Arts Diary: More complaints in Rankin's future

Published on Wednesday 5 January 2011 11:16

CRIME king Ian Rankin's New Year resolution: "To start the book I promised myself I would start on 1st December 2010." The man who lives on "Writer's Block" in Bruntsfield, alongside the likes of Alexander McCall Smith, has confessed to a bit of writer's panic.

Rankin's next book is the follow-up to The Complaints, which introduced his new character Detective Malcolm Fox, in the Complaints and Conduct Division of the Lothian and Borders Police. It is due for delivery by the end of May, and for publication in October.

He's given himself five months to frame 100,000 words, after what he dubbed a sabbatical year.

Rankin cheerfully told the audience at the New Year's Day Conversation event with fellow crime writer Lin Anderson: "I am panicking, because I haven't written a new book for about a year and a half now, and literally tomorrow morning I am sitting down to write my new book." But later, he noted: "I've never missed a deadline yet."

The event was part of the Edinburgh's Hogmanay line-up, and with Catherine Lockerbie in the chair at the National Galleries of Scotland Hawthornden lecture theatre it felt like a bit of book festival in December.

Rankin's other projects recently have included penning the film script of a literary favourite, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg, which is now looking for a director.

He usually goes through three drafts, with the first a trial exploration of characters and plot which he always keeps to himself. "If the book starts in a lecture theatre, you'll know that I'm struggling for ideas," he said, to chuckles.

Anderson, to the inevitable "where-do-you-get-your-ideas-from" question, remembered walking down Princes Street and meeting a hen party wearing devil's horns. "I thought, 'Oh good, I'll murder a bride on her hen-night,'" she said.

Rankin is superstitious of saying anything about a book on the go, but there's a hint that McCall Smith could turn up in the next one.

McCall Smith featured Rankin in the first Scotland Street serialisation in The Scotsman, accidentally picking a Peploe painting in a junk shop. He brought him back in the third, when a member of the Royal Company of Archers wings him in the backside.

"I wish he would stop using me," Rankin declared, then warned: "My response to this has been, revenge is a dish best served cold, Sandy."

Good with wood

A PINKY-RED chair designed for Conran by Philip Treacy - better known as a high fashion hat maker whose pieces are modelled by the likes of Kate Moss - takes centre stage at the Henderson Gallery show, Past, Present, Future.The exhibition wraps up Saturday with a closing bash tonight.

It features work by students and graduates of Edinburgh College of Art, including Richard Demarco, alongside the likes of Roland Fraser, the University of St Andrew's art historian turned furniture maker.

Fraser uses reclaimed wood, from skips to driftwood, to craft pieces including traditional chests, or kists, with witty Gothic carvings. The piece in the show - titled "A' Could Dae That" - is a one-off play on abstract impressionism, reflected in paint spatters on wood planks from a gate.

Fraser's had a good year. He sold an impressive 17 of 21 pieces at his recent solo show at Henderson's and has been asked by the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment to show work at the Ideal Homes exhibition in March.

It's the "recycled, eco-friendly" element that he reckons caught their eye.