Rankin's work is consistently superior, and Fleshmarket Alley, his fifteenth Rebus novel, has already garnered glowing reviews. Booklist's Bill Ott declared, "This is a superb crime novel, a pivotal entry in a uniformly fascinating series, and a remarkably perceptive analysis of the contemporary immigration dilemma at its most achingly human level," while Kirkus contended, "Iconoclastic Rebus and tetchy Clarke are the best thing to come out of Scotland since single-malt especially when they're involved in a plot so rich and complex."

I had the decided pleasure of speaking to Mr. Rankin on the phone from his home in Edinburgh. As I had been promised, he was charming, endlessly funny, and bright. And I was pleased to hear him say he was sipping a small glass of malt whiskey as we chatted.
 

Fleshmarket Alley Signed 1st Edition by Ian Rankin "[A]s is often the case with Mr. Rankin's books, the story is secondary to the pleasure of Rebus's company." Janet Maslin, The New York Times More about this book/ check for other copies A Question of Blood: An Inspector Rebus Novel by Ian Rankin "Arguably no Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott has had the commercial and critical success that Ian Rankin now enjoys....He is an addictive writer, which accounts for his immense popularity, but he is also a serious and disturbing one....A remarkable talent." Spectator List Price $6.99 Your Price: $4.50 (Used - Mass Market) More about this book/ check for other copies Resurrection Men: An Inspector Rebus Novel (Inspector Rebus Novels) by Ian Rankin "Resurrection Men is what good crime fiction should be ? a puzzle that challenges the eye, but worth the effort of putting all the pieces in place." Philadelphia Inquirer List Price $6.99 Your Price: $4.50 (Used - Mass Market) More about this book/ check for other copies The Falls: An Inspector Rebus Novel (Inspector Rebus Novel Series) by Ian Rankin "Finish one of Rankin's book, and you'll feel you've been taken inside the river body of Edinburgh from top to the darkest bottom, a journey that calls Charles Dickens and Wilke Collins to mind as often as it does Inspector Morse." Los Angeles Times List Price $7.50 Your Price: $5.50 (Used - Mass Market) More about this book/ check for other copies

Georgie: I can honestly say that I rocketed through all of your novels. I truly read them at breakneck speed and stay up all night doing so. How does a writer create a "page turner"? And do you think I'm doing your work justice by reading them so quickly?

Ian Rankin: I have very mixed emotions about readers who read my books very quickly. On the one hand, I think "God, it took me weeks to write that book and you've read it overnight!" And yeah, it is quite flattering that you can't put it down, you need to read it quickly. On the other hand, I think that there are some nuances that you are not getting because you are not savoring each page. So you should go back and reread it at a more leisurely pace.

How do I inject pace? Well, that is down to the fact that I write them at breakneck speed. It takes me a long time to get ideas and it takes me a long time to do the research. But when I actually start writing the book it usually entails ten-hour days and usually involves seven day weeks. And I can finish it in about 10 or 12 weeks.

Georgie: Wow!

Rankin: And that's where the pace comes from I think. It is because once I know what story I want to tell I want to get on with it and tell that story. And part of the reason for that is that I don't know how the book is going to end. When I start writing the book I don't know where it is going to go. An awful lot of it is improvised.

Ok the first 40 or so pages, you've got a murder. You've got certain things that will happen because of that. And that takes care of the first thirty or forty pages. And by then I've got to know some of the new characters, the book has gone off on various tangents, maybe a subplot has come along, and I've just got to follow those because the book has got its own life by then, so what I do is try and grab on to it and go with it.

You'd be surprised. People think that crime fiction is very structured, that it has the puzzle element, that it has got a very strong sense of beginning, middle and end. The crime happens, then you get the investigation, then you get the resolution at the end. And it all looks very structured. But an awful lot of crime writers make it up as they go along. I always say "If I knew what was going to happen, why would I need to write the book?"

The first draft of the book for me is an investigation. Getting to know the characters, finding out what the theme is, finding out how the various little stories and plots might intertwine.

Georgie: Do your long-term characters, in particular John Rebus and Siobhan Clarke, ever surprise you?

Rankin: The reasons I keep writing about them, especially Rebus, is that there are still things I don't know about them. Rebus continues to surprise me, and there are bits of his history I don't know about, bits of his psychology I don't know about, there is more of him that I haven't explored yet. And the same is certainly true of Siobhan.

The thing about Rebus is that he is very different from me. He is from a slightly older generation; he's got a different way of looking at the world: he sees the world in terms of goodies and baddies. Very much in terms of absolutes there is good and there is evil. I think I'm more liberal (sorry I know that is a dirty word in the States). My job in the books is to make him change his mind about certain blinkered views that he has. It could be to with religion, with race as in the asylum seeker theme in Fleshmarket Alley. I want to challenge him by presenting him with something that is going to make him think hard about his mindset.

Georgie: Pushing him to grow?

Rankin: Yeah, well he does keep changing, he does mature and I think that is why I keep writing about him. If I thought that I'd said everything that needs to be said about him, if I knew everything I needed to know about him, then I wouldn't need to write the books.

Georgie: It is like a relationship isn't it?

Rankin: It is! It is a long-standing one as well. I think it's twenty years this year since I wrote my first Rebus novel. I think it was in 1985 it was eventually published in 1987. So yeah, that is twenty years I've been living with this guy. That is a long time. You can murder somebody and you don't spend that much time in prison.

Georgie: Your novel The Falls seemed to find you many new American readers. I hope for their sake that Fleshmarket Alley does as well. However, you also have many loyal fans who have read all of your Rebus novels. How do you craft your work to appeal to someone reading a Rebus novel for the first time as well as satisfying your die-hard fans?

Rankin: You know, I don't think I worry. Because then that would reduce what I could do with the stories. I love Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder novels. However, in some of the early Scudder novels for about two or three pages he'd talk about the reason why Scudder left the police: He's accidentally shot the kid, he'd go into churches, he'd tithe, he'd light candles for her. And you'd get the same section in every book. And I thought, you know, I don't need that. And then you wonder, does a new reader need that, or will they pick that up on the way almost subliminally? There must be a reason why the guy left the force, he must be guilty, and I think they'll pick it up. So I don't think I do try to write for people who are new to the series. I just hope that they are intelligent enough that they will pick up quite a lot about these characters.

Now, having said that, there are certain shorthand methods that you can use. For example, I think Rebus's taste in music tells you quite a lot about him. So the fact that he listens to stuff like Leonard Cohen would seem to suggest that he is of a certain age and of a certain type of personality who is not gregarious. He likes to listen to music late at night on his own. So already you are learning something about him. He likes listening to mid-period Rolling Stones, so you can tell that his background is more blue-collar than white collar because they were the rebellious band of the sixties. So that you can start picking up things about him just from his musical taste. And certainly from his way of thinking about the world, the pubs that he drinks in, his diet, his general attitude towards life. So you don't really need the whole back story.

Georgie: I think that is interesting what you said about Rebus continuing to grow. I love the relationship between Rebus and his friend and colleague Siobhan Clarke. Siobhan is becoming a more prominent character as your series continues, and it also appears that she is taking on more of Rebus's characteristics. I have just been reading the latest book from Henning Mankell Before the Frost and up until the most recent one the lead character has been Kurt Wallander. However, in this new novel his daughter is the main protagonist. Do you think Siobhan would ever get her own series?

Rankin: It is a possible future. It is one possibility. The only one thing I know at the moment is that having made the decision early on that Rebus would live in real time; he is closing in on retirement quite fast.

Georgie: That is what we Rebus readers are worried about!

Rankin: Well in Scotland you have to retire at 60 if you are in the police. So he has got about three or four more years, which means about three or four more books. And what happens after that I couldn't tell you, because I don't even know what the next book is going to be about at the moment. And maybe I'll find I don't even have three or four new stories to tell? There is always that terrifying moment when I sit down at the blank screen of the computer and feel like I have to channel him again. It is like being at a séance and you are trying to get the spirits to descend. And so far it has always happened but you never know when you start the new one will he have left the building? And have I got anything new to say about him? Have I got anything new to say about Edinburgh?

I sit there and I trust the muse to a large degree. I wait for something to click. I am happy to sit around for weeks and weeks waiting for a story to come to me, rather than rushing around to look for it. It could be an overheard remark. Well, in this instance, Fleshmarket Close is a real street in Edinburgh (in the UK the novel is called Fleshmarket Close but because an American audience might not get what a Close is, we called it Alley) and I'd been walking past Fleshmarket for about twenty years my two favorite record shops are on a street that bisects it and just one day walking past I just stared at the sign and suddenly thought Fleshmarket! The market in flesh! The selling of human bodies. And I could actually start seeing the theme peek out from the actual words. And so once that happened I thought that's the title of the book: "Fleshmarket Close." It is going to be about an asylum seeker and it just so happened than an asylum seeker had been murdered not in Edinburgh but in Glasgow, but in very similar circumstances to what happens in my book. And I could actually start to see the theme emerging. So yes, it can actually be that easy; just walking down the street and seeing a street sign and that gets you your next book. Or with A Question of Blood it was a woman asking me a question at an event. She asked me "Why do you never talk about the private schools in Edinburgh?" And that was all it took, that one question to get me thinking why I'd not done that and that maybe I should.

Georgie: Ever since seeing the film Trainspotting with Ewan Mc Gregor standing in an abandoned field, complaining that he is at the arse-end of the world, ignored by the Queen, maligned, etc, I have felt, as an Australian, a sort of kinship with the Scottish. I have felt that there is something similar about the Scottish and Welsh to the Australians in those sorts of terms.

Rankin: You sure you're not talking about New Zealanders here?

Georgie: Hey we were the convict colony! We've lived with that all our lives.

Rankin: Yeah, yeah… Well yes, there is no doubt that we are geographically marginalized because we're on the northwestern tip of Europe and we can't get anywhere without going through England really. And Scotland is a very small country. Well, it is a big piece of land, but the population is only five million. I mean London is eight million. You can put the entire population of this country into London and have plenty of space left over. And so, yes, small countries have this slight chip on their shoulder.

On the other hand Scotland punches above its weight in many areas. And one of them right now is writing. I think if you walk into your bookstore you'll find that J. K. Rowling is in there if I walk out my front door I can see her house! Even closer, two doors from me is Alexander McCall Smith who writes the Botswana detective stories. Three of us in the same street!

Georgie: Amazing.

Rankin: And we've plenty more we've got Irvine Welsh of course, Kate Atkinson...

Georgie: Denise Mina, Val McDermid, Louise Welsh…

Rankin: Yeah, good Scottish writers making good reputations all around the world, and selling lots of books. It is fantastic. I just wish we could get together and talk about it, but we never do because we're too busy.

Georgie: I wondered about that.

Rankin: Well Alexander McCall Smith I see quite a lot. In fact his car is resting in my driveway. He's off on vacation, and he didn't want it sitting in the street. So, I've got his rather elderly Mercedes Benz sitting in my driveway. I go out every morning and start it just to make sure it is running okay.

Georgie: Do you think that the Scottish crime writers like the ones you just mentioned approach the police procedural differently to English writers like Minette Walters, Ruth Rendell, and Reginald Hill?

Rankin: I think there are quite subtle differences and I think it is due to the fact that the English crime novel was very slow to escape the shadow of the cozy. Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham were such a pervasive influence, and they were writing about amateur detectives most of the time, titled gentlemen and elderly spinsters who were solving crimes that they were stumbling upon in twee English villages with cricket being played on the green, and that is a very unreal world. Especially an unreal world if you happen to be living in the twenty-first century in an urban environment, which most of us do.

Now the Scottish crime novel never had that. We never had our Agatha Christies so we didn't live under the shadow of anything. I think that meant that we could be more free-ranging. If you wanted to write a cozy, write a cozy; if you want to write a crime novel set in the late twentiy-first century, do it. If you want to write a crime novel set in the eighteenth century, do it. If you want to, write very black comedy like Christopher Brookmyre does. If you want to do very psychological stuff like Denise Mina about very damaged individuals, go and do that. It was like this was this incredibly vast flat playing field with no rules and regulations, and no reason to look over your shoulder. Scotland has a tradition of gothic, very dark psychological novels such a Jekyll and Hyde. And a very important book for a lot of us is a book called Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg which was written in the nineteenth century. It's about a very God-fearing individual in Edinburgh who is tempted to commit murder and all manner of sins by someone who may or may not be the devil, or who may be his alter ego, or may be induced by drugs. And that is a very dark murder story. So we've got all those that we can look back to as models for what to do. And having talked recently to people like Denise and Val, we all share that. We all like that very dark, gothic imagination.

Georgie: I know you studied American literature and I have read you say that you were inspired to write detective novels from some American films of the 1940s. I think there are a lot of differences between American and British crime writing styles. Would you like to comment on that?

Rankin: Well the American tradition is more hard boiled and it is urban, talking about big cities like Los Angeles and New York, and it is talking about private eyes rather than little amateur detectives, so the original Chandler and Hammett idea of the crime novel is very masculine and very "tough-guy." They broke all the rules that were going. I think there are essential differences. Somewhere like Los Angeles you cannot replicate in Britain. I mean some people have tried. There is one very good English crime writer called David Peace, and he basically writes James Ellroy style sprawling, scatter-gun prosed novels, but set in Yorkshire. The same place that Reginald Hill is writing about! And they actually work fairly well.

Georgie: And then you have American and Canadians like Peter Robinson and Elizabeth George writing books set in England.

Rankin: Yeah, and in the case of Elizabeth George sometimes making the occasional mistake.

Georgie: Oh really?

Rankin: Oh yes, but just occasionally. And I'm sure plenty of British writers are making mistakes as well. I do think that the crime writing community is a community. There are not that many of us well there are a few hundred but not really that many, and we do tend to meet up and get to know each other in a way that is not always true of the literary novel. I don't find the same backstabbing and bitching that you do in the literary novel world. Usually when crime writers get together they get on great. They'll help each other when they possibly can.

I'm touring with Peter Robinson when I come to the states because we're good mates and we've known each other for donkey's years, and we share the same taste in beer and the same taste in music, so we're doing a lot of gigs together this trip. And you know, I don't think you'd get Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis touring together probably not. Norman Mailer and John Updike? You just can't imagine these things happening. So it is quite nice having that sort of community. And if we can't meet, quite a lot of us keep in touch by email.

George Pelecanos is here in April and I'm desperately trying to arrange that we can meet up. And if Michael Connelly comes into town I'll try to take him out for dinner. Many of these crime writers have at one time or another been treated to a drink at the Oxford Bar by me because it is a real bar and it is slap bang right next to where we have our book festival in August each year.

Georgie: Is that a Scottish writers festival?

Rankin: Well yes, but it is world wide writers. It is the biggest in Europe I think, and it runs for two weeks. It is great because they send me a list of authors who are coming and ask me if there are any writers I'd like to interview on stage, and so I've been able to interview P. D. James, Michael Dibdin... even Henning Mankell a few years ago. And it is terrific! I get to interview people I admire, people I've got lots of questions for. And then I take them to the Oxford Bar and we have a few drinks!

Georgie: I was going to ask you about the whole label of "genre." Are you okay with the label or do you prefer to go as something else?

Rankin: No, I don't mind the tag at all. When I wrote the first Rebus novel I didn't really think of myself as a crime writer at the time. I thought of myself as writing in this gothic Scots tradition. And the fact that I was writing about a cop was because I thought writing about a cop was a good way of looking at society from top to bottom. He's got access to all areas. He can be interviewing the movers and shakers, the politicians and the businessmen. He can also be interviewing people who are unemployed, have drug problems, are prostitutes, whatever. So you can actually look at society from the bottom to the top in one character, which you can't really do with many other characters. And then the book was published and it was published as a mystery novel and I thought "Oh my God, I've become a crime writer by accident." So I went away and read a lot of British crime fiction, because I hadn't really read any crime fiction.

And it ended up I liked the sense of place, I liked the strong narrative, and, most of all, it was the antithesis of the kind of books I had to study at university. I was reading books I was told to read, which would only be read by people at university. You can't really imagine people picking up Thomas Pynchon's V or John Barth's The Sotweed Factor for fun. You read these books because you are told to read them. The same thing goes for James Joyce's Ulysses. And so to actually write books that people want to read was quite refreshing.

Georgie: I have heard of mystery readers described as continually curious, active readers, or intelligent ones. How would you describe a typical mystery reader?

Rankin: I don't think there is a typical mystery reader. I get hundreds of emails to my website each month, and some of these are from fifteen and sixteen year olds who are doing their school essays on my books, and some of them are from people in their seventies and eighties. I did an event today at Edinburgh University and I had people in their teens there, I had staff members, people were getting me to sign books for their grandma. It is a very catholic (with a small c) community. It encompasses people who are curious about places and how certain places work. And cities, and how does living in a certain city affect the people who live there? They are interested in different cultures. I don't find that people who like crime fiction are interested in crime fiction just from Oregon, say, or crime fiction just from California. They are interested in crime fiction from Sweden and Spain and Germany and interested in what it tells you about the culture and what it tells you about the people who live there. If I am going to go to a country on tour I am going to read the crime fiction of the country before I go, because you get a real sense of what that community is like.

It also teaches you what parts of town you should avoid of course or not, as the case may be.

Georgie: Hahaha yeah. Well, in your novels, you haven't left much of Edinburgh crime free.

Rankin: Well, if I didn't keep finding new places in Edinburgh, I wouldn't be able to keep writing the books. For example, all of a sudden the "pubic triangle" springs up an area full of strip joints and seedy lap dancing places and sex shops. This area has just popped up in the last couple of years. I mean, reading (as I've just been doing) the first Rebus novel it seems like ancient history. Some of these places aren't even with us anymore. Rebus goes to an ice-cream parlor that has been shut for years, a cinema that has been closed for a while. Edinburgh is changing. To the tourist perhaps not, because the castle is still there and the museums are still there, but on the periphery new things are happening all the time. And of course, now we have a new parliament there is a huge new parliament building which has just cost us 800 million pounds (or dollars?) which is a phenomenal amount of money. And so now with the new parliament, that is something I need to write about. The fact that we make our own decisions now as opposed to them being made in London, 500 miles to the south. At the end of the year there is a new smoking ban that will take effect. So where the hell is Rebus going to smoke? He won't be able to smoke in the Oxford Bar!

Georgie: Oh no!

Rankin: Oh yes! My wife just came back from a holiday in Cuba, and she brought back cigars. But while she was there, of course, they banned smoking in Cuba.

Georgie: Argh. Sign of the times eh? Well, I'm going to ask you something different here. If you were to choose any other career what would it be?

Rankin: Well, popular choice, for male crime writers especially, of course would be rock star.
Almost every crime writer I know is a frustrated band member. We all wish we'd been a pop star, rock star, whatever. But because we had no musical ability we had to become writers. Being Bob Dylan would have suited me fine. Same with Mick Jagger or Keith Richards. Actually when I was a kid I wanted to be a comic book artist, but I found I was no good at drawing, no good at art. That would have been great, although, I guess I would have to write, and I do that. But yeah, rock star would have suited me down to the ground.

Georgie: I actually love the way that Rebus and Siobhan are always recommending music to each other and I have taken a few of their tips myself. Very nice selection, too. So what are you listening to at to moment?

Rankin: Oh my, I'm listening to tons of things. I buy about 15 CDs a week!

Georgie: Gosh I can't find that much good new stuff myself.

Rankin: Well, a lot of it is stuff I have on vinyl that I find has been re-released on CD. So I end up buying a lot of old stuff with the new stuff. But hang on; I'm just going upstairs to my office where I keep a lot of music. Ok, well just the other day I bought these two guys called Lemon Jelly. This is the new one, '64 '95. I think they are Scottish actually not 100% sure. Anyhow, I like that one. What else? The Fiery Furnaces I've not listened to that one yet. Got lots of good reviews. A Scottish guy called Lucky Pierre. That's not his real name he is from a band called Arab strap. He has two albums now, actually, but they are both instrumental. Really good though. Another Scottish singer, KT Tunstall, who has an alt-country sort of sound. And another country singer, Katheryn Williams, who does these really cool cover versions. Fantastic signer and guitarist.

One of the nice things about touring is that I get given a lot of CDs. They don't give me books they always give me CDs. People burn me albums. They are always sending me stuff.

Georgie: Mr. Rankin, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. And thanks for the music tips!