`When I wrote the first Rebus book, I had no idea it would turn out to be a series. I had no idea I was writing a crime novel. I had no idea that the crime novel, the genre, even existed." Last year Black And Blue, the ninth in Ian Rankin's Rebus series was awarded the Golden Dagger, the crime writer's Booker. The paperback, out just three weeks, had already sold more than 35,000 copies in Britain. The latest addition to the canon, The Hanging Garden, was published on the same day.
With his darkly-veined stories of an Edinburgh the tourists never see, Ian Rankin (37) is the newly crowned king of the urban crime novel. Knots And Crosses, the first of the series, was written in two weeks 10 years ago. Rankin was a post-graduate at Edinburgh University doing his PhD on the novels of Murial Spark when he decided she would be better pleased if he was writing his own.
"I thought I was writing a slice of Scots gothic in the grand tradition of Stevenson and Hogg: Confessions Of A Justified Sinner meets Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde for the 1980s. The fact that I chose a detective as the hero was completely accidental. I knew nothing about police work, I didn't know the stylistics or the structure of the whodunnit. I wasn't a whodunnit fan. I didn't read mystery novels. Suddenly I found myself in the crime niche. Then I had to become the PhD student in crime, and read up on the genre to find out where I was coming from and did I want to be there."
The initial answer to that was No. Two "Graham Greene type" spy novels, written when he was living in London, editing a Hi-Fi magazine, followed. Then someone asked, "whatever happened to that guy Rebus?" ("It was pure luck I didn't bump him off at the end of Knots And Crosses, he was a potential suspect.")
Rankin comes from a working-class family in a mining town in Fife, north-east of Edinburgh. His story-telling ability he reckons comes from his father. "He was a very creative liar. He would never tell the truth if a lie would suffice.
"On Sunday mornings, I would get into bed with my parents, my mum would read the newspaper and my dad would make up stories. It was only later I realised that basically they were about him as a kid; he was extrapolating from his own life. So there was this thing about using a fictional narrative as a way of exploring the past or telling something about yourself."
After his older sister married when he was 11, Ian Rankin was, in effect, an only child. His home village of Cardenden "still is" a really depressing place. "We used to call it Car Dead End. Nothing was very easy. So you remade Cardenden almost as a fictional world. The smoking slag heap became Krakatoa."
Young Rankin discovered that while censorship stopped him seeing A Clockwork Or- ange and The Godfather at the local cinema, books were a different matter. "I thought this was absolutely amazing. I could go into a bookshop and buy anything I liked. And nobody would stop me, so I was starting to read this stuff, age 10. From Ian Fleming to skinhead and suedehead books, with lurid covers and lots of violence inside."
A would-be punk, Rankin wrote lyrics for a make-believe band (Kaput). Later he was the vocalist (Ian Kaput) for "the second best punk band in Fife". His first published work was a poem that came second in a competition. It was the first poem he had ever written and had only entered because of the cash prize.
Same thing with his first short story - a competition (cash prize) in The Scotsman. By this time he was at Edinburgh University reading English.
Rankin has no time for the traditional English "golden age" crime novel, Christie, Sayers et al. "It's very like Shakespearian comedy where outside forces come in and disrupt the status quo and some little old lady, who's in the village visiting her niece, solves the crime using rational deduction and good old-fashioned middle-class values. But I can't get anything out of it. The actual puzzle element of mysteries is I think the least interesting part for me.
"I am interested in the delineation of character - in motivation, in what makes people tick, what makes us what we are, the problems that society has and how we can deal with them and how we can face up to them."
However real Rankin's Edinburgh appears to be it is, says Rankin, a fictional city. Knots And Crosses was written in Edinburgh and the rest, up to The Hanging Garden, were written in France. "I suppose I was just doing the James Joyce thing. Going abroad to write about the place where I come from," he says. "It became something I was creating from a distance. If I was still living in Edinburgh, the temptation would be to say, `oh I better go and see how many steps . . . how long would it take me to walk . . . ' Living in France, I thought `what the hell', and made it up. So it was my imaginative Edinburgh inside the real Edinburgh. Or living parallel with it. Now that I have that structure, of the fictional Edinburgh, I am quite happy to move back." The issue of crime novels not being taken seriously irritates him. Compare them with Martin Amis, he says, whose latest offering, Night Train, was a crime novel. Except that it wasn't treated as such. Because it was Martin Amis it was still "literature". Yet the great writers of urban crime: Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, Barbara Vine will still be found on the crime shelves.
"And it'll be a long time before they're shortlisted for the Booker. Because there's still that blinkered notion of what is crime fiction and what is literature.
"I think a lot of us are out there busily trying to transcend the genre, or at least blur the edges in people's minds."
The blurring of fact and fiction happens without Rankin really trying. His second Rebus book, Hide And Seek, involved a secret society of judges and lawyers "who by night are consorting with rent boys and bumping people off".
The inspiration he says, was Deacon Brodie, in turn the real life inspiration for Stevenson's Jekyll And Hyde. "I was picking up from what Murial Spark was writing about in Miss Jean Brodie, the two sides of Edinburgh, the light and the dark, the rational and the more Celtic if you will - the fact that it all looks respectable on the outside but underneath there are all kinds of things simmering going on that we don't know about."
Rankin had "plucked the story out of the ether" but two years later the police began investigating a very similar "magic circle" of gay lawyers in Edinburgh. "From that time the real world has intruded more and more in the books." It happened again with Black And Blue, the parallels if anything even more disturbing.
As for Rebus, where does the name come from? Until last year, as far as Rankin knew it was not a real surname at all, merely the name of the word puzzle that used to appear in his mother's Sunday paper. Then last summer, when the Rankins returned to Edinburgh, a friend introduced him to a couple in his local pub. Mr and Mrs Rebus. "I said I have never met anyone called Rebus. That I didn't know the name existed. Well, they said, we're in the phone book. So we got a phone book from behind the bar and I looked it up. There was only one Rebus. And their address was Rankin Avenue." He shudders. We both do. "It makes you think."