It’s a “bit hectic” the day best-selling crime writer Ian Rankin speaks with The Scots Magazine. His new novel, Saints of the Shadow Bible, is officially published the following day, meaning he’s doing interviews, a talk and getting ready for a series of book tours around Scotland, England, Canada and–in the New Year–America. “My feet don’t really touch the ground until February,” he says. “That’s the way it is these days; as a writer, you spend more of your time rushing around the world selling your books than you do writing the books.”
Nor is he feeling particularly relieved at this point in time. “The relief comes after the book’s sold a few copies and had a few decent reviews,” he adds, like any professional author. “We’re still at the late pregnancy stage here.”
Admittedly, Ian sees the whole promotional period as something of a mixed blessing, not least because it physically prevents him from writing. “I wish I was more like Alexander McCall Smith, who seems to be able to write in hotel rooms and airport lounges, but I can’t,” he says. “I’ve got to be at home with my mug of tea and chocolate biscuits and some music playing in the background.”
Saints of the Shadow Bible is Ian’s 33rd novel, and the 19th to feature his most famous creation, John Rebus. “Several things happened to give me the storyline,” he explains. “One was that the Scottish Government were trying to push through the ending of the ‘Double Jeopardy’ rule, which means you can re-prosecute people even if they were found Not Guilty in previous years. I just thought: ‘What kinds of cans of worms could that open up?’
“Also, I’d been to a few retirement ‘do’s for cops and I’d gathered so many fantastic stories of the way policing used to be in the 1970s and 1980s,” he adds. “I started to think: we know Rebus now but, when we first met him in 1987, he’d already been a cop for some considerable time. We don’t know what he was like back then. So this novel allowed me to go back to the early 1980s, to discover what it was that turned Rebus into the kind of cop he became–somebody who is happy to break the rules, and somebody who’s very cynical about due process.”
It’s long been a feature of the Rebus novels that they’ve been set in specific times and places, with the character aging as the series progressed. Given that 1 April 2013 saw a big change in the way Scotland is policed, with the creation of the single, country-wide Police Scotland, how did Ian deal with this? “It’s a little bit sneaky, but I set the book specifically in March 2013,” he says, “so I didn’t have to deal with or explain any of the huge structural changes to the policing of Scotland.”
Which is perhaps just as well, as Ian doubts his creation could operate within Police Scotland. “Rebus is a dinosaur,” he insists. “He’s the last of that kind of cop; they can’t really exist any more. There’s kind of room for him, but no others.
“The other thing about this book is that I couldn’t not mention the current political situation,” he says, regarding the forthcoming Independence Referendum. “I’ve tried to be very fair and square about my dealings with the Yes campaign and the No campaign. Anyone who knows Rebus knows that he would be a No voter, because he’s cautious and conservative with a small ‘c’, and he fears change–he enjoys the status quo. Siobhan Clarke, his colleague who’s now his boss, is much more firmly in the Yes camp. I keep having to balance these things, just to make life bearable in Scotland!”
In the grand tradition of superhero comics, Saints of the Shadow Bible also brings Rebus up against Ian’s more recent literary creation, Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox. “Malcolm is, I think, more like me; he’s canny and cautious, and he doesn’t like breaking the rules,” Ian points out. “Rebus is very unlike me; he’s my kind of Mr Hyde–he’ll happily break the rules just for the sheer fun of it, and I’ve never been like that. It was interesting putting the two of them together, because one represents a very careful, cautious way of policing and one represents the way policing used to be, which was much more cavalier. Somebody said to me it was like when two Doctor Whos meet!”
When it was first published in 2007, Exit Music was very much promoted as the final Rebus novel; it would be five years before Rebus returned in print. As a writer, did Ian enjoy his time away from his most famous creation?
“Yeah, I did; it allowed me to breath a bit more easily; I wrote a graphic novel for DC Comics, lyrics for a Scottish band and a short libretto for Scottish Opera. I wrote a film script of James Hogg’s novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; we just couldn’t get anybody to make it! The break did allow me to stretch myself in different directions. But, you know, ‘cometh the hour’, I was very happy to bring Rebus back.”
For most of his career, Ian has published at least one novel a year, but that won’t be the case in 2014. “I just need time to breath,” he says. “The current schedule of a book a year, and all the touring that goes with it, is just now too much for me. So I’ve told my publishers I want a year off, just to recharge the batteries, and to think about what kind of stories I want to tell next. There are a lot of bits of Scotland I don’t know at all; I’ve never been to the Western Isles, for example. My wife would like us to have a few holidays, as we don’t seem to get much in the way of them.”
Two deaths during the last 12 months were also a factor in his decision. “The head of literature at Creative Scotland, Gavin Wallace, died in February; he was 53, exactly the same age I am,” he says. “So yeah, you do start to think about your priorities–do you want to die slumped at your laptop or would you rather go out and see a little bit of the world first?
The other death was of a fellow Fifer, the acclaimed author Iain (M) Banks. “It was devastating to get the email from him saying: ‘I don’t think I’ve got much longer.’ Iain was just so constantly excited by the world around him, and so was a fantastic guy to spend time with–his enthusiasm was infectious,” he says. “A bunch of us used to get together in an Edinburgh pub; we’d maybe go for a curry, have a few beers and we would just set the world to rights. Iain was just a great guy to spend time with, so it’s a huge loss.”
Given how much of his work involves death, is writing Ian’s own way of dealing with questions of mortality? “I’ve always had a morbid interest in the darker side of life, ever since I was a kid,” he says. “It might have ‘helped’ that my mum died when I was 19; that I was a fairly introverted character, happiest inside my own head, sitting in a room scribbling things down on bits of paper and listening to quite dark music. Maybe. I wasn’t a great reader of crime fiction till I started writing it; I kind of came to crime fiction by accident, while trying to bring the theme of Jekyll and Hyde back to contemporary Edinburgh–because it really annoyed me that Stevenson had chosen to set that book in London when it seemed to me to be such a Scottish novel!”
Ian’s legions of fans shouldn’t be too worried, though, about Ian’s forthcoming ‘gap year’; it’s not as if he’s intending to give up writing for good. “When the writing is going well, there’s no better feeling in the world and the days fly by,” he says. “It feels like you sat down at the computer for half an hour but actually six hours have past and you’ve enjoyed every bit of it. Then there are other days when you feel like you’re tearing your hair out, when it’s like trying to dig through ice with a blunt shovel to get to the right words or the next chapter. Those are not nice days, but the good days more than make up for that. And it just continually thrills me when a story starts to come together.”
In more general terms, the writing process itself continues to fascinate him. “With just 26 letters of the alphabet, any one of us can write a sentence or a paragraph that’s never been written before,” he points out. “How amazing is that?”
Published in the February 2014 issue of The Scots Magazine
