FOR IAN Rankin, the internally acclaimed and best selling Scottish crime novelist, the last 18 months have seen the closing of one chapter in his writing career and the opening of another.
He has retired his much loved character John Rebus and in 2009 published his first graphic novel Dark Entries, wrote the crime novella A Cool Head for a literacy campaign, and most importantly unveiled a new, and very different, leading man for his crime novels - Malcolm Fox.
In another first for the Scot, Ian will be making his debut at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature on Thursday April 22, however it will not be his first visit to Galway.
“I have been there before, driving through on holidays,” Ian tells me from his home in Edinburgh, during our Tuesday morning conversation. “My wife is from Belfast so we go holidaying in Northern Ireland and sometimes go south of the border. I have a lot of friends in Galway who I haven’t seen in donkey’s years so I’ll be catching up with them.”
While in Galway, Ian also hopes to catch up fellow crime novelist and native Galwegian Ken Bruen.
“I was only talking about him the other day at a crime fiction festival in Munich,” he says. “I know Ken well, but I’ve not seen him for a while. He has quite an avid readership in America and I’ve met him at American crime fiction festivals.”
Introducing Malcolm Fox
Ian is best know as the creator of Inspector John Rebus, but he retired the popular character in his 2007 novel Exit Music.
“Retiring Rebus gave me a lot of freedom,” Ian says. “My wife said I could now write anything I liked, science fiction, surrealism, but I wanted to write a crime novel set in Edinburgh, so I’m not done with that yet.”
Ian’s first post-Rebus novel The Complaints introduced Malcolm Fox, an inspector who works in the Scottish police department’s Professional Standards Unit, investigating serious complaints against fellow officers. Fox is a good, decent, man, but one who struggles with abstaining from alcohol, caring for his ill father, and worrying over his sister who is being abused by her husband. Where did Ian get the idea for Fox?
“Originally I read something in a newspaper about the complaints department,” he says. “I didn’t know anything about these guys so I got a favour from a senior police officer and he put me in touch with someone who used to work in there and as I interviewed him, I saw Malcolm Fox become three dimensional.
“I saw the philosophy and psychology that would allow you to do that job, having to keep secrets as you could be investigating someone for up to a year without them knowing, taking orders from high up, so Malcolm is more like a spy. He’s the opposite of Rebus, who was more like a private investigator within the police, not part of the team.
“I liked the idea of the internal affairs department, where the cops investigate other cops. Not many writers use it in their novels. It’s a very different set up from the regular police as those who work there are hated by the criminals and by their fellow cops, so a there is a siege mentality as they go about their business.”
Alongside Rebus and Fox, the other major character in Ian’s work is his beloved Edinburgh, the setting for the vast majority of his novels. A stunningly beautiful city dominated by 18th century buildings, narrow cobbled streets, and a keen sense of history, but also of a modern future, it is no surprise the Scottish capital is a continued source of inspiration.
“It’s a small city of about half a million people but it contains multitudes. It’s always changing,” says Ian. “There’s always something happening to the structure of the city and that’s why I write about Edinburgh. Malcolm Fox also means I can also write about Edinburgh in a new way without it being just about the crime scenes that Rebus visits or visited.
“Because Malcolm works in the complaints department it means he gets to move around. He could get a call from Glasgow to investigate police there so for the next novel I may move it out of Edinburgh, and perhaps for the third novel have Fox investigate Rebus. That’s not certain. It’s all up in the air at the moment.”
Fox investigating Rebus is a novel Rankin fans would relish as Fox, in both his job and his demeanour is a world away from the hard boiled, hard living, Rolling Stones loving John Rebus.
“Malcolm Fox does allow me to do new things,” says Ian. “He’s got ideals and is less cynical, less dysfunctional, than Rebus. He’s close to his family and he’s friendly. I’m enjoying writing about that aspect of Malcolm Fox. He has a relationship with his father that Rebus couldn’t have, because Rebus’ parents are dead by book one.”
Yet like all great crime fiction heroes, Fox is a man with his own personal demons to wrestle. Why is it so important in crime fiction that the crime fighter is almost never a happy man with a stable family life?
“We’re much more attracted to baddies than goodies,” says Ian. “Hannibal Lecter is a more interesting character in Silence Of The Lambs than Francis Dolarhyde, so we don’t want our good characters to be angles, we need to have some darkness in their souls. If they always do things by the book they are quite colourless. We don’t want to stop the action because the main character has to collect his children from school.”
The Complaints was published in September to critical acclaim and Malcolm Fox has been well received by Ian’s wide readership, even though they were unhappy about Rebus’ retirement.
“They weren’t happy as a lot of them had been reading Rebus’ exploits for 20 years and had got to know the guy over thousands of pages,” Ian says. “They felt very sad to lose him, but the thing is that when the first Rebus novel came out in 1987, no bugger bought it. It took a few books for him to take off.”
Music man
Rebus, when not fighting crime enjoyed listening to the Rolling Stones, and the novels Let It Bleed, Black & Blue, and Beggars Banquet, are all titles of Rolling Stones albums.
“I like a particular period of the Stones from the late 1960s to the early 1970s but Rebus is a true Rolling Stones fan,” says Ian. “The Stones were rebels and Rebus has that rebelliousness about him. I think most crime writers would rather be rock stars than writers. I just never got a chance to do it. I was never a good singer.”
Interestingly though it was the Stones’ most background and unofficial member who was the source of inspiration for Rebus - Ian Stewart, the man who played piano on many of the Stones’ recordings from the mid 1960s to mid 1970s.
“Ian Stewart is from the same part of Scotland as I am,” says Ian. “He was an original member of the Stones but his face didn’t fit in, he didn’t look the part, so he was shoved into the background, but he was happy on the periphery, a bit like Rebus, who doesn’t want to be at the centre of things. He’s the outsider looking in.”
Music is a central motif in Ian’s novels. As well as the Rolling Stones’ titles, Dark Entries is also the opening song on Bauhaus’ In The Flat Field, Exit Music comes from a Radiohead song, while The Hanging Garden was also a single by The Cure.
“It’s a shorthand way of telling people something about the character and it’s my opportunity to touch the musical world,” says Ian. “Musicians have become fans and I’ve got emails from Pete Townshend and Robert Smith of The Cure and that would never have happened without me talking about music in the books. Rebus never listened to The Cure or Joy Division or Bauhaus like I do, but his sidekick Siobhan did. If you put their musical tastes together you get my musical taste.”
Ian is also a keen follower of contemporary music and of Scottish rock in particular. He listens to Mogwai while writing. He’s impressed by singer-songwriter King Creosote and the new folk music of the Fence Collective artists. He also likes the new albums by Frightened Rabbit and thanks to an Edinburgh band got a chance to dabble in being a rock star. “St Jude’s Infirmary is a great Edinburgh band,” he says. “I wrote lyrics for their second album.”
As a writer, one of Ian’s biggest challenges came last year when he wrote the graphic novel Dark Entries. It was a departure in writing style and subject matter, a crime novel that is also a horror story and satire on reality TV.
“It was a huge challenge,” he says. “I had no lessons in how to do it. I thought it was going to be easy as there are nearly no words on the page unlike writing a novel.
“The man I was working with Werther Dell’edera, was in Rome and I never met him. I had to make sure he could make the drawings as I wanted them to be. It was like being a film director. The artist is the cameraman and the writer does everything else. I’m the costume designer as I have to come up with what the characters wear, the casting director as I have to describe the characters. I had 1,000 pages worth of descriptions for every drawing. It took me forever.”
An Evening With Ian Rankin, part of the Cúirt festival, takes place in the Town Hall Theatre on Thursday April 22 at 8.30pm. Ian will be reading, play a number of his favourite songs for the audience, and be interviewed by broadcaster Philip King. For tickets contact the Town Hall on 091 - 569777.
