June 4, 2025 • 30 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.
Reading list:
Knots and Crosses, Ian Rankin, 1987
Black and Blue, Ian Rankin, 1997
The Hanging Garden, Ian Rankin, 1998
Standing in Another Man's Grave, Ian Rankin, 2012
Midnight and Blue, Ian Rankin, 2025
A Killing Kindness, Reginald Hill, 1980
In the Woods, Tana French, 2007
The Broken Shore, Peter Temple, 2005
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram
Guest: Ian Rankin
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
More than once on this show. I've mentioned a personal
weakness for a well crafted crime novel. As a kid,
when I was introduced to Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle,
an addiction took cold. I devoured mysteries and puzzle box books,
Ellery Queen and Raymond Chandler, hard boiled American crime and
cozy British Who Dunnits? And while I quickly learned that
(00:23):
the genre was capacious and varied, I was pretty indiscriminate
in where I followed it. For a voracious reader, part
of the treat was discovering new authors with both expansive
backlists and prolific ongoing output. It felt like an endless supply.
If you liked someone's work, there was a better than
average chance that there would be hours of reading pleasure ahead.
(00:45):
Over literally dozens of books, and a couple of particular
favorites emerged, the late Reginald Hill, whose Yorkshire set police
procedurals featured Superintendent Andy Diel and his offsideer Peter Pasco.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
They were great.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
They were trixie and literary, and in their corpulent, flatulent,
profane lead, they were a real precursor by several decades
to mckhern's Slough House Books. Then there's Ian Rankin and
his indelible creation, John Rebers. Since Notts and Crosses, the
first book in the series, was published in nineteen eighty seven,
Rankin has published another two dozen Reabis books. At one
(01:24):
point he was responsible for ten percent of all crime
fiction being sold in the UK. At another he occupied
eight of the ten slots on.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
British bestseller lists.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
He sold almost forty million books to date, translated into
thirty seven languages, and he is now sir Ian Rankin.
The twenty fifth book in the series, Midnight in Blue,
finds his retired cop hero behind bars, called upon to
assist in solving a locked room murder. Crime readers everywhere
can delight in the knowledge that, despite Rankin's best efforts,
(01:56):
he's not done with John Rebers yet.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I'm Michael Williams and.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
This is Read This the show about the books we
love and the stories behind me. I was lucky enough
to sit down with Rankin, sorry, sir Ian, at this
year's Sydney Writers' Festival, just a couple of weeks ago.
(02:24):
I have to say I came to Midnight in Blue
and my first thought was that the title immediately evoked
for me. The eighth book in the Reabs series, Black
and Blue. An extraordinary book, but a book where Rebus
was laid as low, really as you'd cast him at
any point, and it was the first in a sequence
of several books where every time you thought he couldn't
go lower, you really did give him another kicking. So,
(02:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
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 had 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
(03:21):
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, all think it must be a con.
(03:43):
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 in 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 I do enough research that I can persuade
the reader. I do a lot of research. But a
(04:04):
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 Reabis
wouldn't come here. There's no way you would take an
ex Edinburgh copp and put him in Edinburgh prison because
(04:26):
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 into the general population, and I
(04:46):
was happy. And when the governor eventually read the book,
it was a couple of tiny things he thought had
got wrong, but there was nothing major that he thought
had got wrong.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
You did set yourself in this book, and it's the
nature of crime in a pretty but you set yourself
to 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 it fan putting that together?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Okay? First thing that happened was the previous book, Heartful
the 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. Sense is about
to be pronounced the end. It's a lovely Reichenbach Falls moment.
And of course I will only ever be the second
(05:37):
best crime writer 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 Reabis series
with a Reichenbach Falls. But then people start to say, well,
what happened next? And I start 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
(06:01):
you've 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
(06:23):
thought there were 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 that was going on, and
(06:45):
then I thought, well, what's he going to do in prison?
Is 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 cell. 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, I had no idea how this would happen.
(07:08):
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 might happen.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
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 (07:26):
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 later, 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
(07:48):
be you. So it was really the beginning of the
it was the second draft.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
I'm fascinated by that. I'm in a book like The
Hanging Garden where the theme 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
(08:14):
the crime. It seems remarkable to me that it's almost
incidental who's responsible for the inciting incident.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
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 more 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
(08:43):
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
(09:04):
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
(09:25):
that to happen. This was going to be a trilogy
with this guy in it. But the book just said,
this guy's 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
(09:49):
book has been correct.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Has that always been approached to writing or is that
a trust in process that comes only with time and
success and seeing the it works for you.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
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
hard about the craft that comes later on. You know,
(10:25):
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 is a ragged beast, very much so,
which is why nobody sees it except me. And that's
(10:45):
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, and he writes quick as well, and yet
somehow it works so everybody's different, but I found a
(11:10):
way that worked for me quite early on, and I've
stuck to it.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
I have to digress briefly. Your former neighbor Alexander mccol
smith wrote you into one of his books, so you're
going to get revenge?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, have him appeared.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
He's actually written me into more than one. He's had
me 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 say, revenge Sandy is a dish
(11:44):
served very cold.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
I look forward to that. I'm surprised in prison.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Nemesis is coming. Shit, I should have done that.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
You mentioned the idea of the moment before this book
being one of many possible finishing points for Reebis and
the Raichenbach Fall 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.
(12:20):
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 Reabs's
kind of significant other by these later books. How hard
was it to let him go?
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Yeah, you're correct. Caffretty first appears in books three as
a very minor character. I needed Rebus 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. He kind of got under my skin
(13:01):
and I thought, oh, he's a useful can he, as
you say, a useful sort of almost like kenan Abel
or jacqulin Hyde or he's the devil tempting Reebis to
come to the dark side? Nolan Layam, Yeah, Nolan wayem
as 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
(13:23):
actually has two completely different life stories. In book three
he grew up in Glasgow by book seven or eighty.
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
that sort of devil whispering in Reebus's ear. And also
they're from very similar backgrounds. They understand each other very well.
(13:44):
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 is 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
and the world. But Reebus and he have this empathy.
They understand each other so well that you're never sure
(14:04):
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 Headstones, Cafferty survived. He didn't die, and it was
my agent who said, I think it's time. He said,
go back and look at that final scene. I think
(14:26):
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 Reebis in prison in this new book is we
don't have to dwell on the aftermath of it too much.
There's too much other stuff going on that Rebis isn't
(14:47):
sitting in his flat at dead of night thinking too
much about Cafferty. That is for possibly a future.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Book coming up after the break Inches, The genesis of
his lead detective's name and why he never tires of
writing about Edinburgh will be right back. Ian Rankin had
(15:18):
never planned to become a crime writer. Back in nineteen
eighty seven.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
He was a young.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Muriel Sparks, scholar of all things, and very earnestly trying
to rewrite Robert Louis Stevenson to have his own go
at Doctor Jekyl and mister Hyde. Despite the fact that
this first novel, Knots and Crosses made relatively little waves
at the time, the Crime Writers' Association wrote to an
and asked him to join, and he noticed increasingly as
(15:43):
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 start reading this stuff.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Think I'm still the only crime writer I know who
wasn't a fan of the genre before they started writing it.
I'd never The only crime novel I remember reading I
was maybe twelve or thirteen was Shaft, and I only
read it because I wasn't old enough to see the movie.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Is he John raebis because of John Shaft?
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Yeah? Yeah, John Shaft. John raebis definitely. And Riebus because
of Riebus. Is a picture puzzle. It's a little series
of drawings with letters taken away or add it. 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 ar and then someone
rowing a boat row that gives you RRO and you
(16:42):
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 1 (16:55):
So if you started the series now he could be
called John Sudoku.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
Yeah, John Tetris.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Yeah, it doesn't have a ring to it.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
I've got to be and 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
(17:26):
and my mates on Friday night. So I went to
this pub and his mates included an ex police officer
and a guy called Joe Ribis 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 having Polish roots. I didn't know
(17:49):
until then.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
There's that research again.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Yeah, And Joe said to me, he said, I thought
you got my name from the phone directory. I said, no,
I didn't think of Rebus 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 1 (18:17):
Good, serendipitous.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
You could not make that up. You couldn't make it up.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
That is wildly good. It does strike that 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
(18:41):
it as a place from a distance as opposed to
writing about it when you were there.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
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 well. I tried to
write books two, three and four, and that's why book
(19:08):
three is set.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
In London and hides it.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Oh well, I thought, I'm hating it here. I'll channel
that hate to him and he can load it 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
(19:32):
go back. I'd go back to Scotland once or twice
a year and do the research, look at places and
make sure I'd described him 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
(19:55):
it imaginatively when I'm living there? And I think the
first book I wrote when I got back was the
one The 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
(20:17):
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
(20:38):
could spend your whole life trying to understand it.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Wasn't in one of your books that I read the
phrase that Edinburgh.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Was all for for coon nickers. Thats I, that's a
that's a yeah, that's a that's a Glasgow saying about
Edinburgh it's all for coton nickers. Or is one history
in Edinburgh put it as a place of public probity
and private vice, which brings us back to jack lyn
Hyde again. So anyway, so that was what I thought
(21:04):
I was doing with the book, was trying to do
this sort of social history of Edinburgh and at it
seems time take on some pretty big hopefully, I thought,
pretty big questions about good and evil. And a detective
is a perfect means of investigating a city from top
to bomb.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Well, your detective can be in a politician's house one
minute and a commission flats the next.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Yeah, exactly. I mean a journalist can do that, but
a journalist you can say.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
No to them, and you tend to kill off your journalists.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
I do. Yeah, well, I don't always kill off my journalists,
but you're right, You're right they have. Yeah. One of
the many early books didn't last too long, did they.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Coming back again to that idea of public property 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,
(22:06):
to crime, to those kind of stories shifted in they
now almost forty years.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
Yeah, I mean I think crime writers 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
public see them as being conflicted, corrupted, covering up for
(22:35):
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
about bad things he had done in his younger days
(22:56):
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, he feels bad about it. I think Reebis
does feel guilty about the fact that he didn't always
(23:19):
use the correct legal procedures to get a result, but
he feels he didn't usually get the right person, 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. Now policing keeps changing. I mean, it really
annoys me how much the nomenclature changes. So Malcolm Fox
(23:42):
when we first met him, was working for complaints and conduct.
That was what internal affairs was called. Then it changed
it morphed is something else, I think, maybe even internal affairs.
Then it morphed into something else, and now it's something
else again. So in this new book, when Reebis is
talking to him, he said, so what you call this week?
You know? And I've got to keep on top of
(24:03):
that because the people who read my books know that
these things are policing is changing.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Based on the Joe Rebis story, you just write what
you like and it'll come true.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Has happened in the past, I've written about something that
has come true. Weirdly.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
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 the
(24:39):
Rebus 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 (24:50):
Yeah, I you know, haven't decided that Rebus were tough
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 gonna have another cop. But
I don't want anybody to think they're getting Rebus two
point zero or Rebus Light. He's got to be a
very different kind of cop from Rebus. So internal affairs.
(25:10):
I thought that's interesting, because the kind of cop who
makes a good internal affairs detective is the antithesis of Rebis.
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,
(25:30):
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
(25:51):
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 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 to
(26:13):
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 Rebus, the more Fox became the antagonist.
And that was an interesting turnaround. He's tried several times
(26:35):
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 1 (26:54):
Just but that I would write a series about Rabis
managing a bidden breakfast and handling alex Anna McCall smith
as a guest.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Now, now you're talking maybe a short story. I could
get a short story of that.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
There's a whole thing now.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
I keep thinking, you know, in the Reabis now, in
his dotage, all I can do really is hand him
over to Richard Osmond. You know, I just say move
him into your care home. Richard Is, you know you've
got an ex spy, You've got this, you've got that,
have an ex cop.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
So you've been living with John Raebis for almost forty
years now, more than once. You've tried to shake him
off for 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 (27:42):
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
(28:03):
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 like Rebiss don't exist anymore.
(28:27):
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 him back in the second draft.
(28:47):
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 second hand bookshops
around the globe, there will charity shops. There will still
be John Hibbers.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Ian Rangkin's latest novel, Midnight in Blue, is available everywhere.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Now and before we go, a short list of three.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Crime writers who I think are worth your time to
look out I mentioned up the top of the episode
Reginald Hill.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Some of his earlier.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Books have dated a bit, but they are deeply pleasurable
and they riff on everything from the Iliad to his
love of country house mysteries.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
They're really fun.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
A special mentioned are Irish crimewriter Tana French, who's absolutely wonderful.
Her Belfast Murder Squad books are well worth catching up with.
And the late Great Peter Temple, Australing crime writer extraordinary.
Any one of his books you will have a wonderful
time with. You can find them and all other books
we mentioned in this episode at your favorite independent bookstore.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
That's it for this week's.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Show, and the reviews on the Apple pop app are
sitting on two hundred and seventy two that have been
for weeks now. If you haven't gone there to give
a little star rating or a review, do so. I
want that number to get all the way to three
hundred before our hundred episode in a few weeks time.
And while you're there, share the episodes with a friend
who you think will like them.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
It helps us a lot. Next week, I'm read this.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
I'm chatting with Australian author Dominic Amarna about his debut
novel I Want Everything Read. This is a Schwarz Media
production made possible by the generous support of ar Group
The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with
mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher.
Thanks for listening, See you next week.
More than once on this show. I've mentioned a personal
weakness for a well crafted crime novel. As a kid,
when I was introduced to Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle,
an addiction took cold. I devoured mysteries and puzzle box books,
Ellery Queen and Raymond Chandler, hard boiled American crime and
cozy British Who Dunnits? And while I quickly learned that
(00:23):
the genre was capacious and varied, I was pretty indiscriminate
in where I followed it. For a voracious reader, part
of the treat was discovering new authors with both expansive
backlists and prolific ongoing output. It felt like an endless supply.
If you liked someone's work, there was a better than
average chance that there would be hours of reading pleasure ahead.
(00:45):
Over literally dozens of books, and a couple of particular
favorites emerged, the late Reginald Hill, whose Yorkshire set police
procedurals featured Superintendent Andy Diel and his offsideer Peter Pasco.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
They were great.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
They were trixie and literary, and in their corpulent, flatulent,
profane lead, they were a real precursor by several decades
to mckhern's Slough House Books. Then there's Ian Rankin and
his indelible creation, John Rebers. Since Notts and Crosses, the
first book in the series, was published in nineteen eighty seven,
Rankin has published another two dozen Reabis books. At one
(01:24):
point he was responsible for ten percent of all crime
fiction being sold in the UK. At another he occupied
eight of the ten slots on.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
British bestseller lists.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
He sold almost forty million books to date, translated into
thirty seven languages, and he is now sir Ian Rankin.
The twenty fifth book in the series, Midnight in Blue,
finds his retired cop hero behind bars, called upon to
assist in solving a locked room murder. Crime readers everywhere
can delight in the knowledge that, despite Rankin's best efforts,
(01:56):
he's not done with John Rebers yet.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I'm Michael Williams and.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
This is Read This the show about the books we
love and the stories behind me. I was lucky enough
to sit down with Rankin, sorry, sir Ian, at this
year's Sydney Writers' Festival, just a couple of weeks ago.
(02:24):
I have to say I came to Midnight in Blue
and my first thought was that the title immediately evoked
for me. The eighth book in the Reabs series, Black
and Blue. An extraordinary book, but a book where Rebus
was laid as low, really as you'd cast him at
any point, and it was the first in a sequence
of several books where every time you thought he couldn't
go lower, you really did give him another kicking. So,
(02:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
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 had 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
(03:21):
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, all think it must be a con.
(03:43):
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 in 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 I do enough research that I can persuade
the reader. I do a lot of research. But a
(04:04):
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 Reabis
wouldn't come here. There's no way you would take an
ex Edinburgh copp and put him in Edinburgh prison because
(04:26):
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 into the general population, and I
(04:46):
was happy. And when the governor eventually read the book,
it was a couple of tiny things he thought had
got wrong, but there was nothing major that he thought
had got wrong.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
You did set yourself in this book, and it's the
nature of crime in a pretty but you set yourself
to 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 it fan putting that together?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Okay? First thing that happened was the previous book, Heartful
the 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. Sense is about
to be pronounced the end. It's a lovely Reichenbach Falls moment.
And of course I will only ever be the second
(05:37):
best crime writer 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 Reabis series
with a Reichenbach Falls. But then people start to say, well,
what happened next? And I start 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
(06:01):
you've 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
(06:23):
thought there were 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 that was going on, and
(06:45):
then I thought, well, what's he going to do in prison?
Is 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 cell. 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, I had no idea how this would happen.
(07:08):
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 might happen.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
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 (07:26):
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 later, 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
(07:48):
be you. So it was really the beginning of the
it was the second draft.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
I'm fascinated by that. I'm in a book like The
Hanging Garden where the theme 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
(08:14):
the crime. It seems remarkable to me that it's almost
incidental who's responsible for the inciting incident.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
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 more 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
(08:43):
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
(09:04):
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
(09:25):
that to happen. This was going to be a trilogy
with this guy in it. But the book just said,
this guy's 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
(09:49):
book has been correct.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Has that always been approached to writing or is that
a trust in process that comes only with time and
success and seeing the it works for you.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
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
hard about the craft that comes later on. You know,
(10:25):
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 is a ragged beast, very much so,
which is why nobody sees it except me. And that's
(10:45):
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, and he writes quick as well, and yet
somehow it works so everybody's different, but I found a
(11:10):
way that worked for me quite early on, and I've
stuck to it.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
I have to digress briefly. Your former neighbor Alexander mccol
smith wrote you into one of his books, so you're
going to get revenge?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, have him appeared.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
He's actually written me into more than one. He's had
me 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 say, revenge Sandy is a dish
(11:44):
served very cold.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
I look forward to that. I'm surprised in prison.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Nemesis is coming. Shit, I should have done that.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
You mentioned the idea of the moment before this book
being one of many possible finishing points for Reebis and
the Raichenbach Fall 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.
(12:20):
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 Reabs's
kind of significant other by these later books. How hard
was it to let him go?
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Yeah, you're correct. Caffretty first appears in books three as
a very minor character. I needed Rebus 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. He kind of got under my skin
(13:01):
and I thought, oh, he's a useful can he, as
you say, a useful sort of almost like kenan Abel
or jacqulin Hyde or he's the devil tempting Reebis to
come to the dark side? Nolan Layam, Yeah, Nolan wayem
as 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
(13:23):
actually has two completely different life stories. In book three
he grew up in Glasgow by book seven or eighty.
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
that sort of devil whispering in Reebus's ear. And also
they're from very similar backgrounds. They understand each other very well.
(13:44):
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 is 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
and the world. But Reebus and he have this empathy.
They understand each other so well that you're never sure
(14:04):
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 Headstones, Cafferty survived. He didn't die, and it was
my agent who said, I think it's time. He said,
go back and look at that final scene. I think
(14:26):
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 Reebis in prison in this new book is we
don't have to dwell on the aftermath of it too much.
There's too much other stuff going on that Rebis isn't
(14:47):
sitting in his flat at dead of night thinking too
much about Cafferty. That is for possibly a future.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Book coming up after the break Inches, The genesis of
his lead detective's name and why he never tires of
writing about Edinburgh will be right back. Ian Rankin had
(15:18):
never planned to become a crime writer. Back in nineteen
eighty seven.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
He was a young.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Muriel Sparks, scholar of all things, and very earnestly trying
to rewrite Robert Louis Stevenson to have his own go
at Doctor Jekyl and mister Hyde. Despite the fact that
this first novel, Knots and Crosses made relatively little waves
at the time, the Crime Writers' Association wrote to an
and asked him to join, and he noticed increasingly as
(15:43):
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 start reading this stuff.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Think I'm still the only crime writer I know who
wasn't a fan of the genre before they started writing it.
I'd never The only crime novel I remember reading I
was maybe twelve or thirteen was Shaft, and I only
read it because I wasn't old enough to see the movie.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Is he John raebis because of John Shaft?
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Yeah? Yeah, John Shaft. John raebis definitely. And Riebus because
of Riebus. Is a picture puzzle. It's a little series
of drawings with letters taken away or add it. 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 ar and then someone
rowing a boat row that gives you RRO and you
(16:42):
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 1 (16:55):
So if you started the series now he could be
called John Sudoku.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
Yeah, John Tetris.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Yeah, it doesn't have a ring to it.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
I've got to be and 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
(17:26):
and my mates on Friday night. So I went to
this pub and his mates included an ex police officer
and a guy called Joe Ribis 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 having Polish roots. I didn't know
(17:49):
until then.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
There's that research again.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Yeah, And Joe said to me, he said, I thought
you got my name from the phone directory. I said, no,
I didn't think of Rebus 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 1 (18:17):
Good, serendipitous.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
You could not make that up. You couldn't make it up.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
That is wildly good. It does strike that 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
(18:41):
it as a place from a distance as opposed to
writing about it when you were there.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
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 well. I tried to
write books two, three and four, and that's why book
(19:08):
three is set.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
In London and hides it.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Oh well, I thought, I'm hating it here. I'll channel
that hate to him and he can load it 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
(19:32):
go back. I'd go back to Scotland once or twice
a year and do the research, look at places and
make sure I'd described him 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
(19:55):
it imaginatively when I'm living there? And I think the
first book I wrote when I got back was the
one The 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
(20:17):
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
(20:38):
could spend your whole life trying to understand it.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Wasn't in one of your books that I read the
phrase that Edinburgh.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Was all for for coon nickers. Thats I, that's a
that's a yeah, that's a that's a Glasgow saying about
Edinburgh it's all for coton nickers. Or is one history
in Edinburgh put it as a place of public probity
and private vice, which brings us back to jack lyn
Hyde again. So anyway, so that was what I thought
(21:04):
I was doing with the book, was trying to do
this sort of social history of Edinburgh and at it
seems time take on some pretty big hopefully, I thought,
pretty big questions about good and evil. And a detective
is a perfect means of investigating a city from top
to bomb.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Well, your detective can be in a politician's house one
minute and a commission flats the next.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Yeah, exactly. I mean a journalist can do that, but
a journalist you can say.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
No to them, and you tend to kill off your journalists.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
I do. Yeah, well, I don't always kill off my journalists,
but you're right, You're right they have. Yeah. One of
the many early books didn't last too long, did they.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Coming back again to that idea of public property 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,
(22:06):
to crime, to those kind of stories shifted in they
now almost forty years.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
Yeah, I mean I think crime writers 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
public see them as being conflicted, corrupted, covering up for
(22:35):
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
about bad things he had done in his younger days
(22:56):
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, he feels bad about it. I think Reebis
does feel guilty about the fact that he didn't always
(23:19):
use the correct legal procedures to get a result, but
he feels he didn't usually get the right person, 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. Now policing keeps changing. I mean, it really
annoys me how much the nomenclature changes. So Malcolm Fox
(23:42):
when we first met him, was working for complaints and conduct.
That was what internal affairs was called. Then it changed
it morphed is something else, I think, maybe even internal affairs.
Then it morphed into something else, and now it's something
else again. So in this new book, when Reebis is
talking to him, he said, so what you call this week?
You know? And I've got to keep on top of
(24:03):
that because the people who read my books know that
these things are policing is changing.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Based on the Joe Rebis story, you just write what
you like and it'll come true.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Has happened in the past, I've written about something that
has come true. Weirdly.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
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 the
(24:39):
Rebus 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 (24:50):
Yeah, I you know, haven't decided that Rebus were tough
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 gonna have another cop. But
I don't want anybody to think they're getting Rebus two
point zero or Rebus Light. He's got to be a
very different kind of cop from Rebus. So internal affairs.
(25:10):
I thought that's interesting, because the kind of cop who
makes a good internal affairs detective is the antithesis of Rebis.
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,
(25:30):
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
(25:51):
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 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 to
(26:13):
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 Rebus, the more Fox became the antagonist.
And that was an interesting turnaround. He's tried several times
(26:35):
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 1 (26:54):
Just but that I would write a series about Rabis
managing a bidden breakfast and handling alex Anna McCall smith
as a guest.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Now, now you're talking maybe a short story. I could
get a short story of that.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
There's a whole thing now.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
I keep thinking, you know, in the Reabis now, in
his dotage, all I can do really is hand him
over to Richard Osmond. You know, I just say move
him into your care home. Richard Is, you know you've
got an ex spy, You've got this, you've got that,
have an ex cop.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
So you've been living with John Raebis for almost forty
years now, more than once. You've tried to shake him
off for 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 (27:42):
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
(28:03):
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 like Rebiss don't exist anymore.
(28:27):
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 him back in the second draft.
(28:47):
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 second hand bookshops
around the globe, there will charity shops. There will still
be John Hibbers.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Ian Rangkin's latest novel, Midnight in Blue, is available everywhere.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Now and before we go, a short list of three.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Crime writers who I think are worth your time to
look out I mentioned up the top of the episode
Reginald Hill.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Some of his earlier.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Books have dated a bit, but they are deeply pleasurable
and they riff on everything from the Iliad to his
love of country house mysteries.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
They're really fun.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
A special mentioned are Irish crimewriter Tana French, who's absolutely wonderful.
Her Belfast Murder Squad books are well worth catching up with.
And the late Great Peter Temple, Australing crime writer extraordinary.
Any one of his books you will have a wonderful
time with. You can find them and all other books
we mentioned in this episode at your favorite independent bookstore.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
That's it for this week's.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Show, and the reviews on the Apple pop app are
sitting on two hundred and seventy two that have been
for weeks now. If you haven't gone there to give
a little star rating or a review, do so. I
want that number to get all the way to three
hundred before our hundred episode in a few weeks time.
And while you're there, share the episodes with a friend
who you think will like them.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
It helps us a lot. Next week, I'm read this.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
I'm chatting with Australian author Dominic Amarna about his debut
novel I Want Everything Read. This is a Schwarz Media
production made possible by the generous support of ar Group
The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with
mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher.
Thanks for listening, See you next week.
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