Sir Ian Rankin rarely watches television. There is no gleaming flatscreen in the corner of the Edinburgh apartment where he writes, listens to music and constructs elaborate Lego models. He did, however, see the most recent incarnation of his most famous creation, Detective Inspector John Rebus, played by Richard Rankin (no relation), following previous performances by Ken Stott and John Hannah. “I did,” he concedes. “They gave me them on DVD, so I could play them on my computer.”
From Edinburgh to Knightsbridge
His computer has had its screen and hard drive replaced, and there are grooves in the keys. It sits on a plain, compact trestle-table desk he bought on London’s Charing Cross Road in 1987 and lugged back to his Tottenham flat on the tube. Both have accompanied him from London to rural Dordogne, in southwest France, where he lived with his wife, Miranda, in the 1990s, and back to Edinburgh.
His work stands in stark contradiction to any suggestion that he is doggedly attached to the past. Across 26 Rebus books, a smaller series involving detective Malcolm Fox, and a number of standalone novels and plays, Rankin has shown himself to be fiercely attentive to the most serious aspects of contemporary life. “The crime fiction I’m interested in,” he says, “is the crime fiction that’s looking at society and the mess we’re in and how we got there, and it’s predominantly political.”
His new novel, The Heights, takes on the challenge in dramatic and glittering style. Its title refers to a Knightsbridge apartment building aimed at the highest end of the property market, its inhabitants the rich and famous who take as read that their residence will include a cinema and a luxury spa. They are perhaps not expecting that their concierge will be discovered with his head bludgeoned, and that DS Gillian Gish will quickly appear to quiz them as to their whereabouts.
Columbo influence and a new lead
One of the influences feeding into Gish, a brand-new lead character, is 1970s American TV detective Columbo, whom Rankin found captivating. “I didn’t realise it when I was watching as a teenager, but he’s a socialist figure,” Rankin says. “He comes into these very rich people’s lives and tears them apart, and they don’t know he’s doing it until he’s already done it. I just thought that was extraordinary. It’s to do with class: he’s the underclass, they’re the overclass, and he’s going to bring them down.”
Gish has the kind of hinterland that Rebus lacks; she’s embedded in her own neighbourhood, in Rankin’s previous stomping ground of Tottenham, and after work she goes home to care for her mother. Rankin says he felt no trepidation about leaving the Edinburgh setting. “In some ways it can be a wee bit stifling. You get an idea for a story, you say, ‘Well, could that be contained in Edinburgh? And if it can’t be contained in Edinburgh, can I write it?’”
He is convinced that his story of the ostentatious performance of wealth combined with the obsession with privacy of the ultra-rich wouldn’t have worked in Edinburgh. “You’re not going to see a Rolls-Royce or a Bugatti Veyron. The wealth here is discreet.”
Wealth, charity and the future
The success of his novels has made Rankin a wealthy man, even if it took him until his 60s – he’s 66 now – to get an office of his own. He is glad he didn’t make it big when he was young: “I was stupid. I’m sure I would have bought a Lamborghini and a pinball machine for every room in the house.”
He and Miranda live a few minutes’ walk from the writing flat and take trips to far-flung places. “Miranda decided a few years ago that, now the kids have left and we’ve got money in the bank: before we get too old and we lose the use of our limbs and our brains, we should travel. I am holiday agnostic. She’s the one who tells me, right, you’re going here and you’re going there. So we do a lot of travelling, just in the last three or four years maybe. She’s booking through to 2028 at the moment.”
Each year, between 30 and 40% of his net income goes into the charitable trust that he and Miranda set up, for which their older son, Jack, also works. “I’ve got more money than I can spend. Once you’ve bought a nice hi-fi system and you’ve got a nice car, what are you going to do?” The trust’s focus is on smaller charities, often those supporting young people and adults with special needs – people like the Rankins’ younger son, Kit, who has Angelman syndrome, a genetic condition that means he has severe learning difficulties, and has also experienced epilepsy and vision problems. Now in his early 30s, Kit lives in a care facility nearby, and all four of them meet up every Sunday. “Any money that we leave behind when we shuffle off this mortal coil will get channelled to him to make sure that he’s always looked after.”
On Rebus, whom we last saw behind bars following the death of his old adversary, gangster “Big Ger” Cafferty, Rankin is tight-lipped on his next project but sheds some light on Rebus’s future. “Everybody says that, but it’s not true,” he protests. “At the end of the book, his lawyer says, ‘You’ve got some very good news.’ So he’s obviously getting out. You know the appeal is going to be heard and he’s going to get out. I have no doubt in my mind that’s the happy ending.”
