June 21, 2025 • 31 mins
Ian Rankin introduced Detective John Rebus in his 1987 novel Knots and Crosses. Since then, Rankin has published another two dozen books in the series and has sold almost 40 million books to date. Unsurprisingly, he’s now Sir Ian Rankin. This week, Michael sits down with Ian at Sydney Writers’ Festival for discussion about his latest Rebus book, Midnight and Blue.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi there, It's Daniel James and I'm back to share
another episode of Read This Schwartz Meetia's weekly books podcast.
Hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
and around the world. This week, Michael is chatting with
best selling crime writer Ian Rankin. As always, Michael is
(00:22):
here to tell us a little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hi Michael, Daniel James.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Hello, So Michael, today's guest is one of the most
well regarded crime fiction writers in the world, and you
were lucky enough to chat with him at the Sydney
Writers Festival.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Before we talk.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
About Ian Rankin, can you share a little bit about
when your love for a good crime novel began.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah, I've always been a crime fiction tragic. I think
when I was a teenager and us first learning to read,
I was reading kind of classics that were foisted upon
me and ran out of age appropriate stuff pretty quickly,
and then got onto Agatha Christie or the Sherlock Holmes
books and found myself completely hooked. So those earliest ones
(01:03):
were definitely in that puzzle box tradition. The mystery that
is resolved at the end and you get the twist
or you get the reveal. And that was a lot
of fun. But the more I read, the more the
capaciousness of the crime novel struck me. So that it
could be like an English country town cozy, or it
could be a hard boiled el a noir, and the
contrast between them. You know, you could go Raymond Chandler
(01:25):
on the one hand, or you could go PD James
or Ruth Rendell on the other, and so that mix
really appeal. The other thing that was great is if
you found a crime writer you liked, there was generally
a reasonable chance that there was a dozen books in
their backlist and a kind of new book each year
by them that could keep you going. So for a
voracious reader, it was this wonderful promise that not only
(01:47):
was it a world that you liked, but it was
one that you could return to again and again and again.
And amongst those there were a couple in particular that
really grabbed me. One was a British writer called Reginald
Hill who wrote these procedurals set in Yorkshire that were
really great. But the other one that I really loved
was Ian Rankin.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
And Rekon has become a household name now, isn't he.
I mean, I believe he's especially well known for his
character Detective John Reebis, who features him more than twenty
of his novels. What happens in this latest one?
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah. One of the things Rankin often reflects on was
that it took him seven books to become an overnight success.
You know, once your series is in the kind of
twenty odd book territory, you know that it's just going
and going and going. There was a point at which
I'm going to get this slightly wrong, but there's a
point of which I think eight of the ten books
on the bestseller list in the Scottish Times were by
(02:40):
arn Rankin, and I think it was like something insane
like ten percent of all crime fiction being sold in
the UK was by him. You know, he's a phenomenon.
He sold forty million books to date, He's been translated
into thirty seven languages. He's got a knighthood. He's Ian
Rankin now, and this newest book is the twenty fifth
in the series. Well, Midnight in Blue and John ReBs,
(03:02):
at the end of the last book was arrested. He's
in jail and he's been called on to assist in
solving the ultimate crime novel scenario, the Locked Room Mystery.
It's pretty great and it's just very nice to know
that John Reavers is not done yet. And just quickly
before we get to Sir ar Ragan and John Reebs
and all things crime and wonder, I did want to say,
(03:25):
Daniel to anyone who's enjoyed listening to read this in
their seven am feed, We're coming to an end. It's
tumultuous times, but I read this will no longer be
happening with Schwartz Media. There is a chance it will return,
and so I would encourage you, if you'd enjoyed listening
to it in seven Am, subscribe to the read this
feed separately. That's where you'll find that if it's going
(03:45):
to come back to life in the weeks and months ahead.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Coming up in just a moment, John Reebis will outlive
in Raken.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I was lucky enough to sit down with Rankin Sorry
sir Ian at this year's Sydney Writer's Festival just a
couple of weeks ago. I have to say I came
to Midnight and Blue and my first thought was that
the title immediately evoked for me the eighth book in
the Rebis series, Black and Blue. An extraordinary book, but
a book where Rebus was laid as low, really as
(04:22):
you'd cast him at any point, and it was the
first in a sequence in several books where every time
you thought he couldn't go lower, you really did give
him another kicking. So, knowing that he was in prison
in Midnight and Blue, seeing this residence in the title,
I assumed to find a broken man, and instead Rebus
is almost as jaunty as we've seen him for years.
The man's enjoying prison? Is he in?
Speaker 3 (04:44):
I don't know if he's enjoying prison. I think the structure.
He likes his life to have a structure. And when
he had to leave the police force because he was
of an age where he had to go, suddenly his
life hud no structure, and he still felt he ought
to be useful. Did he still have a purpose in
the world? Could he still be useful in prison? He
has a purpose. His purpose is to avoid being murdered
(05:05):
by the many bad men in there who don't like
the fact that a cop is in jail with them.
And then he's given another purpose, which is there is
a lot to sell mystery. Someone has been killed in
a cell, and he is best placed to solve this
before the prison explodes, because the cons all think it
must be a warder. Warder, I'll think it must be
(05:26):
a con. So they're getting ready to clash and into
this kind of powder keg you throw Rabus, so suddenly
he's up in fun while also watching his front on
his back for people about to stab him or throttle
him or kill him. And it was the one thing
that you know, I do a lot of research. I
don't do a lot of research. I do enough research
that I can persuade the reader. I do a lot
(05:47):
of research. But a friend of mine's a photographer. He
knew the governor in Edinburgh Prison, who thankfully, as it
turns out, was about to retire, so he was much
more open and receptive to my questions and might otherwise
be the case. And he took me around the prison
and showed me and everything else. But the first thing
he said was Rebus wouldn't come here. There's no way
(06:07):
you would take an ex Edinburgh cop and put him
in the Edinburgh prison because he would be surrounded by
people he would know who would want ill done to him.
So I said, well, I don't want him to be
anywhere else. He's got to come here. So we discussed
that for a while and we found a way. He said,
well he would come into the Kindese segregation wing, and
I went, okay, that's good. And then I found a
way to get him from the segregation went into the
(06:29):
general population, and I was happy. And when the governor
eventually read the book, it was a couple of tiny
things he thought I'd got wrong, But there was nothing
major that you thought I'd got wrong.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
You did set yourself in this book, and it's the
nature of crime in a prison, but you set yourself
the crime writer's greatest challenge, which is the locker room mystery.
Not only do you have this kind of pressure cooker environment,
but you actually have somewhat unusually for one of your
Rabis books, a puzzle box element to it as well.
Was a fun putting that together.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Okay, first thing that happened was the previous book, Heartfully Headstones,
I thought was the last book. Now I've thought this before,
but I thought this is a last book. He's on trial,
he's in the dock, sentences about to be pronounced the end.
It's a lovely riking back falls moment. And of course
I will only ever be the second best crime writer
(07:22):
to come out of Edinburgh because Conan Doyle was born
and brought up in Edinburgh. So I thought it's a
lovely thing to end the Rebis series with a raking
back falls. But then people start to say, well, what
happened next? And I started to think, what would happen next?
He would be found guilty. If he's found guilty, he's
going to go to prison. That's interesting that immediately you've
(07:45):
got tension and drama, and it's a new setting. It's
a new challenge for me. It's a new setting for
Reebis and a new set of challenges for me. This guy,
who's in his seventies with health issues is going to
go to an alien environment, and in that alien environment,
I can have a discussion with him about good and evil,
because Reebis in the earlier books especially thought they were
(08:08):
just these polarized things that were good and evil. If
you were a bad person, you were irredeemably a bad person.
In jail, some of the prisoners say to him, what
do you think you're here now? Are we really the
monsters you thought we were when you put us in here.
So that was great to be able to have that
discussion with him and possibly change his mind. So all
(08:28):
that was going on, and then I thought, well, what's
he going to do in prison? He's going to have
to solve a murder. And then because people are locked
up for large parts of the day, I thought, Okay,
I'm murdering a lot sell. How is it possible? I
have no idea who did it? I don't know, but
let's start and see. So when I started the book,
(08:50):
I had no idea how this would happen. I had
a vague idea because I've been given a tour of
the cells, so I knew certain things about the layout
of the cells and how certain things it happened.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Can I ask, just on the topic of not knowing
when you started, is it true that when you were
was it Hanging Garden, you finished your first draft and
you still hadn't worked out who the killer was?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Yeah? I mean this is often roughly the case. I'll
be typing away and I'll put a nice, big capitalized
note to myself, fix this letter, you know, And towards
the end of the first draft of the Hanging Garden.
I still didn't know who the killer was. And then
I read the first draft. I sat and read it
through and went, oh, hang on a minute, it must
(09:32):
be you. So it was really this the beginning of
the it was the second draft.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I'm fascinated by that. I'm in a book like The
Hanging Garden where the themes and the crime are so
deeply embedded in each other. You know, the ideas as
you say that question about good and evil that permeates
the series, those kind of binaries of the different sides
of not just Rabist, but of all the characters in
(09:58):
the crime. It seems remarkable to me that it's almost
incidental who's responsible for the inciding incident.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
I don't think it's incidental. I think you've got a
range of possible suspects and motives, and I wait for
the book to tell me which one is most relevant
or is going to be most surprising to the reader
while still being credible. Yeah, I do trust to that.
It's almost like the story is up there, swirling around,
and it descends and decides I'm the person to write
(10:27):
this story down and tell this story, and it will
tell me where to go. And almost always if I've
got a fixed idea of where a book should go,
the novel says differently. The novel says no, no, no.
There was a what was let me think what was it?
It was set in darkness, was going to be the
first book of a trilogy within the series, and it
(10:48):
would look at the formation of the Scottish Parliament. So
in book one there would be a guy who is
running to be a member of Parliament in the new
Scottish Parliament. In book two, the parliament is up and running.
In book three the new building is complete and everything
in there. So this character would be in all three books.
He was dead by page fifty, and I didn't want
(11:09):
that to happen. This was going to be a trilogy
with this guy in it. But the book just said,
this guy is extraneous, you know. And so I went, well,
I've got yet another body, and I don't know who
did it, you know. So I'll wait and hope that
the book will tell me. And every time I've gone
along with the book's idea of what is going to
make a more interesting story or a meteor story, the
(11:33):
book has been correct.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Has that always been approached to writing, or is that
a trust in process that comes only with time and
success and saying that it works for you.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
I mean, you know, I've tried teaching creative writing and
I don't think it can be done. I mean, I
think you can make a good writer better, but I
don't think you can turn someone into a writer. I
just I've always you know, I've always written, ever since
I was a little kid. I've written stories and made
stuff up for my own satisfaction and without thinking too
(12:05):
hard about the craft that comes later on. You know,
the second and third draft is when you try and
make elegant sentences, and you try and add some flesh
to the bones of the characters and solidify the theme
that you're trying to explore in the book. But the
first draft is a ragged beast, very much so, which
(12:27):
is why nobody sees it except me. And that's always
worked for me. That has always worked. I know other
writers do it. I mean what my near neighbor as
was in Edinburgh until I moved because I couldn't take
the competition. Alexander McCall smith only writes one draft. That's it.
It's not allowed to be edited, and it's you know,
(12:48):
and he writes quick as well, and yet somehow it works.
So everybody's different. But I found a way that worked
for me quite early on, and I've stuck to it.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
I have to digress briefly. Your former neighbor alex Anna
McCall smith wrote you into one of his books, So
you're going to get revenge? Yeah, have him appeard.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
He's actually written me into more than one. He's sitting
in my hot tub in Edinburgh when I used to
have a hot tub. He had me getting hit by
an arrow that was fired from some archers and the meadows.
He had my books appear in the wind of a
second hand bookshop. He's and every time he does it,
I see revenge. Sandy is a dish served very cold.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
I look forward to that. I'm surprised in prison.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Nemesis is coming. Shit, I should have done that.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
You mentioned the idea of the moment before this book
being one of many possible finishing points for Reebis and
the Rackenbach Falls idea, and one of the things that
made that seem possible at the end of the last
book was the death of Big jer Cafferty. And I'm
sorry that's a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read it,
but it's a book ago, it's time to catch up.
(14:04):
But you know, Cafferty was such a key figure since
he first appeared, I think in the fourth book in
the series, and had only grown in stature, only grown
as a kind of counterweight and almost close to Rebus's
kind of significant other by these later books. How hard
was it to let him go?
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Yeah, you're correct. Cafferty first appears in book three as
a very minor character. I needed Rebis to be in
Glasgow to find a clue. Why was he in Glasgow?
He's giving evidence in a court case. Who's he giving
evidence against a Glasgow gangster? In book three, Cafferty is
a Glasgow gangster, and he kind of got under my
(14:44):
skin and I thought, oh, he's a useful can as
you say, a useful sort of almost like kenan Abel
or Jacqueline Hyde, or he's the devil tempting Reebis to
come to the dark side.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Nolan Laam, Yeah, Nolan layam.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
It were which one is, which we'll discuss later on.
And so I brought him back after a few books,
but I'd forgotten he was a Glasgow gangster. So he
actually has two completely different life stories. In book three
he grew up in Glasgow. By book seven or eight
he grew up in Edinburgh and as an Edinburgh gangster.
This is how much research I do before I write
the books. But he was very useful to me. Is
(15:21):
that sort of devil whispering in Reebus's ear. And also
they're from very similar backgrounds. They understand each other very well.
Either one of them their life could have gone in
a different way that would have made them more like
the other. So all of that has going on with them,
and he represents all the bad stuff. Cafferty can represent
all the bad stuff that's happening in Edinburgh, in Scotland
(15:42):
and the world. But Reebus and he have this empathy.
They understand each other so well that you're never sure
if they're going to end up being best friends or
destroy each other throughout the series. And to answer your question, eventually,
when I handed the manuscript over to my agent of
Heartfully heads Owes, Cafferty survived, He didn't die, and it
(16:04):
was my agent who said, I think it's time. He said,
go back and look at that final scene. I think
he dies. And I went back and looked at it
and went it's a big deal. But okay, So for
the first time in my life, I took my agent's
advice and it was traumatic. And the nice thing about
putting Rebis in prison in this new book is we
(16:26):
don't have to dwell on the aftermath of it too much.
There's too much other stuff going on that Rebis isn't
sitting in his flat at dead of night thinking too
much about Cafferty. That is for possibly a future book.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Coming up after the Break and Chees, the genesis of
his lead Detective's nine, and why he never tires of
writing about Edinburgh.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Ian Rankin had never planned to become a crime writer.
Back in nineteen eighty seven. He was a young Muriel Sparks,
scholar of all things, and very earnestly trying to rewrite
Robert Louis Stevenson to have his own go a Doctor
Jekyl and Mister Hyde. Despite the fact that this first novel,
Knots and Crosses made relatively little waves at the time,
(17:21):
the Crime Writers' Association wrote to Ann and asked him
to join, and he noticed increasingly as he went into
bookshops in Edinburgh. His debut novel wasn't on the shelf
in the Scottish literature section, despite his deepest hopes. Instead
it sat in the crime section, beside Ruth Rendell and P. D. James.
And that was the moment that Ann thought he'd better
(17:42):
start reading this stuff.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
I think I'm still the only crime writer I know
who wasn't a fan of the genre before they started
writing it. I had the only crime novel I remember
reading I was maybe twelve or thirteen, was Shaft, and
I only read it because I wasn't all enough to
see the movie.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Is he John raebis because of John Shaft?
Speaker 3 (18:05):
Yeah, yeah, John Shaft. John riebis definitely, and Riebus because
of Riebus is a picture puzzle. It's a little series
of drawings with letters taken away or added. So, for example,
if you had a drawing of an ear and above
it was the E with a line through it, that
meant all you wanted was a R. And then someone
rowing a boat row that gives you r RO and
(18:26):
you went on from there. So when he was getting
sent these little picture puzzles in book one, I thought,
being an English literature student studying semiotics and deconstruction, I'll
give him a name that means puzzle.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
So if you started the series now, he could be
called John Sadoka.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Yeah, well John Tetris.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yeah, it doesn't have a ring to it. I've got
to be and.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Yeah, I mean I've told this story before, but I
love it. I mean, having invented that name, I then
spent years explaining to people because it's not a Scottish name,
how I came up with it. We had spent ten
years away from Edinburgh. My wife and I lived in London,
then lived in France, went back and I met a
second hand bookseller and he said, oh, come and have
a drink with me and my mates on Friday night.
(19:12):
So I went to this pub and his mates included
an ex police officer and a guy called Joe Riebis
And I said to him, really, and he pronounced it
Rebus and he said, it's a Polish surname. So from
that book eleven or twelve on, I suddenly mentioned Riebus,
halving Polish roots. I didn't know until then.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
There's that research again.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
Yeah, And Joe said to me, he said, I thought
you got my name from the phone directory And I said, no,
I didn't think of Riebus was even a real name.
So he got the telephone directory from the barman and
we went through the Edinburgh phone directory. Rebus j for Joe,
his address genuinely rank and drive.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Good, serendipitous.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
You could not make that up. You couldn't make it up.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
That is wildly good. It does strike mean. You mentioned
that it was about a decade that you and your
wife lived out of Scotland, and that decade the overlay
is best. I understand that. I think some of those books,
the portrait of Edinburgh in particular, is particularly acute, and
I'm curious about the difference for you of writing about
(20:25):
it as a place from a distance as opposed to
writing about it when you were there.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Yeah. The very first Rebus book, nottson Crosses, was written
in Edinburgh in the National Library of Scotland while I
was supposedly doing a PhD on Murial Spark. Then we
moved to London because the money ran out for the PhD,
and my wife got a job in London as a
civil servant, so she supported me while I tried to
write books two, three and four. And that's why book
(20:52):
three is set in.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
London and Rabis hates it.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Oh well, I thought, I'm hating it here, I'll channel
that hate to him and he can load on my behalf.
And then we moved to France and we were there
for six years. So quite a lot of the books
were written in this French farmhouse, and yeah, it was
Edinburgh then became a city of the imagination. I couldn't
just walk out my front door and do the research.
I didn't remember remembering stuff, and I would go back.
(21:17):
I'd go back to Scotland once or twice a year
and do the research, look at places and make sure
I'd described them properly. But it was useful, I think
to that distance. When I got worried was when we
were moving back. You know, haven't been away for ten years.
A though, if I go back to Edinburgh, can I
still write about the place or will it be more
like journalism or reportage? Can I write about it imaginatively
(21:40):
when I'm living there? And I think the first book
I wrote when I got back was the one to
Hanging Garden, which was partly setting well had the story
behind it was a story of something that happened in
or a door in France during World War Two, a
place near where we lived. So I was kind of
reaching back to France in a way in that book,
as well as making sure that I was it was
(22:01):
an Edinburgh book. I don't know how important it is
to be living in Edinburgh and writing about Edinburgh. It's
such an interesting city to me. It's a it's so
much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
You can walk around it in a day, as you know,
you can walk around it in a day, but you
(22:22):
could spend your whole life trying to understand it.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Wasn't in one of your books that I read the
phrase that Edinburgh was.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
All for name for no nickers. That's I mean, that's
a that's a yeah, that's a that's a Glasgow saying
about Edinburgh. It's all for coton no nickers, or is
one historian of Edinburgh put it as a place of
public probity and private vice, which brings us back to
Jack l and Hyde again. So anyway, so that was
(22:48):
what I thought I was doing with the book, was
trying to do this sort of social history of Edinburgh
and at the same time take on some pretty pretty big,
hopefully I thought, pretty big questions about good and evil,
and a detective is a perfect means of investigating the
city from top to bomb.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Well, your detective can be in a politician's house one
minute and a commission flats the next.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, exactly. I mean a journalist can do that. But
a journalist you can see no.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
To them, and you tend to kill off your journalists.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
I do. Yeah, Wow, I don't always kill off my journalists.
But you're right, You're right they have. Yeah. One of
the many Earily books didn't last too long, did they?
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Coming back again to that idea of public probity private
vice is by setting the books around a police officer
and around the system, you get to tell a pretty
comprehensive story about the failures of that system, the ways
in which it's corrupted or perverted or doesn't do what
it professes to do. Has your attitude to law enforcement
(23:50):
a crime to those kind of stories shifted in there
now almost.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
Forty years Yeah, I mean, I think crime in general. Now,
if you're writing about a police officer, you're very conscious
of the fact that the public don't necessarily see them
as the Clint Eastwood figure riding into a lawless place
and bringing order from chaos. You know, the public general
(24:15):
public see them as being conflicted corrupted, covering up for
one another being part of the problem, and a lot
of younger crime writers are not using cops as their heroes,
and those of us who still do use cops as
our heroes, like Michael Connolly and me, are very conscious
we write about corruption. And the previous Reabis book was
(24:36):
about bad things he had done in his younger days
as part of this kind of group of police officers
and had got away with because in the past you
could get away with stuff that you couldn't get away
with today because of the technology and the surveillance and
the mobile phones and the cameras and everything else. The
stuff you could get away with in the past, and
you know would he feels bad about it. I think
(24:58):
Reabis does feel guilty about the fact that he didn't
always use the correct legal procedures to get a result,
but he feels he did usually get the right person.
He usually put manage to put someone away for something.
But he feels bad about that. But that is something
I think the people who write about police officers have
really taken on board.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Now.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Policing keeps changing. I mean, it really annoys me how
much the nomenclature changes. So Malcolm Fox when we first
met him was working for Complaints and conduct. That was
what internal affairs was called. Then it changed it morphedin
is something else, I think maybe even internal affairs. Then
it morphedin, it is something else, and now it's something
(25:39):
else again. So in this new book, when Riebis is
talking to him, he said, so what you call this week?
You know? And I've got to keep on top of
that because the people who read my books know that
these things are policing is changing.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
It's time the Joe Rabis story. You just write what
you like and it'll come true.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, that has happened in the past that I've written about,
something that has come true.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Weirdly, I'm glad you mentioned Malcolm Fox because he is
a kind of embodiment of that idea of working within
the system or not. And you introduced him in the
Complaints after the first time you attempted to finish writing
about Rebus unsuccessfully, and it seems to me that you
set him up, introduced him a potential new protagonist, and
either you wound up not liking Malcolm very much, or
(26:23):
the ribus in you just couldn't help yourself. And so
Malcolm moved pretty quickly from a potential new protagonist to
an antagonist. And I'm curious about how deliberate that was.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Yeah, I you know, haven't decided that Rebus would have
to retire. My wife said, great, you've got freedom not
to write any Kenny book you want to rate. What
do you want to write about? I said, what a
rate book? Cops? So I'm going to have another cop,
but I don't want anybody to think they're getting Rebus
two point zero or Ribus Light. He's got to be
a very different kind of cop from Rebus. So internal Affairs.
(26:54):
I thought that's interesting, because the kind of cop who
makes a good internal affairs detective is the antithesis of Rebus.
So Malcolm Fox came along. Now the problem is, if
you are working that job, you've got to be cleaner
than clean, whiter than white, never cross the line. Boring, right,
(27:15):
fairly boring. So book two he's trying to be a maverick,
but he's not very good at it. And then I
got an idea for a cold case novel. And there
was a unit in Edinburgh staff by retired detectives that
investigated cold cases, and I thought, oh, that's what Rebus
(27:35):
is doing. He would not go gentle into that good night.
He would not retire from the police and open a
bar or a bed and breakfast or move to Marbea.
He would want to still feel like a detective. So
I brought him back for standing in another man's grave.
And then I thought, the one person who wouldn't want
(27:58):
to see Rebus back on the force is Malcolm Fox.
So Fox did go from being protagonist to antagonist because
suddenly it was Reebus's story. And the more that I
continue to write about Raebus, the more Fox became the antagonist.
And that was an interesting turnaround. He's tried several times
(28:19):
to be a man of action, to be a frontline
police officer, and he's not very good at it. He's
a yes man, a toady, a pen pusher. He's a
very good administrator. But the fact that he always tries
to be a man of action becomes kind of hilarious
to me. He's just not very good at it.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Just but that I would rate a series about Rabis
managing a bid and breakfast and handling Alexander McCole smith
as a guest.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Now now you're talking maybe a short story I could
get a short story of that.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
There's a whole thing now.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
I keep thinking, you know, the ribis now in his dotage.
All I can do really is hand him over to
Richard Osman, who you know, to just say move him
into your care home. Richard, does you know you've got
an ex spy, You've got this, You've got that, have
an ex cop.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
So you've been living with John Rabis for almost forty
years now, more than once you've tried to shake him
off or you've tried to move on, but it's proved
very difficult. I think we can see how he's changed
in the pages over the years. How has writing him
changed you?
Speaker 3 (29:26):
I mean it's I mean he's made me a good living,
which is amazing to me. I've known him longer than
I've known most of my friends. He lives inside my head.
He's in a little compartment there, and every now and
again he pops out of a conversation with me and
we have a conversation about the way the world is.
He's gone through because he's older than me, he's going
(29:47):
through all the eggs and pains that I will have
to go through eventually, and so that's been interesting for
me as I've aged, he's aged as well. Do I
like him? I think I like him better than he
would like me. I think he would find me pretty
boring and wishy washy. He likes a challenge, and I
don't think I would present him with any sort of
a challenge. But the world has moved on and cops
(30:09):
like Riebis don't exist anymore. There's no room for them
in the modern world. Maybe there shouldn't have been room
for them in the first instance, but I've enjoyed it.
I mean, who knows what would have happened if I'd
let him. You know, the first draft of the first novel,
he died. He was shot and killed at the end
of the first book, and for some reason I brought
(30:30):
him back in the second draft. He survived. You know what,
He's going to survive longer than me. You know, when
I shuffle off this mortal coil, when there's nothing of
me left in secondhand bookshops around the globe, there will
charity shops. There will still be John Raebis.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Ian Rangan's latest novel, Midnight and Blow, is available everywhere now.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
Thanks so much for this to another special episode of
Read This. As always, if you want to dive further
into the show, you can search for it wherever you
listen to podcasts. There are more than ninety episodes in
the Read this archive for you to enjoy. See you
next week.
Hi there, It's Daniel James and I'm back to share
another episode of Read This Schwartz Meetia's weekly books podcast.
Hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
and around the world. This week, Michael is chatting with
best selling crime writer Ian Rankin. As always, Michael is
(00:22):
here to tell us a little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hi Michael, Daniel James.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Hello, So Michael, today's guest is one of the most
well regarded crime fiction writers in the world, and you
were lucky enough to chat with him at the Sydney
Writers Festival.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Before we talk.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
About Ian Rankin, can you share a little bit about
when your love for a good crime novel began.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah, I've always been a crime fiction tragic. I think
when I was a teenager and us first learning to read,
I was reading kind of classics that were foisted upon
me and ran out of age appropriate stuff pretty quickly,
and then got onto Agatha Christie or the Sherlock Holmes
books and found myself completely hooked. So those earliest ones
(01:03):
were definitely in that puzzle box tradition. The mystery that
is resolved at the end and you get the twist
or you get the reveal. And that was a lot
of fun. But the more I read, the more the
capaciousness of the crime novel struck me. So that it
could be like an English country town cozy, or it
could be a hard boiled el a noir, and the
contrast between them. You know, you could go Raymond Chandler
(01:25):
on the one hand, or you could go PD James
or Ruth Rendell on the other, and so that mix
really appeal. The other thing that was great is if
you found a crime writer you liked, there was generally
a reasonable chance that there was a dozen books in
their backlist and a kind of new book each year
by them that could keep you going. So for a
voracious reader, it was this wonderful promise that not only
(01:47):
was it a world that you liked, but it was
one that you could return to again and again and again.
And amongst those there were a couple in particular that
really grabbed me. One was a British writer called Reginald
Hill who wrote these procedurals set in Yorkshire that were
really great. But the other one that I really loved
was Ian Rankin.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
And Rekon has become a household name now, isn't he.
I mean, I believe he's especially well known for his
character Detective John Reebis, who features him more than twenty
of his novels. What happens in this latest one?
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah. One of the things Rankin often reflects on was
that it took him seven books to become an overnight success.
You know, once your series is in the kind of
twenty odd book territory, you know that it's just going
and going and going. There was a point at which
I'm going to get this slightly wrong, but there's a
point of which I think eight of the ten books
on the bestseller list in the Scottish Times were by
(02:40):
arn Rankin, and I think it was like something insane
like ten percent of all crime fiction being sold in
the UK was by him. You know, he's a phenomenon.
He sold forty million books to date, He's been translated
into thirty seven languages. He's got a knighthood. He's Ian
Rankin now, and this newest book is the twenty fifth
in the series. Well, Midnight in Blue and John ReBs,
(03:02):
at the end of the last book was arrested. He's
in jail and he's been called on to assist in
solving the ultimate crime novel scenario, the Locked Room Mystery.
It's pretty great and it's just very nice to know
that John Reavers is not done yet. And just quickly
before we get to Sir ar Ragan and John Reebs
and all things crime and wonder, I did want to say,
(03:25):
Daniel to anyone who's enjoyed listening to read this in
their seven am feed, We're coming to an end. It's
tumultuous times, but I read this will no longer be
happening with Schwartz Media. There is a chance it will return,
and so I would encourage you, if you'd enjoyed listening
to it in seven Am, subscribe to the read this
feed separately. That's where you'll find that if it's going
(03:45):
to come back to life in the weeks and months ahead.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Coming up in just a moment, John Reebis will outlive
in Raken.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I was lucky enough to sit down with Rankin Sorry
sir Ian at this year's Sydney Writer's Festival just a
couple of weeks ago. I have to say I came
to Midnight and Blue and my first thought was that
the title immediately evoked for me the eighth book in
the Rebis series, Black and Blue. An extraordinary book, but
a book where Rebus was laid as low, really as
(04:22):
you'd cast him at any point, and it was the
first in a sequence in several books where every time
you thought he couldn't go lower, you really did give
him another kicking. So, knowing that he was in prison
in Midnight and Blue, seeing this residence in the title,
I assumed to find a broken man, and instead Rebus
is almost as jaunty as we've seen him for years.
The man's enjoying prison? Is he in?
Speaker 3 (04:44):
I don't know if he's enjoying prison. I think the structure.
He likes his life to have a structure. And when
he had to leave the police force because he was
of an age where he had to go, suddenly his
life hud no structure, and he still felt he ought
to be useful. Did he still have a purpose in
the world? Could he still be useful in prison? He
has a purpose. His purpose is to avoid being murdered
(05:05):
by the many bad men in there who don't like
the fact that a cop is in jail with them.
And then he's given another purpose, which is there is
a lot to sell mystery. Someone has been killed in
a cell, and he is best placed to solve this
before the prison explodes, because the cons all think it
must be a warder. Warder, I'll think it must be
(05:26):
a con. So they're getting ready to clash and into
this kind of powder keg you throw Rabus, so suddenly
he's up in fun while also watching his front on
his back for people about to stab him or throttle
him or kill him. And it was the one thing
that you know, I do a lot of research. I
don't do a lot of research. I do enough research
that I can persuade the reader. I do a lot
(05:47):
of research. But a friend of mine's a photographer. He
knew the governor in Edinburgh Prison, who thankfully, as it
turns out, was about to retire, so he was much
more open and receptive to my questions and might otherwise
be the case. And he took me around the prison
and showed me and everything else. But the first thing
he said was Rebus wouldn't come here. There's no way
(06:07):
you would take an ex Edinburgh cop and put him
in the Edinburgh prison because he would be surrounded by
people he would know who would want ill done to him.
So I said, well, I don't want him to be
anywhere else. He's got to come here. So we discussed
that for a while and we found a way. He said,
well he would come into the Kindese segregation wing, and
I went, okay, that's good. And then I found a
way to get him from the segregation went into the
(06:29):
general population, and I was happy. And when the governor
eventually read the book, it was a couple of tiny
things he thought I'd got wrong, But there was nothing
major that you thought I'd got wrong.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
You did set yourself in this book, and it's the
nature of crime in a prison, but you set yourself
the crime writer's greatest challenge, which is the locker room mystery.
Not only do you have this kind of pressure cooker environment,
but you actually have somewhat unusually for one of your
Rabis books, a puzzle box element to it as well.
Was a fun putting that together.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Okay, first thing that happened was the previous book, Heartfully Headstones,
I thought was the last book. Now I've thought this before,
but I thought this is a last book. He's on trial,
he's in the dock, sentences about to be pronounced the end.
It's a lovely riking back falls moment. And of course
I will only ever be the second best crime writer
(07:22):
to come out of Edinburgh because Conan Doyle was born
and brought up in Edinburgh. So I thought it's a
lovely thing to end the Rebis series with a raking
back falls. But then people start to say, well, what
happened next? And I started to think, what would happen next?
He would be found guilty. If he's found guilty, he's
going to go to prison. That's interesting that immediately you've
(07:45):
got tension and drama, and it's a new setting. It's
a new challenge for me. It's a new setting for
Reebis and a new set of challenges for me. This guy,
who's in his seventies with health issues is going to
go to an alien environment, and in that alien environment,
I can have a discussion with him about good and evil,
because Reebis in the earlier books especially thought they were
(08:08):
just these polarized things that were good and evil. If
you were a bad person, you were irredeemably a bad person.
In jail, some of the prisoners say to him, what
do you think you're here now? Are we really the
monsters you thought we were when you put us in here.
So that was great to be able to have that
discussion with him and possibly change his mind. So all
(08:28):
that was going on, and then I thought, well, what's
he going to do in prison? He's going to have
to solve a murder. And then because people are locked
up for large parts of the day, I thought, Okay,
I'm murdering a lot sell. How is it possible? I
have no idea who did it? I don't know, but
let's start and see. So when I started the book,
(08:50):
I had no idea how this would happen. I had
a vague idea because I've been given a tour of
the cells, so I knew certain things about the layout
of the cells and how certain things it happened.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Can I ask, just on the topic of not knowing
when you started, is it true that when you were
was it Hanging Garden, you finished your first draft and
you still hadn't worked out who the killer was?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Yeah? I mean this is often roughly the case. I'll
be typing away and I'll put a nice, big capitalized
note to myself, fix this letter, you know, And towards
the end of the first draft of the Hanging Garden.
I still didn't know who the killer was. And then
I read the first draft. I sat and read it
through and went, oh, hang on a minute, it must
(09:32):
be you. So it was really this the beginning of
the it was the second draft.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I'm fascinated by that. I'm in a book like The
Hanging Garden where the themes and the crime are so
deeply embedded in each other. You know, the ideas as
you say that question about good and evil that permeates
the series, those kind of binaries of the different sides
of not just Rabist, but of all the characters in
(09:58):
the crime. It seems remarkable to me that it's almost
incidental who's responsible for the inciding incident.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
I don't think it's incidental. I think you've got a
range of possible suspects and motives, and I wait for
the book to tell me which one is most relevant
or is going to be most surprising to the reader
while still being credible. Yeah, I do trust to that.
It's almost like the story is up there, swirling around,
and it descends and decides I'm the person to write
(10:27):
this story down and tell this story, and it will
tell me where to go. And almost always if I've
got a fixed idea of where a book should go,
the novel says differently. The novel says no, no, no.
There was a what was let me think what was it?
It was set in darkness, was going to be the
first book of a trilogy within the series, and it
(10:48):
would look at the formation of the Scottish Parliament. So
in book one there would be a guy who is
running to be a member of Parliament in the new
Scottish Parliament. In book two, the parliament is up and running.
In book three the new building is complete and everything
in there. So this character would be in all three books.
He was dead by page fifty, and I didn't want
(11:09):
that to happen. This was going to be a trilogy
with this guy in it. But the book just said,
this guy is extraneous, you know. And so I went, well,
I've got yet another body, and I don't know who
did it, you know. So I'll wait and hope that
the book will tell me. And every time I've gone
along with the book's idea of what is going to
make a more interesting story or a meteor story, the
(11:33):
book has been correct.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Has that always been approached to writing, or is that
a trust in process that comes only with time and
success and saying that it works for you.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
I mean, you know, I've tried teaching creative writing and
I don't think it can be done. I mean, I
think you can make a good writer better, but I
don't think you can turn someone into a writer. I
just I've always you know, I've always written, ever since
I was a little kid. I've written stories and made
stuff up for my own satisfaction and without thinking too
(12:05):
hard about the craft that comes later on. You know,
the second and third draft is when you try and
make elegant sentences, and you try and add some flesh
to the bones of the characters and solidify the theme
that you're trying to explore in the book. But the
first draft is a ragged beast, very much so, which
(12:27):
is why nobody sees it except me. And that's always
worked for me. That has always worked. I know other
writers do it. I mean what my near neighbor as
was in Edinburgh until I moved because I couldn't take
the competition. Alexander McCall smith only writes one draft. That's it.
It's not allowed to be edited, and it's you know,
(12:48):
and he writes quick as well, and yet somehow it works.
So everybody's different. But I found a way that worked
for me quite early on, and I've stuck to it.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
I have to digress briefly. Your former neighbor alex Anna
McCall smith wrote you into one of his books, So
you're going to get revenge? Yeah, have him appeard.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
He's actually written me into more than one. He's sitting
in my hot tub in Edinburgh when I used to
have a hot tub. He had me getting hit by
an arrow that was fired from some archers and the meadows.
He had my books appear in the wind of a
second hand bookshop. He's and every time he does it,
I see revenge. Sandy is a dish served very cold.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
I look forward to that. I'm surprised in prison.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Nemesis is coming. Shit, I should have done that.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
You mentioned the idea of the moment before this book
being one of many possible finishing points for Reebis and
the Rackenbach Falls idea, and one of the things that
made that seem possible at the end of the last
book was the death of Big jer Cafferty. And I'm
sorry that's a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read it,
but it's a book ago, it's time to catch up.
(14:04):
But you know, Cafferty was such a key figure since
he first appeared, I think in the fourth book in
the series, and had only grown in stature, only grown
as a kind of counterweight and almost close to Rebus's
kind of significant other by these later books. How hard
was it to let him go?
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Yeah, you're correct. Cafferty first appears in book three as
a very minor character. I needed Rebis to be in
Glasgow to find a clue. Why was he in Glasgow?
He's giving evidence in a court case. Who's he giving
evidence against a Glasgow gangster? In book three, Cafferty is
a Glasgow gangster, and he kind of got under my
(14:44):
skin and I thought, oh, he's a useful can as
you say, a useful sort of almost like kenan Abel
or Jacqueline Hyde, or he's the devil tempting Reebis to
come to the dark side.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Nolan Laam, Yeah, Nolan layam.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
It were which one is, which we'll discuss later on.
And so I brought him back after a few books,
but I'd forgotten he was a Glasgow gangster. So he
actually has two completely different life stories. In book three
he grew up in Glasgow. By book seven or eight
he grew up in Edinburgh and as an Edinburgh gangster.
This is how much research I do before I write
the books. But he was very useful to me. Is
(15:21):
that sort of devil whispering in Reebus's ear. And also
they're from very similar backgrounds. They understand each other very well.
Either one of them their life could have gone in
a different way that would have made them more like
the other. So all of that has going on with them,
and he represents all the bad stuff. Cafferty can represent
all the bad stuff that's happening in Edinburgh, in Scotland
(15:42):
and the world. But Reebus and he have this empathy.
They understand each other so well that you're never sure
if they're going to end up being best friends or
destroy each other throughout the series. And to answer your question, eventually,
when I handed the manuscript over to my agent of
Heartfully heads Owes, Cafferty survived, He didn't die, and it
(16:04):
was my agent who said, I think it's time. He said,
go back and look at that final scene. I think
he dies. And I went back and looked at it
and went it's a big deal. But okay, So for
the first time in my life, I took my agent's
advice and it was traumatic. And the nice thing about
putting Rebis in prison in this new book is we
(16:26):
don't have to dwell on the aftermath of it too much.
There's too much other stuff going on that Rebis isn't
sitting in his flat at dead of night thinking too
much about Cafferty. That is for possibly a future book.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Coming up after the Break and Chees, the genesis of
his lead Detective's nine, and why he never tires of
writing about Edinburgh.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Ian Rankin had never planned to become a crime writer.
Back in nineteen eighty seven. He was a young Muriel Sparks,
scholar of all things, and very earnestly trying to rewrite
Robert Louis Stevenson to have his own go a Doctor
Jekyl and Mister Hyde. Despite the fact that this first novel,
Knots and Crosses made relatively little waves at the time,
(17:21):
the Crime Writers' Association wrote to Ann and asked him
to join, and he noticed increasingly as he went into
bookshops in Edinburgh. His debut novel wasn't on the shelf
in the Scottish literature section, despite his deepest hopes. Instead
it sat in the crime section, beside Ruth Rendell and P. D. James.
And that was the moment that Ann thought he'd better
(17:42):
start reading this stuff.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
I think I'm still the only crime writer I know
who wasn't a fan of the genre before they started
writing it. I had the only crime novel I remember
reading I was maybe twelve or thirteen, was Shaft, and
I only read it because I wasn't all enough to
see the movie.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Is he John raebis because of John Shaft?
Speaker 3 (18:05):
Yeah, yeah, John Shaft. John riebis definitely, and Riebus because
of Riebus is a picture puzzle. It's a little series
of drawings with letters taken away or added. So, for example,
if you had a drawing of an ear and above
it was the E with a line through it, that
meant all you wanted was a R. And then someone
rowing a boat row that gives you r RO and
(18:26):
you went on from there. So when he was getting
sent these little picture puzzles in book one, I thought,
being an English literature student studying semiotics and deconstruction, I'll
give him a name that means puzzle.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
So if you started the series now, he could be
called John Sadoka.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Yeah, well John Tetris.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yeah, it doesn't have a ring to it. I've got
to be and.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Yeah, I mean I've told this story before, but I
love it. I mean, having invented that name, I then
spent years explaining to people because it's not a Scottish name,
how I came up with it. We had spent ten
years away from Edinburgh. My wife and I lived in London,
then lived in France, went back and I met a
second hand bookseller and he said, oh, come and have
a drink with me and my mates on Friday night.
(19:12):
So I went to this pub and his mates included
an ex police officer and a guy called Joe Riebis
And I said to him, really, and he pronounced it
Rebus and he said, it's a Polish surname. So from
that book eleven or twelve on, I suddenly mentioned Riebus,
halving Polish roots. I didn't know until then.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
There's that research again.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
Yeah, And Joe said to me, he said, I thought
you got my name from the phone directory And I said, no,
I didn't think of Riebus was even a real name.
So he got the telephone directory from the barman and
we went through the Edinburgh phone directory. Rebus j for Joe,
his address genuinely rank and drive.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Good, serendipitous.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
You could not make that up. You couldn't make it up.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
That is wildly good. It does strike mean. You mentioned
that it was about a decade that you and your
wife lived out of Scotland, and that decade the overlay
is best. I understand that. I think some of those books,
the portrait of Edinburgh in particular, is particularly acute, and
I'm curious about the difference for you of writing about
(20:25):
it as a place from a distance as opposed to
writing about it when you were there.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Yeah. The very first Rebus book, nottson Crosses, was written
in Edinburgh in the National Library of Scotland while I
was supposedly doing a PhD on Murial Spark. Then we
moved to London because the money ran out for the PhD,
and my wife got a job in London as a
civil servant, so she supported me while I tried to
write books two, three and four. And that's why book
(20:52):
three is set in.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
London and Rabis hates it.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Oh well, I thought, I'm hating it here, I'll channel
that hate to him and he can load on my behalf.
And then we moved to France and we were there
for six years. So quite a lot of the books
were written in this French farmhouse, and yeah, it was
Edinburgh then became a city of the imagination. I couldn't
just walk out my front door and do the research.
I didn't remember remembering stuff, and I would go back.
(21:17):
I'd go back to Scotland once or twice a year
and do the research, look at places and make sure
I'd described them properly. But it was useful, I think
to that distance. When I got worried was when we
were moving back. You know, haven't been away for ten years.
A though, if I go back to Edinburgh, can I
still write about the place or will it be more
like journalism or reportage? Can I write about it imaginatively
(21:40):
when I'm living there? And I think the first book
I wrote when I got back was the one to
Hanging Garden, which was partly setting well had the story
behind it was a story of something that happened in
or a door in France during World War Two, a
place near where we lived. So I was kind of
reaching back to France in a way in that book,
as well as making sure that I was it was
(22:01):
an Edinburgh book. I don't know how important it is
to be living in Edinburgh and writing about Edinburgh. It's
such an interesting city to me. It's a it's so
much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
You can walk around it in a day, as you know,
you can walk around it in a day, but you
(22:22):
could spend your whole life trying to understand it.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Wasn't in one of your books that I read the
phrase that Edinburgh was.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
All for name for no nickers. That's I mean, that's
a that's a yeah, that's a that's a Glasgow saying
about Edinburgh. It's all for coton no nickers, or is
one historian of Edinburgh put it as a place of
public probity and private vice, which brings us back to
Jack l and Hyde again. So anyway, so that was
(22:48):
what I thought I was doing with the book, was
trying to do this sort of social history of Edinburgh
and at the same time take on some pretty pretty big,
hopefully I thought, pretty big questions about good and evil,
and a detective is a perfect means of investigating the
city from top to bomb.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Well, your detective can be in a politician's house one
minute and a commission flats the next.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, exactly. I mean a journalist can do that. But
a journalist you can see no.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
To them, and you tend to kill off your journalists.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
I do. Yeah, Wow, I don't always kill off my journalists.
But you're right, You're right they have. Yeah. One of
the many Earily books didn't last too long, did they?
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Coming back again to that idea of public probity private
vice is by setting the books around a police officer
and around the system, you get to tell a pretty
comprehensive story about the failures of that system, the ways
in which it's corrupted or perverted or doesn't do what
it professes to do. Has your attitude to law enforcement
(23:50):
a crime to those kind of stories shifted in there
now almost.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
Forty years Yeah, I mean, I think crime in general. Now,
if you're writing about a police officer, you're very conscious
of the fact that the public don't necessarily see them
as the Clint Eastwood figure riding into a lawless place
and bringing order from chaos. You know, the public general
(24:15):
public see them as being conflicted corrupted, covering up for
one another being part of the problem, and a lot
of younger crime writers are not using cops as their heroes,
and those of us who still do use cops as
our heroes, like Michael Connolly and me, are very conscious
we write about corruption. And the previous Reabis book was
(24:36):
about bad things he had done in his younger days
as part of this kind of group of police officers
and had got away with because in the past you
could get away with stuff that you couldn't get away
with today because of the technology and the surveillance and
the mobile phones and the cameras and everything else. The
stuff you could get away with in the past, and
you know would he feels bad about it. I think
(24:58):
Reabis does feel guilty about the fact that he didn't
always use the correct legal procedures to get a result,
but he feels he did usually get the right person.
He usually put manage to put someone away for something.
But he feels bad about that. But that is something
I think the people who write about police officers have
really taken on board.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Now.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Policing keeps changing. I mean, it really annoys me how
much the nomenclature changes. So Malcolm Fox when we first
met him was working for Complaints and conduct. That was
what internal affairs was called. Then it changed it morphedin
is something else, I think maybe even internal affairs. Then
it morphedin, it is something else, and now it's something
(25:39):
else again. So in this new book, when Riebis is
talking to him, he said, so what you call this week?
You know? And I've got to keep on top of
that because the people who read my books know that
these things are policing is changing.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
It's time the Joe Rabis story. You just write what
you like and it'll come true.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, that has happened in the past that I've written about,
something that has come true.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Weirdly, I'm glad you mentioned Malcolm Fox because he is
a kind of embodiment of that idea of working within
the system or not. And you introduced him in the
Complaints after the first time you attempted to finish writing
about Rebus unsuccessfully, and it seems to me that you
set him up, introduced him a potential new protagonist, and
either you wound up not liking Malcolm very much, or
(26:23):
the ribus in you just couldn't help yourself. And so
Malcolm moved pretty quickly from a potential new protagonist to
an antagonist. And I'm curious about how deliberate that was.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Yeah, I you know, haven't decided that Rebus would have
to retire. My wife said, great, you've got freedom not
to write any Kenny book you want to rate. What
do you want to write about? I said, what a
rate book? Cops? So I'm going to have another cop,
but I don't want anybody to think they're getting Rebus
two point zero or Ribus Light. He's got to be
a very different kind of cop from Rebus. So internal Affairs.
(26:54):
I thought that's interesting, because the kind of cop who
makes a good internal affairs detective is the antithesis of Rebus.
So Malcolm Fox came along. Now the problem is, if
you are working that job, you've got to be cleaner
than clean, whiter than white, never cross the line. Boring, right,
(27:15):
fairly boring. So book two he's trying to be a maverick,
but he's not very good at it. And then I
got an idea for a cold case novel. And there
was a unit in Edinburgh staff by retired detectives that
investigated cold cases, and I thought, oh, that's what Rebus
(27:35):
is doing. He would not go gentle into that good night.
He would not retire from the police and open a
bar or a bed and breakfast or move to Marbea.
He would want to still feel like a detective. So
I brought him back for standing in another man's grave.
And then I thought, the one person who wouldn't want
(27:58):
to see Rebus back on the force is Malcolm Fox.
So Fox did go from being protagonist to antagonist because
suddenly it was Reebus's story. And the more that I
continue to write about Raebus, the more Fox became the antagonist.
And that was an interesting turnaround. He's tried several times
(28:19):
to be a man of action, to be a frontline
police officer, and he's not very good at it. He's
a yes man, a toady, a pen pusher. He's a
very good administrator. But the fact that he always tries
to be a man of action becomes kind of hilarious
to me. He's just not very good at it.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Just but that I would rate a series about Rabis
managing a bid and breakfast and handling Alexander McCole smith
as a guest.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Now now you're talking maybe a short story I could
get a short story of that.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
There's a whole thing now.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
I keep thinking, you know, the ribis now in his dotage.
All I can do really is hand him over to
Richard Osman, who you know, to just say move him
into your care home. Richard, does you know you've got
an ex spy, You've got this, You've got that, have
an ex cop.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
So you've been living with John Rabis for almost forty
years now, more than once you've tried to shake him
off or you've tried to move on, but it's proved
very difficult. I think we can see how he's changed
in the pages over the years. How has writing him
changed you?
Speaker 3 (29:26):
I mean it's I mean he's made me a good living,
which is amazing to me. I've known him longer than
I've known most of my friends. He lives inside my head.
He's in a little compartment there, and every now and
again he pops out of a conversation with me and
we have a conversation about the way the world is.
He's gone through because he's older than me, he's going
(29:47):
through all the eggs and pains that I will have
to go through eventually, and so that's been interesting for
me as I've aged, he's aged as well. Do I
like him? I think I like him better than he
would like me. I think he would find me pretty
boring and wishy washy. He likes a challenge, and I
don't think I would present him with any sort of
a challenge. But the world has moved on and cops
(30:09):
like Riebis don't exist anymore. There's no room for them
in the modern world. Maybe there shouldn't have been room
for them in the first instance, but I've enjoyed it.
I mean, who knows what would have happened if I'd
let him. You know, the first draft of the first novel,
he died. He was shot and killed at the end
of the first book, and for some reason I brought
(30:30):
him back in the second draft. He survived. You know what,
He's going to survive longer than me. You know, when
I shuffle off this mortal coil, when there's nothing of
me left in secondhand bookshops around the globe, there will
charity shops. There will still be John Raebis.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Ian Rangan's latest novel, Midnight and Blow, is available everywhere now.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
Thanks so much for this to another special episode of
Read This. As always, if you want to dive further
into the show, you can search for it wherever you
listen to podcasts. There are more than ninety episodes in
the Read this archive for you to enjoy. See you
next week.
Popular Podcasts
Cold Case Files: Miami
Joyce Sapp, 76; Bryan Herrera, 16; and Laurance Webb, 32—three Miami residents whose lives were stolen in brutal, unsolved homicides. Cold Case Files: Miami follows award‑winning radio host and City of Miami Police reserve officer Enrique Santos as he partners with the department’s Cold Case Homicide Unit, determined family members, and the advocates who spend their lives fighting for justice for the victims who can no longer fight for themselves.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.