in the books means Edinburgh is more like a central character than a mere backdrop. One moment Rankin zooms in to capture life on the street, faithfully reproducing the city's bars, corner-shops and cafés. The next, he pans back to reveal its dramatic contours, rising from sunken, almost subterranean alleys to the twin peaks of the Edinburgh Castle and Arthur's Seat. "The structure of the city seems to imply that there are two sides to the human character," says Rankin. "The potential for good and evil is contained within us. And Edinburgh physically has the Old and the New Town—it's just perfect." 

There may be less violent crime than in Glasgow, but what there is tends to be more premeditated and cold-blooded, and therefore more interesting to a writer like Rankin. "In Edinburgh, people are thinking it can't be as quiet and clean as it looks. There have got to be feverish impulses beneath the surface, with things happening behind the net curtains and the thick, stone walls," he believes. But he reckons the city which once banned Monty Python's Life of Brian is now "a lot less strait-laced". Rankin cites the Edinburgh Festival as a reference: "I went to see Platform by Michel Houellebecq, which basically had live sex on stage, and two people walked out."

He describes August as "very passionate and unbridled, but come September everything goes back to the way it was. I love September in Edinburgh. I love the Festival—and I love the contrast." Once the circus has left town and the population shrinks back to normal, Edinburgh's true character reappears. For Rankin this character is not repressed—at least, not now—just very private. "I would guess it is one of the richest cities in the world per capita and yet nobody flaunts their wealth. You don't see Rolls-Royces and Ferraris hammering up and down the streets, you see family cars."

Rankin drives a three-year-old Volvo but seems just as happy travelling around town by bus. Sitting next to him on the top deck you would never guess that this stubbly 46-year-old in donkey jacket and jeans is a publishing sensation worth millions. He has pumped out sure-fire bestsellers every year since Black and Blue won the CWA Macallan Gold Dagger award in 1997, and today his books are said to account for a staggering 10 per cent of all crime fiction bought in the UK.

Fortune has brought him a large house in Southside with JK Rowling and Alexander McCall Smith for neighbours. It pays for his £100-a-week CD habit and an outdoor Jacuzzi like Cafferty's. Yet there is not a trace of his fame as he shuffles into his local Starbucks for a chat. He is the quintessential bloke next door, the antithesis of the tabloid "celeb" doing interviews by stretch limo and dripping with bling. "It is the nature of Scottishness that we hate people with airs and graces who get above themselves. In fact, when the money starts coming in you're slightly embarrassed by it. I made more money last year than my dad in his entire working life," observes Rankin.

His working class roots—a mining village in Fife—keep him tethered, but more important has been his slow burn to stardom. "If I'd had this huge, overnight success with book one or two, I'd have got the gold-plated taps, the jukebox in every room and the helicopter landing pad." As it was, the first Rebus book, Knots and Crosses, written 20 years ago, sold fewer than 1,000 copies and was panned by its author in his diary as "120 pages of drivel". The second fared no better and it was only in 1997, on his eighth attempt, that Rankin finally achieved his big break. "But I still didn't hit the UK top 10 until another two books down the line. That was a lot of time to get used to being a writer."

Rankin is extremely wary of success. "I know plenty of writers who have stopped trying—they write because they want the money, or they feel they do, and the books after they became successful are much worse than the books before. I don't want to fall into that trap." On this he has little to fear. The Naming of the Dead, his most political novel since Black and Blue, delighted Rebus fans. But what is it about this misanthropic old dinosaur that so appeals?

"Women like him because they think they can change him. Whenever I do a tour, female fans always put up their hands and say, 'When's he going to settle down with a good woman?' Men tend to like him because he does stuff they'd love to do but wouldn't get away with, like being hungover at work all the time, boozing it up 'til all hours, smoking 40 a day, sitting up all night playing his hi-fi too loudly. He's got that bachelor existence; and a lot of guys who are no longer bachelors, still wish they were."

The transition of Rebus to the small screen was inevitable and has brought him a much wider audience. When the latest series starring Ken Stott was first shown on ITV in January 2006, 8.4 million viewers tuned in—a figure that dwarfs the 600,000 who read the books.

Originally the BBC owned the rights and invited Rankin to submit a script. They told him it was terrible. This time he decided to conduct a straw poll of authors whose books had been televised. "The conclusion was, you either get completely involved in the process—and you still might not like the results—or you just walk away."     

He walked, giving ITV carte blanche to do more or less what they liked. That must have been tough. "The best you can hope for from TV," he shrugs, "is that they don't screw around too much with your character." The Guardian critic, Nancy Banks-Smith, complained you could only recognise it was Rebus by "the beer on his breath". The recent storylines are new and not from Rankin, yet the character looks convincing. With his crumpled face wrapped round a pint of Deuchars, Stott has caught Rebus in a way the previous actor, John Hannah, never did. Not that Rankin pays much attention—aware that if he did, the TV persona might distort his own view of Rebus.

He clearly enjoys hiding behind his hero. "I can slag off Bono and Geldof by giving the cynicism to Rebus," he says of his latest book, "and you're never sure if that's me or him or a mixture of the two. On the other hand, living for six to 10 months of the year with this guy inside my head isn't that much fun. He's a curmudgeon, an Old Testament guy." And he does rather invade the Rankin household. "My wife notices that I'm only 10 per cent in the here and now when I'm writing a book. So sometimes she clicks her fingers in front of me to get me to snap out of it."

Rankin believes all writing is therapy: "One of the reasons writers write is to get stuff out of their system and to ask questions." On this score, Rebus may be the ideal imaginary friend: a chain-smoking old boozer on whom to dump bad thoughts. Whether this has made his creator any happier is unclear, but either way, the disillusioned cop who lives in real time is only one book away from retirement.

Terminating a long-running series is never easy, as Conan Doyle discovered when he killed off Sherlock Holmes, only to bring him back due to popular demand and the size of the cheque. The same fate threatened Hercule Poirot until Agatha Christie was talked out of it by her panic-stricken publisher. Various endings have been touted for Rebus. Will he be gunned down, develop emphysema (Mrs Rankin's suggestion) or perhaps retire to Greece, where he can smoke in peace? His final appearance is officially scheduled for this summer, but the chances are he'll be back.