Rankin adds Banks to the ranks of the grotesque

Now that the literary storm involving Ian Rankin and the lesbian crime writer Val McDermid has all but blown over, I do hope that a follow-up isn't brewing between the Rebus author and another novelist hailing from his native county of Fife.

Rankin who is currently at work doing the promotional rounds at the Edinburgh Festival, has made a less than complimentary dig at one of his fellow Scot Iain Banks's most revered pieces of writing.

Speaking out at the festival, he labelled Banks's popularly acclaimed debut novel The Wasp Factory as being "grotesque".

"Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory was quite grotesque. That was grotesque," he said emphatically.

"I think in general there's a need for young writers to get noticed and an easy way of getting noticed in crime fiction is to make the crime horrendous or to create some extraordinary serial killer that's more grotesque than Hannibal Lector. Shocks, shock value will get you noticed."

This will be the second time in the space of a week that Rankin's comments on literary violence will have been brought to book, so to speak. Last Tuesday, McDermid reacted furiously to comments he made in an interview with The Independent last year in which he said: "The people writing the most graphic violence today are women and they are mostly lesbians as well."

McDermid's response was to tell journalists at the book festival that she regarded Rankin's comments as "arrant rubbish" and "offensive".

* It is not clear where to begin on this, other than to say that Express newspaper baron Richard Desmond is heading for a showdown with Romanian pop duo the Cheeky Girls and their mother, Margit Irimia.

Irimia, whose daughter Gabriela is dating Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik, is furious that Desmond's Daily Star superimposed headshots of Big Brother twins Sam and Amanda on to a picture of the girls which she says they own the copyright to.

"I am very upset. The girls spent 20 years getting their bodies to look like that and this paper has used them to promote two other people," says Margit. "My husband rang to complain but they didn't seem to want to know."

Staff on the Star's picture desk have returned fire saying the pictures belong to them and they can do as they please. "I'm consulting my lawyers," adds Margit. "I used to expect this sort of manipulation under Ceausescu, but not any more."

* Actress Samantha Morton rates her role in Control as the troubled Joy Divison singer Ian Curtis's widow Deborah as her most interesting to date.

It's quite the compliment since Morton has become the film industry's unofficial Queen of the biopic. In the past she's portrayed a host of real-life (and in some cases notorious) characters such as Marilyn Monroe, Myra Hindley and Mary Queen of Scots. "I have played a lot of people that are real people and still alive, but I just found this story really fascinating, Deborah is an incredible woman," she said at a screening of the film in Edinburgh.

As noted in these pages, Morton is pregnant with her second child. When asked whether she might consider, in honour of Curtis, calling the baby Ian, she curtly responded in the negative.

* The novelist Irvine Welsh displays none of the control freakery that has characterised so many of his fellow writers when it comes to transferring their literary oeuvres onto the big screen.

"I didn't have anything to do with the film of Trainspotting, I would have screwed it up if I got my hands on it," he says.

"When you sell the rights as a writer I think that it's good to pass it on to someone else to breathe new life into it. Sometimes you're better standing back and letting other people get on with it."

Welsh did once adapt one of his books, The Acid House, but adds modestly: "It would have been much better if someone else had done it."

* For all Lord Biffen's barracking of Boris Johnson's hero Lady Thatcher, I trust Bozza will forever hold a place in his heart for the recently departed former trade secretary. Prior to the shambolic Tory MP's first marriage to Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1987, not only did the bumbling Boris arrive at the church in typically Johnsonesque fashion without the ring but, according to Andrew Gimson's biography The Rise of Boris Johnson, he was also sporting a pair of trousers he'd had to borrow last minute from Biffen.

"Some weeks later I had to send the mortgagees our wedding certificate, but it was nowhere to be found. Naturally Bozzer showed not the slightest interest," said Mostyn-Owen. "Months later the Biffens were much amused to find the missing document in the pocket of the famous trousers."