Interview: Ian Rankin, author

On Saturday 4 December last year, Ian Rankin picked up his copy of The Scotsman and started to read. There were two articles that mentioned him, and they both had his photo, but they weren’t what caught his attention.

What did was a page lead towards the end of the news section. There was a picture of SNP activist, lawyer and anti- nuclear campaigner Willie McRae, whose body was found in a crashed car in Wester Ross in 1985. At first it looked as though he had died in an accident, but a gunshot wound was later found. Above the picture, the headline read: “25 years on, riddle of McRae death deepens as new evidence emerges.”

At the Edinburgh book festival in August, Rankin told his audience that his next book would incorporate a real-life story, but he refused to say what it was. But that news story about a possible new angle to Willie McRae’s death, was what had sparked his imagination. Before too long he was looking at the library microfiche of every single issue of The Scotsman between 1984 and 1986.

Why? Sitting across the table from me in an Edinburgh cafe, Rankin explains. First there’s the McRae case itself – which also appeared, only lightly camouflaged by fiction in The Land Lay Still, James Robertson’s epic novel of modern Scotland. If this was a suicide, it was one that also leant itself remarkably easily to conspiracy theorists. For a start, there was the private eye who came forward to say he’d been paid to follow McRae. Then the break-in at his office. Or the fact that he was writing a book about the nuclear industry: perhaps someone with a vested interest was out to stop him? Why were there some things missing from the scene – things that his friends insisted McRae always carried with him, such as his cigarettes (he was a heavy smoker) and his lucky £50 note, his fee from his first case?

And then there was the gun McRae had apparently used to shoot himself in the head. But here Rankin started to bring his own imagination into play. He’d change some of the evidence, move everything south to Fife. The body in the car would be someone else altogether, the people investigating it would be on the trail of an altogether different case, one resolutely in the present and not buried deep in the past. Another case, he decided last December, for Inspector Malcolm Fox of the Complaints Department of Lothian and Borders Police.

Compared to Inspector Rebus, Rankin’s more famous fictional creation, Fox is a bit insipid: a team player, not a maverick; a recovering alcoholic not a regular at the Oxford Bar. This is a man who relaxes by watching Top Gear repeats, not a gruff, ex-SAS, rather intimidating veteran detective. Is he harder than Rebus to write about?

“Not really. I’m much more like Fox: careful, cautious, more of a professional voyeur. That’s what writers are – as Muriel Spark says, we loiter with intent, stealing other people’s ideas surreptitiously. Rebus is more like a bull in a china shop. He’s not like me at all. And while it can be fun to jump into his skin for a while, it’s not always an easy place to be. I’m much more comfortable inside Malcolm Fox’s head. There’s far fewer demons there, for a start.”

There’s one problem with being inside Malcolm Fox’s head. With Rebus, Rankin could turn the searchlight on any aspect of society he chose – the new Scottish Parliament in Set in Darkness, immigration in Fleshmarket Close and so on. With Fox, Rankin’s canvas is inevitably narrower: the department his new man works in only investigates rogue cops. “It’s a trade-off,” Rankin admits. “And that’s why I don’t think I’ll be writing 17 books about Malcolm Fox and the Complaints Department, just because of that very limited range of crimes they have to deal with.

“And there’s another reason I can’t see Malcolm Fox lasting for more than three books. Just as Rebus had to retire when he got to 60 because that’s the retirement age for detectives, people only go into the Complaints for four or five years before they go back into CID.”

Wouldn’t he want to carry on writing about Fox when that happens? “Well, if I wanted to tie everything up, I would have him investigate Rebus for some past misdemeanour in Book Three or if it stretches to it, Book Four. But it might never happen. I’ve got a vague idea for something next year and it ain’t Fox and it ain’t Rebus. It’s a standalone novel. All I’ve got of it right now I could put on the back of a fag packet … just three lines of an idea for a crime thriller that will be a bit like a road movie – certainly travelling a long way into Scotland, away from Edinburgh.”

That’s one thing he found himself doing for The Impossible Dead, research which took him to the Highlands to see where McRae’s car went off the road (“I wasn’t looking for the exact spot,” he adds quickly), to Stirling, St Andrews and Kirkcaldy, where the Pancake House figures prominently as a base for Malcolm Fox’s investigative team because its owner made the winning bid at a charity auction.

Meanwhile, the more Rankin read about the mid-Eighties on Edinburgh Central Library microfiches, the more he started to wonder at all the political dramas and melodramas that had passed him by as a PhD student at Edinburgh. In 1985, he points out, the McRae case looked as though it had real parallels to the Hilda Murrell murder the year before, for which many people (Tam Dalyell, for one) blamed the British secret service. (Two decades later, the man sentenced to life for murdering Murrell turned out to have been a teenager with no MI5 links.).

But there was, Rankin adds, something febrile about the politics of the time. “The SNP had only 15 per cent in the opinion polls and a lot of splinter groups came along because they thought Westminster wasn’t listening so there was a need for direct action. Three or four of those groups at least were involved in terrorism. One group posted anthrax spores to Downing Street, the SNLA sent a bomb to Glasgow City Chambers on the very day that Princess Di was supposed to visit. Other bombs went off at the Ministry of Defence and Woolwich arsenal. And as I went through the newspapers, I started to think: How come all of this had passed me by? And also, what happened to all of these people who had joined the splinter groups? Where are they now? What happened to them in the intervening years?”

Gradually, the idea for the plot formed. If the Malcolm Fox novels are thematically more limiting than the Rebus ones, they do at least offer the possibilities of a double plot – an original police investigation which has to sound at least plausible before Fox’s own inquiry unearths a more elusive truth. In The Impossible Dead, Rankin takes his time setting up things up, but the slow start pays dividends: with each rebuff, insult and sullen silence from the Kirkcaldy policemen being investigated by Fox’s team, the atmosphere of mutual suspicion is deepened.

All of this works very well – as does the fact that that the Malcolm Fox books overturn the crime fiction convention that cases are cracked by impulsive, intuitive individualists, not dull, by-the-book plodders. And while Fox lacks Rebus’s forcefulness, this is more than counterbalanced by Rankin’s engaging portrayal of his relationship with his hard-to-please unemployed sister and their ailing father. But, as Rankin has said, none of this will be enough to keep him writing about Fox for years to come. So does he have any clues about what direction his writing will take in the future?

“Maybe I might write about him again in CID. I’ve often thought about [Rebus’s sidekick] Siobhan Clark taking on [Edinburgh crime boss “Big Ger”] Cafferty. Or Cafferty’s early days. Or Rebus’s. Trust me, they’ve all been considered.”

The last time I interviewed Rankin was two years ago, for the launch of The Complaints. At the time he wondered out loud whether this might be his last novel. He gave another interview in which he said, “I kind of wish I was retired from writing already”. He was going to take a year off when, for the first time in 20 years, he wouldn’t have any publisher’s deadlines hanging over him. If he did write another novel, maybe he would only write one every two years. Put all of that together and it hardly added up to a portrait of a man who, deep down, actually enjoyed writing.

But, he insists, he does. “Absolutely. I got really grumpy when I wasn’t writing – and also ridiculously busy. When you turn down something because you’re writing, that’s the one excuse that people are prepared to accept, and they just leave you to get on with it. But when everyone knows you’re not writing, it’s very hard to say ‘No’ to someone who rings up and asks if I can do something to help their charity. So when I’m not writing a novel I end up far busier than when I actually am. I should never say I’ll never write again – but then again, you never know. There is a thing called writer’s block. So far I’ve never had it, but there isn’t any five-year plan either.”

Meanwhile, all those daily demands on his time aren’t going to go away. He won’t even employ a personal assistant to politely turn them down (“I’m much too much of a control freak”). So whenever he has finished his next novel, whatever it is, how will he ever get the chance to relax?

He grins. “We’ve bought this place up in Cromarty, and the plan is for me to spend a lot more time up there. And the great thing is, you can’t get a good mobile phone signal.”

l The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin is published next week by Orion, priced £18.99