Best-selling crime writer talks about his first standalone novel in 20 years and his plans for the fictional detective’s 40th anniversary

Best-selling Scottish crime writer Sir Ian Rankin cannot quite believe that next year marks the 40th anniversary of his fictional detective Inspector John Rebus.

“It’s crazy, just ridiculous,” the Edinburgh-based author says incredulously. “I’ve known this guy longer than I’ve known most of my friends, almost as long as I’ve known my wife.”

Like other fictional detectives – Colin Dexter’s Morse and Peter James’s Roy Grace – Rebus has gained a wider audience through TV, firstly played by John Hannah, and then by Ken Stott.

Edinburgh-based author Ian Rankin has been reflecting on his career. | PA

Filming of the second series of the BBC reboot, starring Richard Rankin (no relation) as a modern reimagining of the character, has just been wrapped. Rebus, it seems, is not going anywhere.

Yet the author Rankin, 66, is in a dilemma about his own retirement.

“I’m fighting partly against ageing and partly against my wife (Miranda Harvey) who, since I started getting my pension earlier this year, said ‘You should take your foot off the accelerator and let’s enjoy ourselves while we can, because you never know what’s around the corner’.”

Looking back, he admits that family life suffered in those early years when he was a struggling writer.

“It’s a curse of being a writer that a lot of the time I’m physically present but my head isn’t in the room. I might be sitting with my wife eating dinner and going ‘Yes’, but my head is still in that book. It’s very hard for me to step away from the book and allow the real world in.

“There are holidays with the kids I barely remember, first days at school that I barely remember because I was physically present but mentally absent – and that’s a shame.”

However, he insists: “I have been slowing down. I mean, when I was skint, when we were young and had two kids and I had no money, I was writing two books a year just to put food on the table.

“I’m now in a fortunate position where a book every two, three, four or five years would give me enough money to live on.

“The ideas don’t come as readily as they once did and I can’t write at the same rate as I used to.”

The Oxford Bar in Edinburgh is a favourite haunt of Ian Rankin’s fictional Detective Inspector Rebus, who has appeared in 22 novels set in Edinburgh since Knots and Crosses was published in 1987. | Stock

He has, however, taken a sabbatical from Rebus to pen The Heights, his first standalone thriller in two decades.

“It’s nice to step away from your comfort zone and have a new challenge,” he observes.

The title of the book is the setting for a newly built high-end high-rise looming over London’s Hyde Park, where an eclectic mix of the global elite reside. It’s a billionaire’s playground, but when a night concierge is found murdered in the lobby, the building’s rarefied atmosphere is shattered.

Enter another interesting fictional copper: born-and-bred Londoner Detective Gillian Gish, who hails from Tottenham and weaves her way through the power, wealth and influence of the residents to find the murderer.

“I’d been reading up on all these oligarchs and these strange goings-on in London, people with gold-plated Lamborghinis driving up and down outside Harrods, sheikhs who would hang out in West London in the summer because it was too hot in their own country and stay in these palatial apartment buildings that they only used a few weeks of the year.

“One night I happened to go past one in a taxi and could see it was completely in darkness, apart from the ground floor where the concierge was was sitting behind the desk looking bored.

“That tells us so much about what London has become – a hollowed-out capital, there for the wealthy, the cosseted. And then there’s this other London that basically services that, the night watchmen, the cleaners, the chauffeurs and everybody else.”

He sifted out cuttings about the dark side of conspicuous wealth and found his story.

The Heights was originally going to be a film, he reveals, but confesses he knew nothing about the film industry and isn’t enamoured of writing scripts. The first version was a short story but the film came to nothing so he expanded it to become a full-length novel.

That version has now been optioned by a TV company, possibly culminating in a six or eight-hour series, but he isn’t holding his breath.

“It took years for us to get Rebus on the TV screen, whereas this so far, touch wood, has been fairly painless.”

He hasn’t been asked to write the script though.

“I’m not a great collaborator. I like to play God. The novelist gets to play God. We’ve got complete control until I hand the manuscript over, whereas in the worlds of television and film, you’re always at the beck and call of producers and directors and everybody else. You’re a very small cog in a very big machine.”

You sense, though, that Rankin may be a little more involved in the Rebus reboot than in previous TV adaptations.

“In the early days of Rebus, I was very hands-off, and then it wasn’t made in a way that I thought was satisfactory. It didn’t serve the books well, because you cannot shoehorn a 300-page novel into an hour of television, and that’s pretty much what they were trying to do in the early versions of Rebus on TV.”

The bestselling crime writer talks about his first standalone novel in 20 years. | Jane Barlow/PA

For the new series, he’s executive producer. “It means I get to look at the scripts, I give them feedback, and in fact they’re very amenable.”

Since creating Rebus nearly 40 years ago, Rankin says that the fears of audiences have changed.

“The fears of an audience in the Twenties and Thirties, when Agatha Christie was writing, are not necessarily the fears of today.

“A lot of crime fiction today focuses on paranoia and technology. Technology is out to get you. You cannot trust your computer or your phone or your ring doorbell. Your identity’s being stolen, something is happening to rob you of your ID or your life.

“This can be the rise of fake news – what can you trust on screen now? A lot of the crime fiction now on television and in books is (based on fear that) you can’t trust your partner, your kids, your next-door neighbour.

“That kind of paranoia, I think, reflects the fact that we live in a time when we are finding it difficult to trust what we see with our own eyes.”

Rebus books have mostly had a backdrop of social issues, from child abuse and illegal immigration and modern slavery, to what unemployment does to people, or political corruption.

“But at the centre of them are very big moral questions, as with all good crime fiction, about good and evil, about the kinds of crime that we get and whether we get the kinds of crime we deserve, and why people do bad things. Why do people continue to do bad things? That’s a central question, and it’s a question that we can keep asking, but the answers never quite seem to come.”

Rankin himself has many fears.

“The world political scene and the people who are in charge in a lot of countries worries me. How close people’s fingers are to the nuclear buttons worries me. Global warming worries me.”

As for Rebus, it’s doubtful he has finished with him.

“We’re hoping to do quite a lot to help celebrate the 40th anniversary – and the idea of (writing) a book is certainly very appealing. I’ll have to do a wider tour, go to some of the other countries where he’s been successful. Then I can sell it to my wife as a world trip.”

The Heights by Ian Rankin is published by Orion, priced £25. Available October 8.