Sir Ian Rankin

An easy question to ask, how do you create a baddy. 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 in human 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 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 is 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. So that’s interesting to me, that I can get inside the head of someone without having met too many terrible people in real life. Well, how would you know? A very good Mr. Hyde is going to hide behind Dr. Jekyll, and you will never know that you’re meeting a terrible person. Perhaps, later on they will be revealed to have been a terrible person, but you might not know it at the time. And there’s been one or two cases where I have met people who’ve done terrible things, or I’ve been invited to meet people in jail or in secure psychiatric hospitals who’ve done terrible things. And very occasionally, I’ve shied away from it. So I do have-- there are places I don’t want to go. And one Rebus book in particular, Dead Souls, featured a paedophile who’s been released from jail into the community without the community being told this person has served time for paedophilia. And when the local community found out, they basically go after this guy with torches and pitchforks. The scenes from his perspective, I was going to write in the first person, and I did start to do that. But as the parent of two young children, I thought, I really don’t want empathy with a paedophile, certainly, at this stage of my life. So I ended up writing those sections in the third person to put some distance between me and the person who had done very terrible things that I was trying to write about.

Crime fiction is very much connected to myth and folklore and folk tales. And sometimes the baddy just needs to be a baddy. The wolf just needs to be a wolf, disguised as a grandma. But other times, you want somebody who’s morally complex, who’s a much more complicated character. I mean, I think Cafferty in some ways is a very complicated character. He has a moral code, for example. And he is, as an older man, now surrounded by younger, more venal, wannabe gangsters who do not have the moral code that he has. Remember that old story about the Krays? They always looked after their own. They were lovely to their mum. They only really attacked you if you had done something to them. Mind you, it might not have been very much that you’d done to them and they would come at you all guns blazing as it were, or all axes swinging. But there is something of the beauty in the beast in someone like, Cafferty, I was going to say, but let’s look at Hannibal Lecter again. I mean, Thomas Harris became completely fascinated by the character of Hannibal Lecter. And in the book, Hannibal actually starts to give him a backstory. And that’s when I ceased to be very interested in. I was much more interested in Hannibal Lecter when I didn’t know-- there was no reason for him to do what he did. There was no horrible story in his background. Nothing happened to him in childhood to explain what he did. He just did what he did. He was a cannibal. A very charming cannibal. And he was an incredibly charismatic character. He was certainly much more interesting than someone like Clarice Starling, the cop who’s trying to bring him down, who seems incredibly bland by comparison. You’d much rather go to a dinner party with Hannibal Lecter than Clarice Starling. You just wouldn’t eat the main course necessarily. There is something about a character who is different from us. Who is evil, who is a killer, who is a serial killer, an assassin, a psychopath. We are absolutely fascinated by the flaws in the human beings around us because we wonder how many flaws we ourselves have that we manage to tiptoe over every single day. I mean, it’s fascinating to me. Why don’t more of us kill people? Why don’t more of us break the law. And when things start to break down, when society starts to break down, you realise how fragile that skin is between people behaving themselves and people misbehaving between order and anarchy. And a lot of the criminals in my books, are making the reader ask themselves that question about order breaking down, about why some people do this and other people don’t. Why don’t I as a reader do this? I could get away with it. People often say that. But crime writers surely is a crime writer. You could get away with the perfect murder. And you go yeah, but I don’t want to. I do plenty of that in my fiction. That’s what keeps me sane and grounded is the fact I write about this stuff in fiction. I don’t have to think about it too much in the real world.

I did have a bit of 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, oh, 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. So I sort of drew that out. In the next book I wrote, I made sure that he went and hit somebody with a hammer and some nails and pinned them 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 did 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 it was-- 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, 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. Yeah I mean, in some ways, The Day of the Jackal was an extraordinarily groundbreaking book, not only because we all know that the killer doesn’t get away with it. So where’s the tension? Where’s the threat? Where’s the danger? But the guy’s a professional assassin, and yet we’re absolutely riveted by him all the way through. He’s the-- it’s his eyes we are looking at the world through. And that was a really daring thing to do at that time.

Criminal behaviour can be explained away socioeconomically, psychologically, in terms of the background of the person. Sometimes it can. I mean, sometimes people are just bad. And I did years ago make a TV series for Channel 4, a documentary series about evil. It was going to be a series about crime and punishment. But in fact, the producer and I sat down and we just thought, no, we’ve got to go back to basics. Before we can talk about crime, we need to talk about good and evil. And so it became a series, a three part series on that. And the first episode was, what do we mean when we say evil? Does it mean the same thing in different cultures at different periods in history, or is it malleable? Number two, where does it come from? Nature or nurture. Are people born bad, or made bad by circumstance, or chemical imbalances in the brain or whatever. And then episode three was, what do we do about it? And I was able to-- I got extraordinary access. I mean, I was exorcised in the Vatican by the chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome. I didn’t know that was going to happen until it happened, but it did. I got access to a guy who was on death row in Texas, a drug addict, a member of a gang who had broken into a woman’s house and killed her to rob her in order to get drug money. And he’d been on death row for 12, 13, 14 years at that stage. And unknown to me, the producer/director got in touch with Ian Brady’s mother, the Moors murderer Ian Brady, to see if we could interview her about what it’s like to have a serial killer in the family. She passed that on to Ian Brady, who then replied to the director from Broadmoor secure hospital to say, no, no, Mr. Rankin doesn’t talk to my mother. He comes here and talks to me. And that was another point at which I said, no, I don’t want to do that. Thank you very much. Because once Ian Brady is inside your head, he ain’t leaving. It’s one thing to talk about and think about and write about fictional psychopaths, but when you meet these people in real life, you cannot then unmeet them. And Brady, I knew from a reading of his horrible nonfiction book, The Gates of Janus, glories and gets a thrill from playing mind games with people. That’s all he had left to him in Broadmoor was playing mind games with researchers, with people who communicated with him, wrote to him, and with the families of the victims. And he wouldn't give them closure by telling them where some of the bodies were buried. So I said, no, I don’t want to meet this guy and I won’t meet this guy. So I shied away from that. Which is a roundabout way of answering the question, but I am fascinated by evil. I am fascinated by the existence of evil. But very often when you talk to historians, psychiatrists, they will tell you that these people are very bland. The people who carry out these acts in themselves are very bland, nondescript people. They almost have no personality. It’s an incredible thing. You’re looking for Hannibal Lecter and you end up with the blandest person imaginable carrying out a terrible act of evil.

There’s no doubt in my mind that my characters are more real to my readers than they are to me. People are very worried about John Rebus, my detective, his health, the fact he has very few friends, he drinks too much, until recently, he smoked too much. He’s now got emphysema, so he’s stopped smoking, but he's getting on a bit. He’s had to move from a second floor apartment to a ground floor because he can’t manage stairs anymore. They’re not worried about me, these readers. If I say I’ve got a terrible cold or the flu, just keep writing. But tell us about Rebus. What is Rebus up to? We’re really worried about him. And people like Cafferty as well. I was actually literally walking down the street where I live yesterday and a guy said to me, How’s Cafferty getting on? Because he knew that Cafferty lives in the same part of town as me and always has done. Now, that’s weird. My hero, John Rebus, lives in the street I lived in when I was an impoverished student and started writing these books. But when I got successful, I kind of started to move into the circles, the social circles, that Cafferty, the successful businessman/gangster moves in. So I had a big Victorian house in a lovely tree lined street, and that’s where he lived. And then he moved to a penthouse apartment in a new development in Central Edinburgh. And blow me down a couple of years later, I moved there as well. Now I could say that wasn’t my choice. That was my wife’s idea for us to downsize and move to this area of town. But maybe subconsciously, I’ve been following the bad guy around Edinburgh rather than following the good guy around Edinburgh. So potentially, if a psychoanalyst got me on the couch, they would find us a lot more of the evil character, the bad character, the nasty character in me then there is the goody.

I don’t think I think too much about the degree of empathy readers will have for villains when I create the villain. The villain is necessary. I mean, I’m possibly not the best person to talk to about this. I was never-- I didn’t read crime fiction until I started writing. I’m the only crime writer I know who was not a fan of crime fiction before they began writing crime fiction. I grew up with the American novel, with cinema, with TV cop shows, and with Scottish literature. I grew up with Jekyll and Hyde. I grew up with dark Gothic tales set in Scotland or written by Scottish authors. And the first Rebus novel I wrote was meant to be an updating of the theme of Jekyll and Hyde. You were meant to think the detective Rebus, who was only going to be around for one book, you were meant to think he’s potentially the killer. He has blackouts during that book. He wakes up not remembering what he did the night before. He has a locked room in his flat. And I was trying to make the reader think this person is potentially Jekyll and Hyde. But then he stuck around, so then he suddenly wasn't that anymore. But I don’t think too much about it. I just-- I start with a theme that I want to explore, a question I want to explore about the way the world is. I find a plot that allows me to explore that theme and then I think OK, what characters do I need? So oftentimes when I start a book, I have no idea who the killer is. And it’s only through writing the first draft of the book, i.e. playing detective, getting to know the characters and how they connect to each other and people’s possible motives, it's only then that I start to discover who the culprit is and why they did what they did. And that’s always worked for me. I don’t know if it would work for too many other writers, but at one book, The Hanging Garden, I think I was on the second draft before I worked out who the killer was. I just had these big blank bits that had to be filled in later on, and it was only in reading through the first draft that I start to go, well, wait a minute, if he did that, then possibly this person who we met earlier in the book might have been connected to that and might have ended up killing him because of that. That all came about quite late on in the process. And some people would panic at that. I think a lot of writers would panic at not knowing where a story is meant to go. James Ellroy, famous American crime writer, writes 300-page synopses of his books before he starts. I start with a handful of pages, usually which run out by the time I’ve got to page 50 because by then, I’ve used up all the ideas I had. And by then, hopefully the story has gone off on a tangent that’s quite interesting. I just follow it. I just grab on to the story and hope it will lead me in the direction it wants me to go in and reveal to me who the killer is and why.

I don’t think I think too much consciously about the effect these books are having. I mean, very occasionally, someone will come up to me after a book has been written and said, oh, I didn’t like that for this reason, or I was worried about that or these books have written, for example, about perhaps with a transsexual or a cross-dressing killer, which I’ve done for shock effect. And it’s only years afterwards that a member of the trans community said to me, I really didn’t like that you did that. You only did it for a cheap thrill. And they’re absolutely right. And now I would probably think a little bit more, as a man in his 60s, I would think a little bit more about my writing and why I do things and how I use characters, because characters are people. They reflect real people often. I would think more about that than I did when I was a young, vigorous man on his way up, not caring what he did to get his books noticed. A lot of books out there, to get them noticed I used to think you had to put in lots of gore and violence and rococo serial killers. I didn’t stick with that for too long, but for a short period of time, I thought that’s what gets you noticed as a crime writer. That was very much learning the lesson of Hannibal, I guess. No, I don’t think too much about that. I would hate people to lead their whole lives based on the way Rebus leads his life because they probably wouldn’t have a very long, and happy, and healthy lifestyle. He’s certainly not an advert for a healthy lifestyle. Cafferty probably is much-- the villain is probably a much better advert for a healthy lifestyle. I don’t think he smokes, he doesn’t drink to excess, he doesn’t hang out in pubs the way Rebus does. It’s only afterwards that you think about the effect, I think, that these books have had when you start to talk to readers who’ve read the book. And they’ll say, oh, that was an interesting thing you did there, or my granddad was in a POW camp so that was really interesting to me that he used internment camps in that book, or et cetera, et cetera. I mean-- I guess. Does the author have any moral role to play? I don’t want to be on a soapbox, tub-thumping, saying this is the way the world is because I say so, and this is how you should lead your life because I say so. I think readers are much more nuanced, and much more articulate, and intelligent than that. They don’t need me laying things out for them in that way. What I give them are interesting and intriguing stories, I hope, that beneath the surface, if you want to investigate or dig a little bit further, will perhaps be saying something or asking a question about politics, about society, about social injustice, issues of people smuggling, people trafficking, immigration, xenophobia, racism. I mean, these are all meat and drink to the crime writers, especially in the current day, but I’m not a politician. I’m a writer who makes a living by entertaining people. So I’ve got to write. My prime objective is to write something where people will keep turning the pages. And if they find any moral value in that, below that, in the deep structure of the book, then great. If they just read it as an entertainment, to pass the time on a flight, or a train, fine.

There have been a few times when I’ve been confronted. Dead Souls, a book about a paedophile released into the community, was based on a true story that happened in Stirling. And I did an event in Stirling, and sitting in the front row was the real woman who had been responsible for gathering up the community to chase this paedophile out of their community. And she was basically tapping the book and nodding at me. She knew that it was her, that this character in my book was very much based on. So she came up at the end, but she was fine. I mean, we had a nice conversation, an intelligent conversation about the role that her character played, which was different from the real life role that this woman had played. I’ve had immigrants come up to me, asylum seekers, because in one of the books, Fleshmarket Close, there were asylum seekers. And they said, oh did you base that on us? Did you ’cause we were mentioned in a newspaper story and maybe, you know. But again, politely, it didn’t seem to me that they were outraged. One member of the trans community was annoyed that I’d used a cross-dresser as a killer in one book. But again, we had a nuanced debate about it-- not a debate, a conversation. And I’m always learning. I mean, I’m always learning. I don’t think I pull my punches too much. I mean, I am a much more liberal figure in reality than most of my characters I write about. Rebus is much more of an Old Testament guy. He sees the world in absolute, good and evil, black and white. If you’ve crossed the line and become a criminal, to him, you’re always going to be a criminal. But then I’ve got a character called Siobhan Clarke, who is a younger detective, and she’s much more liberal. She’s college educated, she’s a bit more like me in many ways. And she will have an argument with Rebus, or a conversation with Rebus and try to change his mind, as I do, about the way the world would is. To say, and look, there are gradations, there are shades of grey, it's not binary. And I do worry that in this world that we now inhabit, which is much more online-driven than it used to be. Things do seem to be becoming much more binary. There’s not much room on the internet, on social media, for nuanced debate and for middle ground. Very quickly, people have knee jerk reactions. Very quickly, people move into their tribes and only listen to the members of their tribe, and don’t listen to the opposing parties or people who are not a member of the tribe. And so you get entrenched views. Literature is about the opposite of that. Literature is about connecting people. It’s about telling people there’s another world in this. There are other cultures out there. There are things you should know about. There are things I want to tell you about and I do worry that the online world doesn’t have that nuance and doesn’t have that ability to debate in the way the novel can start a debate. And a lot of the crime novels being written now by younger writers, specifically not police procedurals, but any psychological crime novels and standalones, as we call them. The crime novel has always examined the world around it and examined the fears of its contemporary audience. And right now, the fears of the contemporary audience are things like online stalking, people pretending to be your friend online and are not, CCTV being everywhere, people being spied on, people being harassed online. There’s a lot of conspiracy theories around that. People are starting to-- some people are falling into. So a lot of that now in the crime fiction that is being written. It’s fascinating to me that the contemporary crime novel more and more, of course, is dealing with the fears, the potential fears of its contemporary audience.

I write about Edinburgh predominantly. That’s the main place I write about. And I live in Edinburgh. I’m talking to you from Edinburgh. I’ve been living in Edinburgh more or less since I was 18 years old and came here to go to university. It’s a city I know pretty well. And a lot of people who’ve been to Edinburgh visited as tourists or on business or whatever, think they’ve got an idea of what Edinburgh is like as well. So that’s great. I’ve got a recognisable city that I’m starting in, and it’s a small city. It’s not sprawling like Los Angeles or Athens. So it’s containable in fiction in a way that a much bigger city might not be containable. My characters can roam through Central Edinburgh very, very easily, very quickly. It didn’t take long to get from one end of Edinburgh to the other. So there’s that. I’ve always read-- I’ve always read novels from a very young age. And you learn tricks along the way. You learn how to present a place, even if it’s a fictitious place. You learn how to present it in a way that very quickly means that readers can feel they know it too. For the last Rebus novel I wrote, A Song for the Dark Times. It was meant to be set in a real town on the north coast of Scotland called Tongue. And I went to Tongue to explore it and thought oh no, this won’t do. Tongue is too big, too populous, too much is going on. There are too many facilities here. I want somewhere smaller. So I invented a village a few miles outside Tongue and I called it Naver. N-A-V-E-R. Does not exist. There is a River Naver, but there’s no village called Naver. And I thought OK, we’ll have a primary school, it’ll have a pub, it’ll have a shop, it’ll have a post office, perhaps, it’s only open a few hours. A scattering of houses, and people will work in this industry, or that industry, or be self-employed, or be retired. And you just start very quickly with a few brush strokes to put together the place where you’re setting the book. And then because Rebus is Rebus, he’s a guy who likes to get to know a place by walking through it, by walking around it, by going to the pub, by meeting local people, wherever he is in the world, he does that. And that introduces the reader very quickly to the people who live in this village. So I do that. And the big question I had early on in this series, when I was young, was do I make-- how much is it a real Edinburgh in the books and how much is it a fictitious place? And in the early books, it was much more of a fictitious Edinburgh. Rebus drank in fictional bars. Rebus went to fictional parts of Edinburgh. But then people in Edinburgh said, oh, that’s obviously that housing scheme with a different name. And that’s obviously that pub that he’s drinking in, but you’ve given it a different name. And he worked in a police station in a fictitious street. Great London Road does not exist. There’s a street called London Road, but there is no Great London Road. So four books into the series, I think I’ve burned down his fictitious police station and moved him into a real police station, and moved him into a real bar, The Oxford Bar, where I happened to drink, and where a lot of cops happened to drink in the old days. And started more and more to use real bits of Edinburgh. Now I will still use fictional bits of Edinburgh if something horrible has happened. I don’t want to disrespect people living in tough parts of town when they are doing their best to make these places habitable. These parts of town, a nice place to bring up kids and stuff. So if something horrible is happening, I will lightly fictionalise the area of town I’m talking about. But Edinburgh folk know roughly where I am. It’s just I’m doing my best not to disrespect real people who are being brought up in much tougher circumstances, than the circumstances I happen to live in.

A completely amoral world. The world with just bad people and no good people. It’s a tough one to pull off, you know. Even when you produce characters who are intrinsically bad, sometimes empathy gets you or sympathy gets you. And you start having a kind of soft spot for them, and you make them a little bit less nasty than would otherwise be the case. I’m struggling to think of anything. I mean, I’ve written-- I wrote a short story set in hell. A long, long time ago, in the waiting room for hell. Don’t ask me what it’s called, I can’t remember. And it didn’t feature any cops or anything. It was people sitting in a very hot pub that’s getting hotter, and you start to realise between the lines that they’re actually waiting to go to hell. I did write a comic book once, a graphic novel, called Dark Entries, which was part of the John Constantine, Hellblazer series, but it’s a standalone 200-page comic book which takes place in hell. And that was pretty interesting. But the demons in hell pass their time by watching Big Brother, so that’s quite nice. Yeah, it’s a tough one. I do think that people have redeeming features. I think that’s possibly my flaw. So it’s very hard for me to conceive of writing a story that’s all nasty without the possibility of good intruding. I did my PhD on the novels of Muriel Spark. Muriel Spark is a wonderful Scottish novelist. She wrote a fantastic crime novel called The Driver’s Seat, if you don’t know it, you should read it, about a victim looking for someone to kill them, basically. Spoiler alert. But that’s a fairly venal world that she writes about because the guy doesn’t want to carry out the act, but she kind of makes him do it in a way. So who’s the goody here and who’s the baddy? Muriel Spark was very good at that. Throughout her career, she wrote about these people and you were never sure if they were good or bad or contained elements of both. Miss Jean Brodie is both a hero and a villain of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, for example. And there’s a quote from Muriel Spark, which is what I’m getting at, where she said all human beings have within them the ability to do good and the ability to do evil. And what crime fiction investigates is that point where the line was crossed. Why did they cross the line? Who crosses the line? And why don’t more of us cross the line? I remember for that series on evil I did about the nature of evil, I did interview a historian who had looked at people who’d been near the end of World War Two, people in Poland, I think. Men of a couple of villages were rounded up by the Nazis and-- one village sorry, were rounded up by the Nazis and said, look, we’re going to attack the village over there and you’re going to come and kill all the villagers with us. Take one step forward if you will do that. And what this guy had done was go back and interview as many of the people as he could find, the ones who took a step forward and the ones who didn’t. And often the ones who took a step forward said, I did it because the guy next to me did it. I did it because I was afraid what would happen to me if I didn’t do it. It was that kind of thing. Taking one step forward meant you were going to take part in an atrocity. And I was, I’m fascinated by that. Taking that one step forward is what’s at the back of my mind when I write a lot of my crime fiction. Muriel Spark comes back to that in The Mandelbaum Gate, which is a book about-- well, she was in Jerusalem when-- I’m going to forget his name now, Adolf Eichmann, was being put on trial. And Eichmann-- she went to court to actually watch some of it. And Eichmann’s defence was, you know, I just followed the rules, I just followed the orders, I was just a bureaucrat. I wasn’t doing the killing. I was just a bureaucrat shoving bits of paper around. And it’s extraordinary that how many of the Nazis, when you actually look at it, were just basically bureaucrats who thought they were doing a job.