Ian Rankin: Rewards of an inspector's remorse

Scotland's most dysfunctional detective, DI Rebus, now sells more than a million books a year. Behind his triumph lies the strange case of a gifted writer who learned how to achieve success without stupidity.

Pubs and bars loom large in literature's liquid folklore. Yet you sometimes suspect that renown drowns reality. Did Boswell and Johnson prop up the Cheshire Cheese, and would the Closerie des Lilas have sunk without the patronage of Joyce and Hemingway? In the case of Ian Rankin, and his prodigiously successful creation John Rebus, half an hour in the friendly fug of the Oxford Bar should silence sceptics.

Hidden down a cobbled lane not far from Princes Street is the tiny bolt-hole where DI Rebus, the moody Edinburgh sleuth, retreats to drink and think. It also shelters his inventor. As we slide into the Ox after a meal at a nearby bistro, proprietor John Gates calmly presents Ian Rankin with a stack of books deposited by fans for him to sign. Mr Gates (who lends his name to a senior Edinburgh pathologist in the Rebus novels) keeps letters for the author underneath his minute bar: "It's my poste restante." Drinkers look up from their afternoon pints to praise the latest Rebus books. And Rankin, a bantering legend in his own lunchtime, recalls the woman who approached him on a recent Canadian tour with thanks "for all the pleasure that you've given me in bed".

Brooding, curmudgeonly, depressive ("created as the exact opposite to me," says Rankin), DI Rebus continues to please an army of readers, in and out of bed. Resurrection Men (Orion, £17.99) is his 13th appearance. Rankin can foresee a handful of future cases before the troubled 'tec hits the statutory retirement age and spends more time with his beloved Seventies rock albums, even though "When I sit down at that computer, I never know whether his voice is going to come".

The Rebus canon now sells well over a million books every year. Meanwhile, ITV dramatisations have given Rankin's grizzled cop the improbably youthful features of John Hannah. At least it wasn't Robbie Coltrane, whom the BBC proposed. I wonder if Bill Paterson might have done the perfect job: "ITV said he was too old, which is quite shocking." Besides, Rebus operates as a questing mind, not an ageing, all-but-alcoholic body: "I just know the inside of his head. I never describe him."

This relentless introspection – allied to Rankin's total immersion in the society and culture of a small, semi-autonomous country in northern Europe – makes his staggering global popularity all the more remarkable. Even more than its forerunners, Resurrection Men unfolds not in the present, but the past. Sent for re-education at the Scottish Police College after throwing a wobbly at work, Rebus meets an awkward squad of washed-up, middle-aged detectives. They grope back towards the murky corners of their careers, "where the bodies are buried". This dark night of the copper's soul reeks of sour testosterone and abandoned hope. "This was how jobs got done," Rebus sulks, "with a tainted conscience, guilty deals, and complicity."

As these toxic fragments of the past emerge, so they expose new facets of the inspector's personality. "There's always another layer of the onion to be unpeeled," says Rankin. In contrast to the "dialogue-driven" crime caper epitomised by Elmore Leonard, we grasp the state of Rebus's mind through blocks of monologue. Rankin says that "if you want a three-dimensional character, you need chunks of prose. I think PD James does that very well". For me, another James springs to mind: Henry. Rankin snorts. "At least I'm readable!"

Of course he is, but never in a simple-minded way. Rankin's steady erosion of that porous boundary between "literary" and "genre" novels makes the Rebus phenomenon as suitable a case for cultural investigators as for crime buffs. As a bookish teenager in the depressed coalfields of 1970s Fife, he learned how to balance aspirations and environment. At weekends, he would travel to the nearest bookshop to order titles featured on Melvyn Bragg's TV programme, and yet "when I wasn't doing that, I had to be out on the street corner, sitting with the rest of the gang".

Later, at Edinburgh University, he wrote award-winning poetry, but determined never to grow up into one of the penurious, drink-cadging bards who lurched into the Poetry Society: "I didn't want to be a kept writer. I wanted to be a full-time professional." It was the versatile novelist (and rare Scots Tory) Allan Massie, then writer in residence, who showed him the way: "Although I didn't share his politics, I enjoyed his books. And he was a proper, grown-up novelist, the first I'd ever met."

Under the cover of a thesis on Muriel Spark, Rankin found time to write three novels. Summer Rites, the still-unpublished first, was a fantasia in which the Provisional SNP kidnapped an American novelist modelled on Norman Mailer. The sole typescript sits in the Rankins' house in the Dordogne: "If there's a fire in France, it's all gone. But my wife says it's my best book. She only says that to annoy me, though."

Knots and Crosses, which saw the birth of Rebus, carried postmodernism into the police procedural with its knowing allusions to Jekyll and Hyde and the haunted, dualistic tradition of Scottish Gothic fiction: "It was jam-packed full of stuff that I thought Umberto Eco would like if he read it." Eco didn't, but the crime reviewers did.

The young poet was morphing into a career crime writer. Did his intellectual dignity suffer? "When I found out that I'd written an accidental crime novel, I went to Allan Massie and said, 'This is terrible.' And he said, 'Well, Ian, you'll never get the kudos, but you'll always get the cash.'"

Now Rankin enjoys both, although no one ever offered wealth and reputation on a plate. After an unhappy spell in London, he and his wife Miranda moved to France, where he hammered out Rebus titles and a trio of rule-busting thrillers as "Jack Harvey". A glorious expat idyll? Hardly: he loathed the isolation. "I went off my head in France, I really did... I'd drive round the French countryside in a 2CV screaming at the top of my voice. It was hellish."

On top of this existential angoisse came a more urgent ordeal. The Rankins' second son was born with severe disabilities, and in 1996 the family returned to Edinburgh. The following year, Black and Blue lifted the Rebus series onto a new plane of social inclusiveness and emotional complexity. It won the Gold Dagger for best crime novel, and helped secure Rankin heavyweight status in the critical and commercial leagues. He still writes at the punishing pace of a new Rebus every year, a rate he would prefer to halve. The one catch is that "Orion keep waving bigger and bigger cheques in my face. The working-class Presbyterian boy says, 'Grab the money while you can. Get it for the family, stick it in the bank.'"

His Rebus-hungry admirers include plenty of police officers. Regular CID contacts supply professional tips, while the chief constable of Lothian & Borders himself has reviewed a couple of titles. The gist of his critique, reports Rankin, was that "While I may frown upon the way Rebus works, we could do with a few more like him in the force." Meanwhile, the travails of Rebus's increasingly important sidekick, DS Siobhan Clarke, strike a chord with women officers as they wrestle with the canteen culture: "A lot of female cops come up and say, 'That's just what it's like'."

This proximity to flesh-and-blood police work in a very solid city tugs the Rebus books away from the conventions of their form. It's a critical commonplace that whodunits enact "closure", with the moral order restored. Rankin, and reality, beg to differ: "If you talk to real-life cops, it isn't like that. The case is never really closed. What fascinated me about the crime novel was that it had this very fixed structure, which a lot of readers like. Crime, investigation, resolution – they love that. But you can subvert it by saying that, even if you get the guy, you won't feel good about it."

This open-ended quality turns into a motor of the series as a whole. Characters and motifs recur from book to book, each time in a different light. Rankin expresses a slightly surprising enthusiasm for such multi-volume chronicles of louche, patrician life as Simon Raven's Alms for Oblivion and (above all) Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which he has read half-a-dozen times: "You leave the dance floor, then you go back and there's another partner that you haven't seen for 20 years... You tend to think of life as a series of abrupt moments, but it's not; it's a series of concentric circles, like a dance. You keep meeting at these little cusps. It can make for a really rich fictional life."

I can't quite picture Anthony Powell boozing in the Ox, although Simon Raven might happily have dropped in for a pint or five. As for DI Rebus himself – the spectral presence at the actual bar – he won't be receiving his last orders for a wee while yet. But Rankin can already imagine a future without his soused and sullen Mr Hyde – and even without the genre he adorns. "The crime novel works for me as a series of moral questions, moral arguments, that say something about society; and, hopefully, about the Scottish psyche and the psyche of this individual who happens to inhabit the books. When that stops being interesting, I'll go off and do something else."

Biography

Born in 1960, Ian Rankin was brought up in the former mining town of Cardenden, Fife (sometimes known as "Cardeadend"); his father was a grocer. After publishing award-winning poetry and short stories as a student, he wrote his first three novels while a postgraduate at Edinburgh University. Later he worked as a civil servant, researcher and journalist; his first published novel was The Flood. The first book to feature Inspector John Rebus of Edinburgh CID, Knots and Crosses, appeared in 1987. The ninth, Black and Blue, won the Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction in 1997. Next week the 13th, Resurrection Men, is published by Orion, while the previous Rebus novel, The Falls, is currently a bestseller in paperback. Several of the novels have also been adapted for television by ITV, with John Hannah in the title role. Orion has re-released the three thrillers that Rankin wrote under the pseudonym "Jack Harvey" – Witch Hunt, Bleeding Hearts and Blood Hunt – in an omnibus edition. Married with two sons aged nine and seven, Ian Rankin lives in Edinburgh; he also has a house in south-western France.

Bid to be a Rankin character

Ian Rankin is supporting The Independent's Christmas Appeal for two disability charities – ADD and Kids – by offering to name a character in his next novel after the person who bids most. Companies may also bid for their name to feature in the plot. Simply e-mail your bid to: appeal@independent.co.uk