Ian Rankin's Books | Crime Books

Biography

Ian Rankin was born in Cardenden, a former mining town in Fife, in 1960 where his father owned the local grocery store, and his mother worked in the school canteen.

Escaping Fife

As a six-year-old, Rankin claimed he could see hope draining out of the town as the colliery was gradually abandoned. He and his friends nicknamed the town “Car Dead End”, and Rankin escaped through films and books.

“I was too young to get into R-rated movies, like The Godfather or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or A Clockwork Orange, even at ages 11 or 12 nobody stopped me buying the books on which those movies were based. So I was finding a sideways or sneaky way to experience all of these intriguing stories, and loving them.” (January Magazine)

In 1979, Rankin left his home town to study Literature at Edinburgh University. After graduating, Rankin went on to study for a PhD. examining the works of the novelist Muriel Spark. He didn’t complete it but wrote three novels instead. The third of these, Knots and Crosses, featured a police detective called John Rebus and was published in 1987.

“When I wrote my first crime novel, I was doing a PhD. in Scottish literature at Edinburgh University. I went to the university’s writer-in-residence, a guy called Allan Massie, and said, “I seem to have accidentally written a crime novel, while striving to write literature.” He said, “Don’t worry about it. Do you think John Buchan ever worried about whether he was writing literature or not?” (The Guardian)

Aspiring Author

For the next ten years, Ian Rankin plugged away at his dream of becoming a novelist, living in both London and then in rural France. He subsidised his ambition by working as an alcohol researcher, grape picker, hi-fi journalist and swineherd. During that time, he continued to churn out John Rebus novels, plus a handful of short stories and standalone thrillers (often writing as Jack Harvey).

“The Harveys were big, fat airport-type thrillers: you’d buy one for a flight and you’d chuck it away at the other end. But they kind of let me go off the leash a little bit and let me do things that I couldn’t do in the Rebus books.” (January Magazine)

Despite his efforts, making a living as a novelist was an uphill battle.

“I remember going into a bookshop in Edinburgh in about 1992, and they had none of my books on the shelves. I walked up to a member of staff and said, “How come you’ve not got any of Ian Rankin’s books?” And he said, “Oh, he’s just not very popular.” It made me more bloody-minded than ever.” (The Guardian)

Rankin eventually got his big break in 1997 when he won the CWA Gold dagger for his eighth Rebus novel, Black and Blue. The book was also shortlisted for the Edgar award for best crime fiction novel in the US.

Since then, Rankin’s Rebus novels have sold over thirty million copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages.

John Rebus

Most of Ian Rankin’s books feature the dour, stubborn Detective Inspector John Rebus. The name John came from the fictional detective John Shaft (one of Rankin’s childhood heroes), and Rebus is a picture puzzle (think dingbats) that Rankin came up with when he was “a smart-arse PhD student”.

Much of Rebus’s personal history as a Fife-born ex-soldier turned police officer is based on Rankin’s experiences.

“In that part of Fife, where the mines had all closed down and unemployment was bad, if you weren’t “clever” enough to go to university, your job options were pretty limited. A lot of my friends went into the army or went into the police.” (January Magazine)

Like Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder, Rankin decided to let Rebus age in real-time. Consequently, in the 2007 novel Exit Music, Rebus retires from the force, though he continues to help Rankin’s later protagonist Malcolm Fox.

The two characters initially butt heads when Fox, an officer within Police Complaints, investigates Rebus for corruption and not following the correct procedures. Rankin points out that a book where the protagonist followed the proper procedures would be far from a best seller.

“No police procedural is ever realistic. A realistic police procedural would be the most boring book in the world, because police investigation is tedious and police officers are all tiny cogs in the machine; they never even get to see the whole investigation through from start to finish.” (January Magazine)

True Crime

In addition to writing fiction, Ian Rankin has toyed with true crime. In 2005 he presented a 30-minute documentary on BBC Four called Rankin on the Staircase, in which he discussed the relationship between crime fiction and real-life cases with authors including James Ellroy, Minette Walters and P.D. James.

Three years earlier, whilst making a series for Channel Four about the nature of evil, Rankin was invited to meet the moors murderer, Ian Brady, but passed it up.

“The director was very excited… I said, ‘No fucking way am I letting him inside my head.’ Because you can’t unmeet him. I knew he played tricks – he had nothing left to do but play mind games with his victims, and the family of his victims.” (The New Statesman)

It appears that some lines aren’t worth crossing for the sake of a good book.