Ian Rankin: ‘Serious writers are attracted to the crime novel because it takes on morally complex themes in a digestible way’

I’d toyed with making the previous Rebus novel (A Heart Full of Headstones) the final book. It ends with Rebus in court accused of murder. But fans really wanted to know what happened next. I mulled it over, decided he would be found guilty, and then got excited about the idea of an ex-cop in prison, surrounded by enemies. If there was an unexplained death in that prison, who might be best placed to solve the puzzle before the place erupts?
I do spend a lot of time getting the title right – I can’t really get started on a book until I have the title, and that title will usually say something about the theme, texture or atmosphere of the story. Midnight and Blue wasn’t the working title; it suggested itself later on.
I can’t think of a nation on Earth that doesn’t have a class system. The few royals I’ve met have worked hard at the events where I’ve seen them.
Edinburgh is the birthplace of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and it continues to be a Jekyll and Hyde city – a place of great culture and prosperity, but also a city of the desperate and the disenfranchised. Every city has those two faces, but in Edinburgh it is baked into the fabric of the place – the rational, planned New Town and the more chaotic and ramshackle Old Town. The perfect setting for detective stories.
I learned so much from Muriel Spark. Jean Brodie remains peerless, but Spark wrote many other great, short novels which are full of charm and elegance on the surface but with demons lurking underneath. She was a great satirist and a great analyser of society’s and human nature’s fundamental flaws.
I think the walls between “literature” and “commercial fiction” are crumbling. Serious writers are attracted to the crime novel because it takes on morally complex themes in a digestible way. You can now study crime novels in high school and in academia. I’m not even sure the Man Booker is immune these days …
Rankin On The Staircase is so far back in time that I can’t remember if I drew any clear conclusions at all! I did also present a three-part documentary on Evil (for Channel 4 Television) and again by the end I could point to an act of evil much more readily than I could an irretrievably evil individual. I did undergo an exorcism in Rome though, which was interesting.
Just this year I went on a (short) pilgrimage. I was in a ship that was travelling from San Francisco to New Zealand and one of the stops was Samoa. I visited the house where Robert Louis Stevenson spent his last years. Afterwards I climbed the steep hill to visit his mausoleum. It was about 40 degrees and 90 per cent humidity and I thought I was about to expire. I was cursing him to the skies on the final approach.
Write lots, read lots, become self-critical, prepare for rejection, show your work to people you trust, get lucky and stay lucky.
Black and Blue was my breakthrough book, published at a time when I was struggling financially (and personally – the younger of my two sons having been born with profound special needs). It won the Gold Dagger and convinced my publishers to stick with me and spend a bit on marketing and advertising. My next book crept into the UK top 10 for a week.
Having a son with special needs, I have met so many everyday heroes – carers and charities and tenacious families who never give up fighting for their loved ones. They seldom get noticed or thanked, but then that’s not why they do it. Those are the people I most admire.
In the UK I would begin by nationalising the water companies – their greed and mismanagement continues to appal. Wealth taxes would be high on my agenda, too, along with summary confiscations from those who profited venally from public procurement during Covid. I might put my feet up for ten minutes after that.
I loved Dominic Nolan’s novel White City (1950s and 60s London gangsters and low-lifes). It might not be out quite yet – I was sent an early copy. Film – Poor Things. I’d have said Alasdair Gray’s novel was unfilmable; turns out I was wrong. It’s a mad steampunk kaleidoscope of a film. TV – I don’t watch much, truth be told. But Sherwood is on my list – it’s just finished but I’ll find it somewhere. Podcast – I never listen to them.
This might be an odd choice but the event that springs to mind is the suicide of Joy Division’s singer Ian Curtis. I’d just turned 20 and I was singer in a band that desperately wanted to be the Scottish Joy Division. We were about to play a gig (or had just played a gig) when we heard the news. A shock to the system. I’m sure I wrote screeds in my diary that night.
A patch of first-growth temperate rainforest on the outskirts of Tofino on Vancouver Island. A raised walkway means you can head into the middle of the woods without disturbing the terrain. It is silent and spiritual – but the reason it is so special is because the central belt of Scotland used to be covered in this stuff. It was chopped down to create farmland and provide wood for shipbuilding and the like. So I can walk across a patch of far-western Canada and be back at home several centuries in the past.
I’ve got LPs signed by the likes of Keith Richards, Brian Eno and Van Morrison. I have framed photos of the one time I met Muriel Spark. But my phone’s screensaver is probably the one thing I couldn’t part with. It depicts a moment on Christmas Eve 2020. Due to Covid we weren’t sure our son would be able to come home from his care home to spend Christmas with us. Eventually it was decreed that he could. The photo shows my wife sitting next to him while he reaches out to give his brother a huge all-encompassing hug.
The most beautiful book I own is my copy of the first edition of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, inscribed to me by Muriel Spark.
Can we change the dinner party to a good whiskey bar? Alasdair Gray and William McIlvanney would be there, maybe with Robert Louis Stevenson too. Plus Muriel Spark and Edna O’Brien and Marian Keyes. I would put my credit card behind the bar and just sit and listen.
If you mean Edinburgh, the best thing is that it is a city the size of a town with the feel of a village. The worst is that it can get congested in places, but then I know all the quieter routes to my favourite watering-holes.
My favourite quotation is from Milan Kundera: “The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.” Though I’m also fond of Iris Murdoch: “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”
It has to be John Rebus – otherwise I wouldn’t have spent the past 40 years with him!
Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide books always make me laugh.
Elif Shafak can move me to tears, though song lyrics (such as those by Elbow’s Guy Garvey) are more likely to do it than prose.
Midnight and Blue is published by Orion