John Rebus by Ian Rankin

Author:Ian Rankin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

IV

So where did Rebus come from? Well, from my subconscious, obviously, from a young man’s brain, filled with stories and strategies. But also from the books I’d been reading, the city I’d made my home, and the blood that had soaked into its pavements and roadways. Yet it still seems to me that he appeared as a bolt from the blue. I’ve looked at photos of myself in my student room in Arden Street, and have pored over my diaries from the time, seeking clues. The notes I jotted down prior to starting the novel shed very little light. I saw the book as “a metaphysical thriller” but spent very little time delineating Rebus’s character. I wanted the story to contain lots of “puzzles and word-play,” wanted it to be “a very visual piece” and decided it should be written in the third person: “don’t need to go too far inside the main character’s head.” Rebus was to be a cipher rather than a three-dimensional human being. From a re-reading of Knots and Crosses I think it’s true to say that the reader feels more distanced from Rebus in that book than in any of the others which followed. There was a good reason for this: I wanted Rebus himself to exist as a potential suspect in people’s minds. Hence the momentary flashbacks, the hints of something awful in his past, and the “locked room” in his apartment. He also at one point almost strangles a woman who has invited him into her bed.

Nice.

Through sheer force of will, however, he stuck around and grew into someone more fully-formed, to the point where fans are now worried about his health, and find when they meet me that I fall disappointingly short of Rebus himself. I’m just not as damaged as he is, as complex, or as dangerous to be around. I’m only the bloke who commits his stories to paper. What did become obvious to me early on was that a detective makes for a terrific commentator on the world around him. He has access to the highest in the land and the lowest, the politicians and oligarchs, as well as the junkies and petty thieves. In writing books about Edinburgh, I could examine the city (and the nation of which it is capital once more) from top to bottom through Rebus’s eyes. I was lucky, too—there is no tradition of the crime novel in Scotland, so I could make my own path. And, back then, there were no crime novels set in contemporary Edinburgh, meaning that for a little while I had no competition. I’ve been lucky also in that Edinburgh and Scotland continue to change in interesting ways, giving me plenty of plots while delivering up their secrets and mysteries only very slowly. I’ve been living in this city now for almost thirty years—on and off—and it continues to surprise me. Underground streets and chambers are still being discovered. Archaeological digs at the castle bring new truths to the surface.

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