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As Ian Rankin publishes his first standalone thriller in two decades, the Scottish author talks about making sense of difficult experiences through fiction, giving away a share of his success and why he is still looking for new challenges.
Having a ‘Sir’ in front of his name means Ian Rankin often comes in for a bit of ridicule from friends. “When I go into my local bar, someone will look out of the door and say, ‘Where have you parked your horse today?’” he tells me. “The knighthood hasn’t got me very much in terms of freebies or status. Living in Edinburgh keeps you grounded.” Rankin was knighted in 2023 for his services to literature and charity, with Princess Anne “doing the business” at Buckingham Palace while King Charles was otherwise engaged. Even if his drinking buddies don’t take the knighthood all that seriously, Rankin does, not so much for what it says about him as what it says about the genre in which he has spent much of his working life.
“What it does is reinforce that crime fiction is literature,” he tells me. “For a long time in the UK, there was a snobby attitude that said popular fiction or commercial fiction is not of the same status or standard as literary fiction. If the royal family say, ‘No, this is for services to literature, not services to commercial fiction’, that, for me, is a big deal because other people will see crime fiction is just as serious as any other kind of writing.” The Scottish author has sold more than 35 million books worldwide, with his best-known creation, John Rebus, repeatedly making the leap to television, played by John Hannah and Ken Stott, and more recently by Richard Rankin, no relation, in the BBC series Rebus.
This month, though, Rankin is leaving both Rebus and Edinburgh behind. Published today, The Heights is his first standalone thriller in two decades and is set in a luxury London apartment block, where detective Gillian Gish investigates the murder of a night concierge. For Rankin, writing something different offered the chance to test himself again. “There’s always the fear of becoming complacent,” he says, speaking from his office at home in Edinburgh. “It’s good to set yourself a new challenge.” It also allowed him to explore a city in which extreme wealth exists alongside people struggling to make ends meet, sometimes only streets apart. Rankin has long seen crime fiction as a way to examine the world beyond the crime itself.
“The crime novel is the perfect vehicle for an author, whatever you want to do,” he suggests. “If you want to write entertainment, the crime novel will do that. If you want to look at moral issues, good and evil, and big subject matter, from war crimes to adultery, you can do that. If you want to look at a culture, a civilisation, a city or a country, you can do it in a crime novel. For me, it’s the perfect package.” Although he spends a great deal of time in London, Rankin still lives in Edinburgh. Originally from Cardenden, Fife, he moved to the Scottish capital to study at university, where he began writing novels. His mother became ill a month after he arrived and died when he was 19, an experience that shaped those early years and his relationship with writing. “Every time I went home from university, she’d be a little bit worse and a little bit worse,” he says. “My first couple of years at university were quite a dark time.” “I was writing to try to make sense of the world,” he adds. “In one of my Rebus novels, I put his daughter in a wheelchair because I’d learned my son was not going to be able to walk. Writing is a way of dealing with things. You give your problems and big questions to a fictional character and let them worry away, and you might get a solution or a bit of closure.”
“Writing is a way of dealing with things. You give your problems and big questions to a fictional character and let them worry away, and you might get a solution or a bit of closure.”
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