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 here to tell us a little bit more about the episode.
Hi Michael, Daniel James.
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.
Before we talk.
About Ian Rankin, can you share a little bit about when your love for a good crime novel began.
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 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 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 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.
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?
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 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, 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, 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 to come back to life in the weeks and months ahead.
Coming up in just a moment, John Reebis will outlive in Raken.
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 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?
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 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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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, 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.
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?
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 be you. So it was really this the beginning of the it was the second draft.
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 the crime. It seems remarkable to me that it's almost incidental who's responsible for the inciding incident.
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 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 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 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 book has been correct.
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.
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, 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 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, 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.
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.
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.
I look forward to that. I'm surprised in prison.
Nemesis is coming. Shit, I should have done that.
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.
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?
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 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.
Nolan Laam, Yeah, Nolan layam.
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 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 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 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 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.
Coming up after the Break and Chees, the genesis of his lead Detective's nine, and why he never tires of writing about Edinburgh.
We'll be right back.
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, 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 start reading this stuff.
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.
Is he John raebis because of John Shaft?
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
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.
So if you started the series now, he could be called John Sadoka.
Yeah, well John Tetris.
Yeah, it doesn't have a ring to it. 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 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 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.
There's that research again.
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.
Good, serendipitous.
You could not make that up. You couldn't make it up.
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 it as a place from a distance as opposed to writing about it when you were there.
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 three is set in.
London and Rabis hates it.
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.
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
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 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 could spend your whole life trying to understand it.
Wasn't in one of your books that I read the phrase that Edinburgh was.
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 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.
Well, your detective can be in a politician's house one minute and a commission flats the next.
Yeah, exactly. I mean a journalist can do that. But a journalist you can see no.
To them, and you tend to kill off your journalists.
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?
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 a crime to those kind of stories shifted in there now almost.
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 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 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 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.
Now.
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 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.
It's time the Joe Rabis story. You just write what you like and it'll come true.
Yeah, that has happened in the past that I've written about, something that has come true.
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
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.
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.
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, 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 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 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 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.
Just but that I would rate a series about Rabis managing a bid and breakfast and handling Alexander McCole smith as a guest.
Now now you're talking maybe a short story I could get a short story of that.
There's a whole thing now.
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.
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?
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 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 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 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.
Ian Rangan's latest novel, Midnight and Blow, is available everywhere now.
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.