RANKIN FILE:

Sympathy for the devil: Please allow us to introduce Ian Rankin, a man of wealth and taste. He’s been around for years writing about Inspector Rebus, but now the series is coming to an end, and Britain’s most successful crime novelist must decide what to do next. A good time, then, for Peter Ross to take a magnifying glass to the fascinating life and career of a very Scottish literary star (Peter Ross, 02 May 2004, Sunday Herald)

IAN Rankin’s most recent book A Question Of Blood, the 14th to star Detective Inspector John Rebus, features a teenage girl whose bedroom is on constant public display via webcam. It’s interesting to imagine what the author’s own adolescent bedroom might have looked like had we been able to examine it online back in the Seventies. Posters of bands, self-penned poetry furtively shoved under the mattress and almost certainly stacks of novels, a topography of maturing taste. A core of Robert Louis Stevenson; then a substrata of those books Rankin had been too young to see in their cinematic form – The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange; then perhaps a top layer of Muriel Spark, whose writing would eventually be the subject of Rankin’s uncompleted PhD.

Had we gone online during Rankin’s 19th year, we might have seen the author himself, confined to bed for four weeks, suffering from undiagnosed spinal meningitis, “hallucinating white lights and tunnels”, fluid pressing on his brain, the doctor insisting it was a migraine. His father entering the room and pressing a dishcloth soaked in vinegar to his son’s forehead, hoping to the God he didn’t believe in that it was going to help, not thinking too straight anyway, as his wife had passed away around nine months previously and eventually giving in to his son’s suggestion that they ask the doctor to return.

Meningitis correctly identified on this second visit, Rankin was immediately taken to hospital, given a spinal tap and confined to an isolation unit. He might have died, but didn’t, and now we can look back on 1979 as significant to his development as a writer and a man. It was the year of his mother’s death, his own near-death experience and the year that Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures was released. His all-time favourite album, it was a black masterwork sung by a man who would shortly kill himself. If you were searching for a root darkness in Rankin’s life to explain the darkness of his books, you could do worse than look at 1979. He had been working a summer job in a chicken factory – “It wasn’t the killing end, it was the birthing end” – and you can see the obsession with death, that gives life to his work, hatch in that year.

A quarter of a century later, Ian Rankin is standing in the posher of two living rooms in his considerably posh Edinburgh home, pointing a remote control at his posh electronic fire, trying to summon a flame. One’s mind automatically flickers to a memory of Ozzy Osbourne swearing at his state-of-the-art telly; it’s a comparison Rankin endorses. “We are the Osbournes,” he smiles, “the neighbours you don’t want.” He and his wife Miranda and their sons Jack and Kit moved to Merchiston in September. The house didn’t need anything doing to it, a happy situation for DIY-disaster-prone Rankin, and all they have added is two cats – Mooch and Scarlet – and a hot-tub in the back garden. I like to think of Rankin sitting in it, perhaps sipping champagne and gossiping with Miranda about their near neighbours – Alexander McCall Smith, JK Rowling, Richard Holloway, Robin Cook and Alastair Darling.

You can live in a neighbourhood like this if you sell, as Rankin does, one million books a year. He has sold five million in Britain, does well in America and Canada and has been translated into 22 languages. He is responsible for ten per cent of all crime novels sold in the UK. He functions like a rock star of the old school, producing a book a year and then touring it round the world. Four of his Rebus books have been adapted for television and, while the project is on ice at the moment, it may yet be defrosted.

The Rebus books are outstanding and the BBC adaptation pretty good.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 2, 2004 9:12 AM