2.1 Sir Ian Rankin
Sir Ian Rankin is a best-selling Scottish crime writer who created a series of books based around a fictional Scottish Detective named John Rebus. The fictional detective was born in the late 1940s in Fife and joined the army before joining the police. His antagonist, the ruthless Morris Gerald Cafferty, is an Edinburgh organised crime gang boss. The two characters meet in several of Ian’s novels.
In the following video you will meet Ian Rankin as he introduces us to his villain, Morris Gerald ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty.
Download this video clip.Video player: week1_video3_ian_rankin.mp4
Transcript
IAN RANKIN
An easy question to ask, how do you create a baddie, it’s a complex question to answer. They come from everywhere. The crimes that I use in my books often come from newspapers and magazines and things that have actually happened in the real world. So real miscreants have been at the heart of those stories to begin with.
But the crime story, the fictional crime story, demands something else. It demands that the criminal be interesting and charismatic. And if you’ve ever met any real criminals, they very often are not. There aren’t too many Hannibal Lecters out there in the real world, if any. Even the most rococo serial killer in real life is usually quite a bland individual when you end up interviewing them.
So you’ve got to heighten reality, in a way. And I’ve always been fascinated by Jekyll and Hyde. I mean, that’s my kind of ur text is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, because within us, I think we all have the potential to be good and to be evil, or at least to carry out acts of evil, inhuman acts, given the right set of circumstances.
And what I’m interested in is what pushes people over the line or what leads them into that territory. But yeah, it’s a complicated thing. But when I get a good villain, I’m very loath to let them go. So Morris Gerald Cafferty, Big Ger, who was the gangster figure, Rebus’s nemesis in my books, was only meant to be around for one book. He was meant to have a very small role in book three. But he just demanded that I bring him back.
And there was a lot I could do with him and Rebus, that Holmes and Moriarty thing, where they are quite similar in some ways. Their backgrounds are similar, but their paths, the trajectory of their lives, have been very different. But there’s an empathy there, and that’s what I enjoy, is playing with that empathy.
I think perhaps authors themselves must be morally questionable people in order to write about morally questionable characters. We do contain multitudes. All the facets of every character I’ve ever created exist in some form inside my head. Therefore, I am all the goodies and all the baddies in my books, or I contain the possibility of containing all these people.
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Of course this is just one author’s approach to creating villains. In the next video you will see the author Lin Anderson talk about her approach to creating a baddie.