Ian Rankin - The Beat Goes On

From the above, it seems I’ve been guilty of a protracted lie. For years I’ve been telling people that I wrote Knots and Crosses in that apartment in Arden Street, right across the road from where Rebus still lives. But I vacated Arden Street in the summer of 1985 and moved in with two undergraduate students (Jon being one of them) in a place way over the other side of the city. This means that Knots is even closer to Jekyll and Hyde than I’d guessed, having been written partly to the south of Princes Street and partly to the north...

Because my novel The Flood had been accepted for publication, an agent had come to ask if I was working on anything else. She decided that we should send copies of Knots and Crosses to five London-based publishers: Bodley Head, Collins, Century Hutchinson, André Deutsch and William Heinemann. Eventually, we’d get the thumbs-up from only one — Bodley Head. But that was all we needed, and I was especially thrilled that I would have the same publisher as Muriel Spark... at least for a short while.

My final diary entry for 1985 ends: ‘year after year, there’s improvement’...

When the book was finally published, however, on 19 March 1987, I noted that it seemed to receive less publicity than its predecessor. Working with a publicity budget of zero, Bodley Head ran no advertisements and secured no interviews with newspapers or magazines. The book came and went without anyone really paying it any attention at all. It failed to make the shortlist for the Crime Writers’ Association’s First Novel Award (won that year by Denis Kilcommons), though the CWA asked me if I wanted to join them anyway. It was at this point that I realised the awful truth: while trying to write ‘the Great Scottish Neo-Gothic Novel’ I had somehow become a crime writer. Not that this gave me too many sleepless nights. I had said farewell to the character called Rebus and was moving on to a spy novel called Watchman . It would be a further year or two before my editor cleared his throat and asked me what had happened to John Rebus:

‘I liked him, and I think there’s more you can do with him...’

I think his clearing of the throat was a way of telling me that he didn’t expect Watchman to do any better than Knots and Crosses , but that maybe the crime genre was worth another try.

This editorial musing was, in retrospect, invaluable, but the gods also seemed to be looking favourably upon Rebus. A TV producer had shown some interest in that first novel. He had formed a new company with an actor (known for his role in a popular soap) and was looking for a promising project. If successful, the action of Knots and Crosses would have been moved to London (to accommodate the actor’s English accent), and that might have been the end of my creation. However, my agent disappeared halfway through negotiations, and the deal fizzled out. (Don’t worry, she reappeared some years later.)

Hide and Seek gave me a second bite at Rebus’s cherry, if you’ll pardon the expression. The name Hyde is implicit in the title — in fact, the book’s working title was Hyde and Seek . I followed it up with a novel in which I dragged Rebus to London — where I was living at the time — so he could hate it as much as I did. And by then the damage was done: three books down, I had produced a series. And for as long as Inspector Rebus proved a satisfactory vehicle for my investigations into contemporary Scotland, that series would continue. I just hoped a readership would eventually follow.

So where did Rebus come from? Well, from my subconscious, obviously, from a young man’s brain, filled with stories and strategies. But also from the books I’d been reading, the city I’d made my home, and the blood that had soaked into its pavements and roadways. Yet it still seems to me that he appeared as a bolt from the blue. I’ve looked at photos of myself in my student room in Arden Street, and have pored over my diaries from the time, seeking clues. The notes I jotted down prior to starting the novel shed very little light. I saw the book as ‘a metaphysical thriller’, but spent very little time delineating Rebus’s character. I wanted the story to contain lots of ‘puzzles and word-play’, wanted it to be ‘a very visual piece’, and decided it should be written in the third person: ‘don’t need to go too far inside the main character’s head’. Rebus was to be a cipher rather than a three-dimensional human being. From a rereading of Knots and Crosses I think it’s true to say that the reader feels more distanced from Rebus in that book than in any of the others which followed. There was a good reason for this: I wanted Rebus himself to exist as a potential suspect in people’s minds. Hence the momentary flashbacks, the hints of something awful in his past, and the ‘locked room’ in his apartment. He also at one point almost strangles a woman who has invited him into her bed.

Nice.

Through sheer force of will, however, he stuck around and grew into someone more fully formed, to the point where fans are now worried about his health, and find when they meet me that I fall disappointingly short of Rebus himself — I’m just not as damaged as him, as complex as him, or as dangerous to be around. I’m only the bloke who commits his stories to paper. What did become obvious to me early on was that a detective makes for a terrific commentator on the world around him. He has access to the highest in the land and the lowest, the politicians and oligarchs, as well as the junkies and petty thieves. In writing books about Edinburgh, I could examine the city (and the nation of which it is capital once more) from top to bottom through Rebus’s eyes. I was lucky, too — there’s no tradition of the crime novel in Scotland, so I could make my own path. And, back then, there were no crime novels set in contemporary Edinburgh, meaning that for a little while I had no competition. I’ve been lucky also in that Edinburgh and Scotland continue to change in interesting ways, giving me plenty of plots, while delivering up their secrets and mysteries only very slowly. I’ve been living in this city now for almost thirty years — on and off — and it continues to surprise me. Underground streets and chambers are still being discovered. Archaeological digs at the castle bring new truths to the surface. Exhibits long forgotten in the various museums turn out to have their own tales worth telling. As a subject, the city seems inexhaustible. This is, after all, a city of words. Where else in the world would you find the main railway station named after a novel (Waverley) and a vast edifice in the city centre celebrating that work’s author (the Scott Monument)? Robert Louis Stevenson brought his own imagination to his hometown. Arthur Conan Doyle was born here. Muriel Spark grew up here. Robert Burns made his name here. J.M. Barrie was a student here. Not to mention the likes of Carlyle and Hume... Right up to J.K. Rowling, Irvine Welsh and Alexander McCall Smith in the present day.

Rebus, too, is composed of words — millions of them — so you might think that by now I’d have got to the heart of what makes him tick, but he continues to surprise me, which is perhaps only apt for a man whose name means ‘puzzle’. For twenty years now, he’s been living inside my head, but sometimes it feels as though I’m the one living in his . When a psychoanalyst interviewed me at a book festival a while back, he wondered if Rebus represented the brother I never had, or maybe the life of adventure which I was never going to allow myself to lead. Both my parents had served in World War Two (my father in the Far East). One of my two sisters married a Royal Air Force engineer and spent much of her life thereafter travelling the world. As a kid, I once wrote to the Army asking them for information on joining up. But I was resolutely bookish, and all my adventures took place inside my head. Maybe the psychoanalyst had a point; maybe Rebus really is an extension of my own personality — doing all the dangerous stuff I’d be too scared to do, breaking rules and conventions, getting into fights and scrapes, and even coming up against the occasional deadly force. Some commentators have decided that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a book about the creative process and the division between our rational mind and the darker fantasies which we keep hidden from view. In which case, Rebus would be my Hyde, acting as a force of nature, saying the unsayable, doing things I could never bring myself to do — even though I could (and can) all too readily imagine myself doing them.