Rebus may have retired but his creator, Ian Rankin, has no thoughts of following suit, writes Hannah Stephenson.
Britain’s best-selling crime-writer, Ian Rankin, bid farewell to his most famous character less than two years ago, but hasn’t had time to miss Inspector Rebus.
His hard-drinking, anti-social detective may have retired, but millionaire Rankin is certainly not going the same way.
At 48, retirement is not an option for the award-winning Edinburgh-based author, who lives in the same street as fellow writer Alexander McCall Smith and around the corner from J K Rowling.
Even though he doesn’t need to work, he sets himself a punishing schedule, speaking at a range of book events and festivals, supporting charities, sitting on a literacy commission in Scotland and campaigning to encourage young readers, in between writing novels.
He’s also supporting World Book Day today and has written a short crime novel, A Cool Head, which is part of the Quick Reads series by best-selling writers and celebrities. The books are designed for people who have lost the reading habit and for those who struggle with reading.
Not surprisingly, Rankin simply hasn’t had time to miss Rebus, the dour Scottish detective inspector played on television by Ken Stott and John Hannah. “There hasn’t been a proper mourning process, partly because maybe I think he’s still out there. He’s not dead, he’s getting on with his life,” Rankin says.
Rebus isn’t the only one to be moving on. Since his last Rebus novel, Exit Music, Rankin has written another crime novel, Doors Open, about an art heist, the Quick Reads book and a 200-page graphic novel, Dark Entries, which will be out later this year.
He is also working on another crime novel, set in Edinburgh. “I always feel like letting up, but somehow I keep signing these contracts. People keep offering me interesting projects,” he explains.
Rankin’s life is a bit ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, slotted into compartments as he constantly switches from mega-successful writer to parent of two teenage boys.
Indeed, working life is a world away from his home life in Edinburgh, where he lives with his wife Miranda Harvey and their sons, Jack, 16, and 14-year-old Kit, who suffers from Angelman Syndrome and is blind and unable to walk or talk. He attends the Royal School for the Blind in Edinburgh.
“When I’m writing or talking to an audience, that other part of my life is pushed into a compartment,” Rankin explains. “But when I come home, I’ll be making Kit’s breakfast or taking him up to Starbucks so we can sit outside and have a coffee and a bit of cake.”
Rankin and his wife, who support many disabled charities, are under no illusion as to how fortunate they are to have the required funds for Kit’s care.
“We can afford equipment. We don’t have to have a raffle at the pub to get our son a wheelchair. I’ve come into contact with a lot of families with special needs kids and that’s their day-to-day life.
“I worry on a practical level about the fact that my younger son is never going to able to look after himself. He’s now 14 but we knew soon after he was born that he was always going to need 24/7 care.
“Kit’s always improving but it’s in tiny, tiny degrees. He’ll never talk and although we’re still hopeful that he’ll walk, he’s not walking at 14. He can feed himself in a rudimentary way but he can’t get dressed and we are toilet training.”
They recently returned from a week’s break in Bermuda, which Rankin says was an experiment he will probably not repeat. “Kit had never been on a six-hour plane journey before. They managed to lose his wheelchair at Gatwick coming back. We got to Edinburgh with no wheelchair, so we had to manhandle him into a taxi and bring him home and he had to sit in the living room until the wheelchair turned up later in the day.”
Rankin could have reduced his work commitments, but his reluctance to do so may stem from the fact that he did not achieve instant success as a writer.
Born in Cardenden, Fife, he wrote and drew his own comic books before going to Edinburgh University to study English Literature. He started to write fiction after graduating in 1982 and his first Inspector Rebus novel, Knots & Crosses, was published in 1987.
“Many a time I thought ‘I’m not making a go of this’. Publishers would say, ‘Ian’s never going to make it into the big time’ and I was worried that Rebus wasn’t the character people wanted to read about. The first five or six books got good reviews but didn’t win any prizes or go anywhere near the bestseller list.”
He and his wife, then a high-flying civil servant, ended up living in the Dordogne in France for six years where Ian could concentrate more fully on his writing.
But all that seems a long time ago. Rankin’s books are said to account for ten per cent of crime fiction sales in the United Kingdom and the Rebus books have been translated into more than 30 languages. He has received the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger and was appointed OBE in 2002.
Rankin admits he is pedantic when writing - the pens have to be in the right position, the music has to be on and he has a large supply of Snickers bars.
“You always want the next book to be better than the previous book,” he explains. “So even without the pressure from publishers or the public, your first critic is yourself. You’ve always got to come up with an idea that’s cleverer than the previous one and characters more interesting than the previous ones.”
As fans will know, Rebus is cynical, anti-social and downbeat. Is his creator like that? “Sometimes. I mean, I’m not nearly as cynical as he is but that’s because I’m not a cop. He’s been a cop for 30 years and that’s coloured his impression of the world. He sees the world as a series of crimes and crime scenes and that people are up to no good.
“I’m not like that but some of his character comes from me, like sitting in pubs on his own staring at the glass in front of him. That’s my idea of a good time.”
I somehow feel Rankin may not have said his last goodbyes to his beloved detective. “He’s out there somewhere and I doubt he’s having a quiet retirement. The best case is that he’s working in a civilian capacity in Edinburgh, maybe on cold cases, something that retired cops do.
“Retirement would be a nightmare because he hasn’t got hobbies, friends or close family. I get the feeling there’s some unfinished business between us.”
* A Cool Head, by Ian Rankin, is published by Orion (£1.99).
