3.3 Sir Ian Rankin
In this video Sir Ian Rankin talks about a particular problem he faced with his character Cafferty, which was brought to light by a reader comment at a book signing.
Download this video clip.Video player: week2_video4_ian_rankin.mp4
Transcript
IAN RANKIN
I did have a slight issue with my figure Cafferty a few books ago when someone came at a reading to get a book signed. And they said I love Cafferty. He’s such a big, cuddly bear of a guy. And I thought he’s not supposed to be. He’s supposed to be someone you fear, someone you don’t want to get too close to.
And I realised that maybe I’d been doing what Thomas Harris did with Hannibal and just falling in love a little bit with my character, enjoying writing about him too much. And so he became safer.
And so I drew that out in the next book I wrote. I made sure that he went at somebody with a hammer and some nails and pinned him to the floor of a boxing gym. Because I felt that he was getting too comfortable. I was getting too comfortable around him and readers were getting too comfortable with him.
And I didn’t want him to be a bit more dangerous than he was proving to be. So there’s that. I did write one non Rebus book years ago, which I enjoyed a lot called Bleeding Hearts. And the challenge for me was that the main character is a hired assassin.
I thought, OK, so he’s the villain of the piece. But actually, I want him to be the hero. I want the reader to empathise with him. So what I did was give him a flaw. He’s a haemophiliac. So if anybody punches him or bruises him, or whatever, he can die.
And then I’ve got a private detective who’s out to catch him. And that private detective, I made a scurrilous seedy figure, a really sleazy guy. And so that made the reader empathise and sympathise with the assassin rather than the forces of law and order who are out to bring the assassin down.
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You will notice that the writers so far have pointed out that they can vary who the reader feels empathy with to achieve different effects with their readers and that is also a feature picked out by Craig Robertson in the next video.