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 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.
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.
They were great.
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 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.
British bestseller lists.
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, he's not done with John Rebers yet.
I'm Michael Williams and.
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. 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, 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.
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 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. 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 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 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 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.
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?
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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 be you. So it was really 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 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 the crime. It seems remarkable to me that it's almost incidental who's responsible for the inciting 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 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 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'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 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 seeing the 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 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 Alexander mccol smith wrote you into one of his books, so you're going to get revenge?
Yeah, have him appeared.
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 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 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.
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?
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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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.
Is he John raebis because of John Shaft?
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
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 Sudoku.
Yeah, 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 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 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. 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.
Good, serendipitous.
You could not make that up. You couldn't make it up.
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 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 well. I tried to write books two, three and four, and that's why book three is set.
In London and hides it.
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 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
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 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 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 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.
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 say.
No to them, and you tend to kill off your journalists.
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.
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, to crime, to those kind of stories shifted in they now almost forty years.
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
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, he feels bad about it. I think Reebis does feel guilty about the fact that he didn't always 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 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 that because the people who read my books know that these things are policing is changing.
Based on the Joe Rebis story, you just write what you like and it'll come true.
Has happened in the past, 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 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.
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.
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, 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 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 Rebus, 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 write a series about Rabis managing a bidden breakfast and handling alex Anna McCall 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, 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.
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?
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 Rebiss 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 second hand bookshops around the globe, there will charity shops. There will still be John Hibbers.
Ian Rangkin's latest novel, Midnight in Blue, is available everywhere.
Now and before we go, a short list of three.
Crime writers who I think are worth your time to look out I mentioned up the top of the episode Reginald Hill.
Some of his earlier.
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.
They're really fun.
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.
That's it for this week's.
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.
It helps us a lot. Next week, I'm read this.
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.