Creator of Inspector Rebus to share stories and songs at Cœirt

by Dave O’Connell

His most famous creation is Rebus – the hard drinking, heavy smoking, cynical Scottish detective who sees the world in black and white and doesn’t need to bother with shades of grey – but Ian Rankin has a confession . . . if the Edinburgh Detective Inspector ever met his creator, he wouldn’t like Rankin at all.

“No, he’d see me as some wishy-washy liberal who never did a decent day’s work in his life. That’s why I created Siobhan Clarke – she’s fighting my corner, telling Rebus that things aren’t always that simple; that you must give people a chance to change. But Rebus wouldn’t buy that,” he says.

DI John Rebus and DS Siobhan Clarke may be poles apart but together they’ve been part of Ian Rankin’s life for the best part of 20 years – and despite the author’s earlier insistence that Exit Music was the final chapter in the Rebus story, he admits that he might have to bring the old codger back to life.

“There’s still some unfinished business with Rebus. I know exactly where he is – he’s still alive, retired but working in police headquarters on cold cases with three other officers, two of them also retired.

“Just a few weeks ago I wrote a new Rebus short story for a charity in Edinburgh which I then read at their function. It was bought and published by The Scotsman newspaper but only in the print edition so it’s not online.

“It was for the Royal Blind School and I’ve given them the copyright to the story. I’ve said to them they should put it on their own website as a way of getting people to find out more about their work when they read the story,” he says.

Those who haven’t read the Rebus series – and given that Rankin is Britain’s biggest selling crime novelist, there can’t be many – will be familiar with the character from the ITV series where the Inspector was first played by John Hannah and more recently by Ken Stott.Everyone else may have seen him on the small screen, but the man who brought Rebus to life hasn’t.

“I’ve never watched it on TV and I won’t until I absolutely know I’ll never write about Rebus again. I don’t want to have a face or a voice in my head when I think of Rebus. I’ve actually no idea what he looks like, but I want to paint a picture so that readers will imagine him for themselves,” he says.

He does admit that he thought Hannah was a bit too young for the role and that, as one fan put it to him, Ken Stott is the sort of man you can imagine punching someone. To add further confusion, the audio books are read by Scottish actor James MacPherson, who is familiar as Mike Jardine from Taggart!

For the most part the TV adaptation is fairly loyal to the original stories – except when it comes to football! Because while Rankin made Siobhan Clarke a Hibs fan, he didn’t give Rebus an affinity with either of the big Edinburgh rivals.

Ken Stott, though, is a massive Hearts fan in real life and the producers decided to make Rebus a Hibs fans, forcing Stott to enter Easter Road for a scene which Rankin says the actor told him was the hardest he has ever had to do.

“And this from a man who played Hitler!” he points out.

Rankin is one of the big names coming to this year’s Cúirt Festival of Literature. He increasingly finds himself on the literary festival circuit – which says a lot about how the crime fiction genre has become more accepted by the literary populace.

“It probably was looked down on in the past but less so now; I was picking up an award at a festival in Barcelona very recently and I bumped into John Connolly there. I frequently meet Ken Bruen at events in the US. It’s nice to be part of a sort of band of crime writers who know each other and meet each other in the strangest of places,” he says.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.