Speaker 1: More than once on this show. I've mentioned a personal
Speaker 1: weakness for a well crafted crime novel. As a kid,
Speaker 1: when I was introduced to Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle,
Speaker 1: an addiction took cold. I devoured mysteries and puzzle box books,
Speaker 1: Ellery Queen and Raymond Chandler, hard boiled American crime and
Speaker 1: cozy British Who Dunnits? And while I quickly learned that
Speaker 1: the genre was capacious and varied, I was pretty indiscriminate
Speaker 1: in where I followed it. For a voracious reader, part
Speaker 1: of the treat was discovering new authors with both expansive
Speaker 1: backlists and prolific ongoing output. It felt like an endless supply.
Speaker 1: If you liked someone's work, there was a better than
Speaker 1: average chance that there would be hours of reading pleasure ahead.
Speaker 1: Over literally dozens of books, and a couple of particular
Speaker 1: favorites emerged, the late Reginald Hill, whose Yorkshire set police
Speaker 1: procedurals featured Superintendent Andy Diel and his offsideer Peter Pasco.
Speaker 2: They were great.
Speaker 1: They were trixie and literary, and in their corpulent, flatulent,
Speaker 1: profane lead, they were a real precursor by several decades
Speaker 1: to mckhern's Slough House Books. Then there's Ian Rankin and
Speaker 1: his indelible creation, John Rebers. Since Notts and Crosses, the
Speaker 1: first book in the series, was published in nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: Rankin has published another two dozen Reabis books. At one
Speaker 1: point he was responsible for ten percent of all crime
Speaker 1: fiction being sold in the UK. At another he occupied
Speaker 1: eight of the ten slots on.
Speaker 2: British bestseller lists.
Speaker 1: He sold almost forty million books to date, translated into
Speaker 1: thirty seven languages, and he is now sir Ian Rankin.
Speaker 1: The twenty fifth book in the series, Midnight in Blue,
Speaker 1: finds his retired cop hero behind bars, called upon to
Speaker 1: assist in solving a locked room murder. Crime readers everywhere
Speaker 1: can delight in the knowledge that, despite Rankin's best efforts,
Speaker 1: he's not done with John Rebers yet.
Speaker 2: I'm Michael Williams and.
Speaker 1: This is Read This the show about the books we
Speaker 1: love and the stories behind me. I was lucky enough
Speaker 1: to sit down with Rankin, sorry, sir Ian, at this
Speaker 1: year's Sydney Writers' Festival, just a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 1: I have to say I came to Midnight in Blue
Speaker 1: and my first thought was that the title immediately evoked
Speaker 1: for me. The eighth book in the Reabs series, Black
Speaker 1: and Blue. An extraordinary book, but a book where Rebus
Speaker 1: was laid as low, really as you'd cast him at
Speaker 1: any point, and it was the first in a sequence
Speaker 1: of several books where every time you thought he couldn't
Speaker 1: go lower, you really did give him another kicking. So,
Speaker 1: knowing that he was in prison in Midnight and Blue,
Speaker 1: seeing this residence in the title, I assumed to find
Speaker 1: a broken man, and instead Rebus is almost as jaunty
Speaker 1: as we've seen him for years. The man's enjoying prison.
Speaker 3: I don't know if he's enjoying prison. I think the structure.
Speaker 3: He likes his life to have a structure. And when
Speaker 3: he had to leave the police force because he was
Speaker 3: of an age where he had to go, suddenly his
Speaker 3: life had no structure, and he still felt he ought
Speaker 3: to be useful. Did he still have a purpose in
Speaker 3: the world? Could he still be useful in prison? He
Speaker 3: has a purpose. His purpose is to avoid being murdered
Speaker 3: by the many bad men in there who don't like
Speaker 3: the fact that a cop is in jail with them.
Speaker 3: And then he's given another purpose, which is there is
Speaker 3: a lot to sell mystery. Someone has been killed in
Speaker 3: a cell, and he is best placed to solve this
Speaker 3: before the prison explodes, because the cons all think it
Speaker 3: must be a warder, all think it must be a con.
Speaker 3: So they're getting ready to clash and into this kind
Speaker 3: of powder keg you throw rabus, so suddenly he's up
Speaker 3: in fun while also watching his front in his back
Speaker 3: for people about to stab him or throttle him or
Speaker 3: kill him. And it was the one thing that you know,
Speaker 3: I do a lot of research. I don't do a
Speaker 3: lot of I do enough research that I can persuade
Speaker 3: the reader. I do a lot of research. But a
Speaker 3: friend of mine's a photographer. He knew the governor in
Speaker 3: Edinburgh Prison, who thankfully, as it turns out, was about
Speaker 3: to retire, so he was much more open and receptive
Speaker 3: to my questions and might otherwise be the case. And
Speaker 3: he took me around the prison and showed me and
Speaker 3: everything else. But the first thing he said was Reabis
Speaker 3: wouldn't come here. There's no way you would take an
Speaker 3: ex Edinburgh copp and put him in Edinburgh prison because
Speaker 3: he would be surrounded by people he would know who
Speaker 3: would want ill done to him. So I said, well,
Speaker 3: I don't want him to be anywhere else. He's got
Speaker 3: to come here. So we discussed that for a while
Speaker 3: and we found a way. He said, well, he would
Speaker 3: come into the Kindese segregation wing, and I went, okay,
Speaker 3: that's good. And then I found a way to get
Speaker 3: him from the segregation into the general population, and I
Speaker 3: was happy. And when the governor eventually read the book,
Speaker 3: it was a couple of tiny things he thought had
Speaker 3: got wrong, but there was nothing major that he thought
Speaker 3: had got wrong.
Speaker 1: You did set yourself in this book, and it's the
Speaker 1: nature of crime in a pretty but you set yourself
Speaker 1: to the crime writer's greatest challenge, which is the locker
Speaker 1: room mystery. Not only do you have this kind of
Speaker 1: pressure cooker environment, but you actually have, somewhat unusually for
Speaker 1: one of your Rabis books, a puzzle box element to
Speaker 1: it as well. Was it fan putting that together?
Speaker 3: Okay? First thing that happened was the previous book, Heartful
Speaker 3: the Headstones. I thought was the last book. Now I've
Speaker 3: thought this before, but I thought, this is a last book.
Speaker 3: He's on trial, he's in the dock. Sense is about
Speaker 3: to be pronounced the end. It's a lovely Reichenbach Falls moment.
Speaker 3: And of course I will only ever be the second
Speaker 3: best crime writer to come out of Edinburgh because Conan
Speaker 3: Doyle was born and brought up in Edinburgh. So I
Speaker 3: thought it's a lovely thing to end the Reabis series
Speaker 3: with a Reichenbach Falls. But then people start to say, well,
Speaker 3: what happened next? And I start to think what would
Speaker 3: happen next? He would be found guilty. If he's found guilty,
Speaker 3: he's going to go to prison. That's interesting that immediately
Speaker 3: you've got tension and drama, and it's a new setting.
Speaker 3: It's a new challenge for me. It's a new setting
Speaker 3: for Reebis and a new set of challenges for me.
Speaker 3: This guy, who's in his seventies with health issues is
Speaker 3: going to go to an alien environment, and in that
Speaker 3: alien environment I can have a discussion with him about
Speaker 3: good and evil, because Reebis in the earlier books especially
Speaker 3: thought there were just these polarized things that were good
Speaker 3: and evil. If you were a bad person, you were
Speaker 3: irredeemably a bad person. In jail, some of the prisoners
Speaker 3: say to him, what do you think you're here now?
Speaker 3: Are we really the monsters you thought we were when
Speaker 3: you put us in here. So that was great to
Speaker 3: be able to have that discussion with him and possibly
Speaker 3: change his mind. So all that was going on, and
Speaker 3: then I thought, well, what's he going to do in prison?
Speaker 3: Is going to have to solve a murder. And then
Speaker 3: because people are locked up for large parts of the day,
Speaker 3: I thought, Okay, I'm murdering a lot cell. How is
Speaker 3: it possible? I have no idea who did it? I
Speaker 3: don't know, but let's start and see. So when I
Speaker 3: started the book, I had no idea how this would happen.
Speaker 3: I had a vague idea because I've been given a
Speaker 3: tour of the cells, so I knew certain things about
Speaker 3: the layout of the cells and how certain things might happen.
Speaker 1: Can I ask, just on the topic of not knowing
Speaker 1: when you started, is it true that when you were
Speaker 1: was it Hanging Garden, you finished your first draft and
Speaker 1: you still hadn't worked out who the killer was?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean this is often roughly the case. I'll
Speaker 3: be typing away and I'll put a nice, big capitalized
Speaker 3: note to myself fix this later, you know. And towards
Speaker 3: the end of the first draft of The Hanging Garden,
Speaker 3: I still didn't know who the killer was. And then
Speaker 3: I read the first draft. I sat and read it
Speaker 3: through and went, oh, hang on a minute, it must
Speaker 3: be you. So it was really the beginning of the
Speaker 3: it was the second draft.
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by that. I'm in a book like The
Speaker 1: Hanging Garden where the theme and the crime are so
Speaker 1: deeply embedded in each other. You know, the ideas as
Speaker 1: you say that question about good and evil that permeates
Speaker 1: the series, those kind of binaries of the different sides
Speaker 1: of not just Rabist, but of all the characters in
Speaker 1: the crime. It seems remarkable to me that it's almost
Speaker 1: incidental who's responsible for the inciting incident.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's incidental. I think you've got a
Speaker 3: range of possible suspects and motives, and I wait for
Speaker 3: the book to tell me which one is most relevant
Speaker 3: or is going to be more surprising to the reader
Speaker 3: while still being credible. Yeah, I do trust to that.
Speaker 3: It's almost like the story is up there, swirling around,
Speaker 3: and it descends and decides. I'm the person to write
Speaker 3: this story down and tell this story, and it will
Speaker 3: tell me where to go. And almost always, if I've
Speaker 3: got a fixed idea of where a book should go.
Speaker 3: The novel says differently. The novel says no, no, no.
Speaker 3: There was a what was let me think what was it?
Speaker 3: It was set in darkness, was going to be the
Speaker 3: first book of a trilogy within the series, and it
Speaker 3: would look at the formation of the Scottish Parliament. So
Speaker 3: in book one there would be a guy who is
Speaker 3: running to be a member of Parliament in the new
Speaker 3: Scottish Parliament. In book two, the parliament is up and running.
Speaker 3: In book three the new building is complete and everything
Speaker 3: in there. So this character would be in all three books.
Speaker 3: He was dead by page fifty, and I didn't want
Speaker 3: that to happen. This was going to be a trilogy
Speaker 3: with this guy in it. But the book just said,
Speaker 3: this guy's extraneous, you know. And so I went, well,
Speaker 3: I've got yet another body, and I don't know who
Speaker 3: did it, you know. So I'll wait and hope that
Speaker 3: the book will tell me. And every time I've gone
Speaker 3: along with the book's idea of what is going to
Speaker 3: make a more interesting story or a meteor story, the
Speaker 3: book has been correct.
Speaker 1: Has that always been approached to writing or is that
Speaker 1: a trust in process that comes only with time and
Speaker 1: success and seeing the it works for you.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I've tried teaching creative writing and
Speaker 3: I don't think it can be done. I mean, I
Speaker 3: think you can make a good writer better, but I
Speaker 3: don't think you can turn someone into a writer. I
Speaker 3: just I've always you know, I've always written, ever since
Speaker 3: I was a little kid. I've written stories and made
Speaker 3: stuff up for my own satisfaction and without thinking too
Speaker 3: hard about the craft that comes later on. You know,
Speaker 3: the second and third draft is when you try and
Speaker 3: make elegant sentences and you try and add some flesh
Speaker 3: to the bones of the characters and solidify the theme
Speaker 3: that you're trying to explore in the book. But the
Speaker 3: first draft is is a ragged beast, very much so,
Speaker 3: which is why nobody sees it except me. And that's
Speaker 3: always worked for me. That has always worked. I know
Speaker 3: other writers do it. I mean what my near neighbor
Speaker 3: as was in Edinburgh until I moved because I couldn't
Speaker 3: take the competition. Alexander McCall smith only writes one draft.
Speaker 3: That's it. It's not allowed to be edited, and it's
Speaker 3: you know, and he writes quick as well, and yet
Speaker 3: somehow it works so everybody's different, but I found a
Speaker 3: way that worked for me quite early on, and I've
Speaker 3: stuck to it.
Speaker 1: I have to digress briefly. Your former neighbor Alexander mccol
Speaker 1: smith wrote you into one of his books, so you're
Speaker 1: going to get revenge?
Speaker 2: Yeah, have him appeared.
Speaker 3: He's actually written me into more than one. He's had
Speaker 3: me sitting in my hot tub in Edinburgh when I
Speaker 3: used to have a hot tub. He had me getting
Speaker 3: hit by an arrow that was fired from some archers
Speaker 3: and the meadows. He had my books appear in the
Speaker 3: wind of a second hand bookshop. He's and every time
Speaker 3: he does it, I say, revenge Sandy is a dish
Speaker 3: served very cold.
Speaker 1: I look forward to that. I'm surprised in prison.
Speaker 3: Nemesis is coming. Shit, I should have done that.
Speaker 1: You mentioned the idea of the moment before this book
Speaker 1: being one of many possible finishing points for Reebis and
Speaker 1: the Raichenbach Fall idea, and one of the things that
Speaker 1: made that seem possible at the end of the last
Speaker 1: book was the death of Big jer Cafferty. And I'm
Speaker 1: sorry that's a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read it,
Speaker 1: but it's a book ago, it's time to catch up.
Speaker 1: But you know, Cafferty was such a key figure since
Speaker 1: he first appeared, I think in the fourth book in
Speaker 1: the series, and had only grown in stature, only grown
Speaker 1: as a kind of counterweight and almost close to Reabs's
Speaker 1: kind of significant other by these later books. How hard
Speaker 1: was it to let him go?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're correct. Caffretty first appears in books three as
Speaker 3: a very minor character. I needed Rebus to be in
Speaker 3: Glasgow to find a clue. Why was he in Glasgow?
Speaker 3: He's giving evidence in a court case. Who's he giving
Speaker 3: evidence against a Glasgow gangster? In book three, Cafferty is
Speaker 3: a Glasgow gangster. He kind of got under my skin
Speaker 3: and I thought, oh, he's a useful can he, as
Speaker 3: you say, a useful sort of almost like kenan Abel
Speaker 3: or jacqulin Hyde or he's the devil tempting Reebis to
Speaker 3: come to the dark side? Nolan Layam, Yeah, Nolan wayem
Speaker 3: as it were, which one is, which we'll discuss later on.
Speaker 3: And so I brought him back after a few books,
Speaker 3: but I'd forgotten he was a Glasgow gangster. So he
Speaker 3: actually has two completely different life stories. In book three
Speaker 3: he grew up in Glasgow by book seven or eighty.
Speaker 3: He grew up in Edinburgh and as an Edinburgh gangster.
Speaker 3: This is how much research I do before I write
Speaker 3: the books. But he was very useful to me. Is
Speaker 3: that sort of devil whispering in Reebus's ear. And also
Speaker 3: they're from very similar backgrounds. They understand each other very well.
Speaker 3: Either one of them their life could have gone in
Speaker 3: a different way that would have made them more like
Speaker 3: the other. So all of that is going on with them,
Speaker 3: and he represents all the bad stuff. Cafferty can represent
Speaker 3: all the bad stuff that's happening in Edinburgh, in Scotland
Speaker 3: and the world. But Reebus and he have this empathy.
Speaker 3: They understand each other so well that you're never sure
Speaker 3: if they're going to end up being best friends or
Speaker 3: destroy each other throughout the series. And to answer your question, eventually,
Speaker 3: when I handed the manuscript over to my agent of
Speaker 3: Heartfully Headstones, Cafferty survived. He didn't die, and it was
Speaker 3: my agent who said, I think it's time. He said,
Speaker 3: go back and look at that final scene. I think
Speaker 3: he dies. And I went back and looked at it
Speaker 3: and went it's a big deal. But okay, So for
Speaker 3: the first time in my life I took my agent's
Speaker 3: advice and it was traumatic. And the nice thing about
Speaker 3: putting Reebis in prison in this new book is we
Speaker 3: don't have to dwell on the aftermath of it too much.
Speaker 3: There's too much other stuff going on that Rebis isn't
Speaker 3: sitting in his flat at dead of night thinking too
Speaker 3: much about Cafferty. That is for possibly a future.
Speaker 1: Book coming up after the break Inches, The genesis of
Speaker 1: his lead detective's name and why he never tires of
Speaker 1: writing about Edinburgh will be right back. Ian Rankin had
Speaker 1: never planned to become a crime writer. Back in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty seven.
Speaker 2: He was a young.
Speaker 1: Muriel Sparks, scholar of all things, and very earnestly trying
Speaker 1: to rewrite Robert Louis Stevenson to have his own go
Speaker 1: at Doctor Jekyl and mister Hyde. Despite the fact that
Speaker 1: this first novel, Knots and Crosses made relatively little waves
Speaker 1: at the time, the Crime Writers' Association wrote to an
Speaker 1: and asked him to join, and he noticed increasingly as
Speaker 1: he went into bookshops in Edinburgh his debut novel wasn't
Speaker 1: on the shelf in the Scottish literature section despite his
Speaker 1: deepest hopes. Instead, it sat in the crime section beside
Speaker 1: Ruth Rendell and P. D. James, And that was the
Speaker 1: moment that Ann thought he'd better start reading this stuff.
Speaker 3: Think I'm still the only crime writer I know who
Speaker 3: wasn't a fan of the genre before they started writing it.
Speaker 3: I'd never The only crime novel I remember reading I
Speaker 3: was maybe twelve or thirteen was Shaft, and I only
Speaker 3: read it because I wasn't old enough to see the movie.
Speaker 1: Is he John raebis because of John Shaft?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, John Shaft. John raebis definitely. And Riebus because
Speaker 3: of Riebus. Is a picture puzzle. It's a little series
Speaker 3: of drawings with letters taken away or add it. So,
Speaker 3: for example, if you had a drawing of an ear
Speaker 3: and above it was the E with a line through it,
Speaker 3: that meant all you wanted was ar and then someone
Speaker 3: rowing a boat row that gives you RRO and you
Speaker 3: went on from there. So when he was getting sent
Speaker 3: these little picture puzzles in book one, I thought, being
Speaker 3: an English literature student studying semiotics and deconstruction, I'll give
Speaker 3: him a name that means puzzle.
Speaker 1: So if you started the series now he could be
Speaker 1: called John Sudoku.
Speaker 3: Yeah, John Tetris.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it doesn't have a ring to it.
Speaker 3: I've got to be and yeah, I mean I've told
Speaker 3: this story before, but I love it. I mean, having
Speaker 3: invented that name, I then spent years explaining to people
Speaker 3: because it's not a Scottish name, how I came up
Speaker 3: with it. We had spent ten years away from Edinburgh.
Speaker 3: My wife and I lived in London, then lived in France.
Speaker 3: Went back and I met a second hand bookseller and
Speaker 3: he said, oh, come and have a drink with me
Speaker 3: and my mates on Friday night. So I went to
Speaker 3: this pub and his mates included an ex police officer
Speaker 3: and a guy called Joe Ribis And I said to him, really,
Speaker 3: and he pronounced it Rebus, and he said, it's a
Speaker 3: Polish surname. So from that book eleven or twelve on,
Speaker 3: I suddenly mentioned Riebus having Polish roots. I didn't know
Speaker 3: until then.
Speaker 1: There's that research again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And Joe said to me, he said, I thought
Speaker 3: you got my name from the phone directory. I said, no,
Speaker 3: I didn't think of Rebus was even a real name.
Speaker 3: So he got the telephone directory from the barman and
Speaker 3: we went through the Edinburgh phone directory. Rebus j for Joe,
Speaker 3: his address genuinely rank and drive.
Speaker 1: Good, serendipitous.
Speaker 3: You could not make that up. You couldn't make it up.
Speaker 1: That is wildly good. It does strike that you mentioned
Speaker 1: that it was about a decade that you and your
Speaker 1: wife lived out of Scotland, and that decade the overlay
Speaker 1: is best. I understand that. I think some of those books,
Speaker 1: the portrait of Edinburgh in particular, is particularly acute, and
Speaker 1: I'm curious about the difference for you of writing about
Speaker 1: it as a place from a distance as opposed to
Speaker 1: writing about it when you were there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The very first Rebus book, nottson Crosses, was written
Speaker 3: in Edinburgh in the National Library of Scotland while I
Speaker 3: was supposedly doing a PhD on Murial Spark. Then we
Speaker 3: moved to London because the money ran out for the PhD,
Speaker 3: and my wife got a job in London as a
Speaker 3: civil servant, so she supported me well. I tried to
Speaker 3: write books two, three and four, and that's why book
Speaker 3: three is set.
Speaker 1: In London and hides it.
Speaker 3: Oh well, I thought, I'm hating it here. I'll channel
Speaker 3: that hate to him and he can load it on
Speaker 3: my behalf. And then we moved to France and we
Speaker 3: were there for six years. So quite a lot of
Speaker 3: the books were written in this French farmhouse, and yeah,
Speaker 3: it was Edinburgh then became a city of the imagination.
Speaker 3: I couldn't just walk out my front door and do
Speaker 3: the research. I didn't remember remembering stuff, and I would
Speaker 3: go back. I'd go back to Scotland once or twice
Speaker 3: a year and do the research, look at places and
Speaker 3: make sure I'd described him properly. But it was useful,
Speaker 3: I think to that distance. When I got worried was
Speaker 3: when we were moving back. You know, haven't been away
Speaker 3: for ten years. A though, if I go back to Edinburgh,
Speaker 3: can I still write about the place or will it
Speaker 3: be more like journalism or reportage? Can I write about
Speaker 3: it imaginatively when I'm living there? And I think the
Speaker 3: first book I wrote when I got back was the
Speaker 3: one The Hanging Garden, which was partly setting well had
Speaker 3: the story behind it was a story of something that
Speaker 3: happened in or a door in France during World War Two,
Speaker 3: a place near where we lived. So I was kind
Speaker 3: of reaching back to France in a way in that book,
Speaker 3: as well as making sure that I was it was
Speaker 3: an Edinburgh book. I don't know how important it is
Speaker 3: to be living in Edinburgh and writing about Edinburgh. It's
Speaker 3: such an interesting city to me, It's a it's so
Speaker 3: much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Speaker 3: You can walk around it in a day, as you know,
Speaker 3: you can walk around it in a day, but you
Speaker 3: could spend your whole life trying to understand it.
Speaker 1: Wasn't in one of your books that I read the
Speaker 1: phrase that Edinburgh.
Speaker 3: Was all for for coon nickers. Thats I, that's a
Speaker 3: that's a yeah, that's a that's a Glasgow saying about
Speaker 3: Edinburgh it's all for coton nickers. Or is one history
Speaker 3: in Edinburgh put it as a place of public probity
Speaker 3: and private vice, which brings us back to jack lyn
Speaker 3: Hyde again. So anyway, so that was what I thought
Speaker 3: I was doing with the book, was trying to do
Speaker 3: this sort of social history of Edinburgh and at it
Speaker 3: seems time take on some pretty big hopefully, I thought,
Speaker 3: pretty big questions about good and evil. And a detective
Speaker 3: is a perfect means of investigating a city from top
Speaker 3: to bomb.
Speaker 1: Well, your detective can be in a politician's house one
Speaker 1: minute and a commission flats the next.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. I mean a journalist can do that, but
Speaker 3: a journalist you can say.
Speaker 1: No to them, and you tend to kill off your journalists.
Speaker 3: I do. Yeah, well, I don't always kill off my journalists,
Speaker 3: but you're right, You're right they have. Yeah. One of
Speaker 3: the many early books didn't last too long, did they.
Speaker 1: Coming back again to that idea of public property private
Speaker 1: vice is by setting the books around a police officer
Speaker 1: and around the system, you get to tell a pretty
Speaker 1: comprehensive story about the failures of that system, the ways
Speaker 1: in which it's corrupted or perverted or doesn't do what
Speaker 1: it professes to do. Has your attitude to law enforcement,
Speaker 1: to crime, to those kind of stories shifted in they
Speaker 1: now almost forty years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think crime writers in general now,
Speaker 3: if you're writing about a police officer, you're very conscious
Speaker 3: of the fact that the public don't necessarily see them
Speaker 3: as the Clint Eastwood figure riding into a lawless place
Speaker 3: and bringing order from chaos. You know, the public general
Speaker 3: public see them as being conflicted, corrupted, covering up for
Speaker 3: one another, being part of the problem. And a lot
Speaker 3: of younger crime writers are not using cops as their heroes,
Speaker 3: and those of us who still do use cops as
Speaker 3: our heroes, like Michael Connolly and me, are very conscious
Speaker 3: we write about corruption. And the previous Reabis book was
Speaker 3: about bad things he had done in his younger days
Speaker 3: as part of this kind of group of police officers
Speaker 3: and had got away with because in the past you
Speaker 3: could get away with stuff that you couldn't get away
Speaker 3: with today because of the technology and the surveillance and
Speaker 3: the mobile phones and the cameras and everything else. The
Speaker 3: stuff you could get away with in the past, and
Speaker 3: you know, he feels bad about it. I think Reebis
Speaker 3: does feel guilty about the fact that he didn't always
Speaker 3: use the correct legal procedures to get a result, but
Speaker 3: he feels he didn't usually get the right person, usually
Speaker 3: put manage to put someone away for something. But he
Speaker 3: feels bad about that. But that is something I think
Speaker 3: the people who write about police officers have really taken
Speaker 3: on board. Now policing keeps changing. I mean, it really
Speaker 3: annoys me how much the nomenclature changes. So Malcolm Fox
Speaker 3: when we first met him, was working for complaints and conduct.
Speaker 3: That was what internal affairs was called. Then it changed
Speaker 3: it morphed is something else, I think, maybe even internal affairs.
Speaker 3: Then it morphed into something else, and now it's something
Speaker 3: else again. So in this new book, when Reebis is
Speaker 3: talking to him, he said, so what you call this week?
Speaker 3: You know? And I've got to keep on top of
Speaker 3: that because the people who read my books know that
Speaker 3: these things are policing is changing.
Speaker 1: Based on the Joe Rebis story, you just write what
Speaker 1: you like and it'll come true.
Speaker 3: Has happened in the past, I've written about something that
Speaker 3: has come true. Weirdly.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you mentioned Malcolm Fox because he is a
Speaker 1: kind of embodiment of that idea of working within the
Speaker 1: system or not. And you introduced him in the Complaints
Speaker 1: after the first time you attempted to finish writing about
Speaker 1: Rebus unsuccessfully, and it seems to me that you set
Speaker 1: him up, introduced him a potential new protagonist, and either
Speaker 1: you wound up not liking Malcolm very much or the
Speaker 1: Rebus in you just couldn't help yourself, And so Malcolm
Speaker 1: moved pretty quickly from a potential new protagonist to an antagonist.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious about how deliberate that was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I you know, haven't decided that Rebus were tough
Speaker 3: to retire. My wife said, great, you've got freedom not
Speaker 3: to write any Kenny book you want to rate. What
Speaker 3: do you want to write about? I said, what a
Speaker 3: rate book? Cops? So I'm gonna have another cop. But
Speaker 3: I don't want anybody to think they're getting Rebus two
Speaker 3: point zero or Rebus Light. He's got to be a
Speaker 3: very different kind of cop from Rebus. So internal affairs.
Speaker 3: I thought that's interesting, because the kind of cop who
Speaker 3: makes a good internal affairs detective is the antithesis of Rebis.
Speaker 3: So Malcolm Fox came along. Now the problem is, if
Speaker 3: you are working that job, you've got to be cleaner
Speaker 3: than clean, whiter than white, never cross the line. Boring, right,
Speaker 3: fairly boring. So book two he's trying to be a maverick,
Speaker 3: but he's not very good at it. And then I
Speaker 3: got an idea for a cold case novel. And there
Speaker 3: was a unit in Edinburgh staff by retired detectives that
Speaker 3: investigated cold cases, and I thought, oh, that's what Rebus
Speaker 3: is doing. He would not go gentle into that good night.
Speaker 3: He would not retire from the police and open a
Speaker 3: bar or a bed breakfast or move to marbea he
Speaker 3: would want to still feel like a detective. So I
Speaker 3: brought him back for standing in another man's grave. And
Speaker 3: then I thought, the one person who wouldn't want to
Speaker 3: see Rebus back on the force is Malcolm Fox. So
Speaker 3: Fox did go from being protagonist to antagonist because suddenly
Speaker 3: it was Reebus's story. And the more that I continue
Speaker 3: to write about Rebus, the more Fox became the antagonist.
Speaker 3: And that was an interesting turnaround. He's tried several times
Speaker 3: to be a man of action, to be a frontline
Speaker 3: police officer, and he's not very good at it. He's
Speaker 3: a yes man, a toady, a pen pusher. He's a
Speaker 3: very good administrator. But the fact that he always tries
Speaker 3: to be a man of action becomes kind of hilarious
Speaker 3: to me. He's just not very good at it.
Speaker 1: Just but that I would write a series about Rabis
Speaker 1: managing a bidden breakfast and handling alex Anna McCall smith
Speaker 1: as a guest.
Speaker 3: Now, now you're talking maybe a short story. I could
Speaker 3: get a short story of that.
Speaker 1: There's a whole thing now.
Speaker 3: I keep thinking, you know, in the Reabis now, in
Speaker 3: his dotage, all I can do really is hand him
Speaker 3: over to Richard Osmond. You know, I just say move
Speaker 3: him into your care home. Richard Is, you know you've
Speaker 3: got an ex spy, You've got this, you've got that,
Speaker 3: have an ex cop.
Speaker 1: So you've been living with John Raebis for almost forty
Speaker 1: years now, more than once. You've tried to shake him
Speaker 1: off for you've tried to move on, but it's proved
Speaker 1: very difficult. I think we can see how he's changed
Speaker 1: in the pages over the years. How has writing him
Speaker 1: changed you?
Speaker 3: I mean it's I mean he's made me a good living,
Speaker 3: which is amazing to me. I've known him longer than
Speaker 3: I've known most of my friends. He lives inside my head.
Speaker 3: He's in a little compartment there, and every now and
Speaker 3: again he pops out of a conversation with me and
Speaker 3: we have a conversation about the way the world is.
Speaker 3: He's gone through because he's older than me, he's going
Speaker 3: through all the eggs and pains that I will have
Speaker 3: to go through eventually, and so that's been interesting for me.
Speaker 3: As i've aged, he's aged as well. Do I like him?
Speaker 3: I think I like him better than he would like me.
Speaker 3: I think he would find me pretty boring and wishy washy.
Speaker 3: He likes a challenge, and I don't think I would
Speaker 3: present him with any sort of a challenge. But the
Speaker 3: world has moved on and cops like Rebiss don't exist anymore.
Speaker 3: There's no room for them in the modern world. Maybe
Speaker 3: there shouldn't have been room for them in the first instance,
Speaker 3: but I've enjoyed it. I mean, who knows what would
Speaker 3: have happened if I'd let him. You know, the first
Speaker 3: draft of the first novel, he died. He was shot
Speaker 3: and killed at the end of the first book, and
Speaker 3: for some reason I brought him back in the second draft.
Speaker 3: He survived. You know what, He's going to survive longer
Speaker 3: than me. You know, when I shuffle off this mortal coil,
Speaker 3: when there's nothing of me left in second hand bookshops
Speaker 3: around the globe, there will charity shops. There will still
Speaker 3: be John Hibbers.
Speaker 1: Ian Rangkin's latest novel, Midnight in Blue, is available everywhere.
Speaker 2: Now and before we go, a short list of three.
Speaker 1: Crime writers who I think are worth your time to
Speaker 1: look out I mentioned up the top of the episode
Speaker 1: Reginald Hill.
Speaker 2: Some of his earlier.
Speaker 1: Books have dated a bit, but they are deeply pleasurable
Speaker 1: and they riff on everything from the Iliad to his
Speaker 1: love of country house mysteries.
Speaker 2: They're really fun.
Speaker 1: A special mentioned are Irish crimewriter Tana French, who's absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 1: Her Belfast Murder Squad books are well worth catching up with.
Speaker 1: And the late Great Peter Temple, Australing crime writer extraordinary.
Speaker 1: Any one of his books you will have a wonderful
Speaker 1: time with. You can find them and all other books
Speaker 1: we mentioned in this episode at your favorite independent bookstore.
Speaker 2: That's it for this week's.
Speaker 1: Show, and the reviews on the Apple pop app are
Speaker 1: sitting on two hundred and seventy two that have been
Speaker 1: for weeks now. If you haven't gone there to give
Speaker 1: a little star rating or a review, do so. I
Speaker 1: want that number to get all the way to three
Speaker 1: hundred before our hundred episode in a few weeks time.
Speaker 1: And while you're there, share the episodes with a friend
Speaker 1: who you think will like them.
Speaker 2: It helps us a lot. Next week, I'm read this.
Speaker 1: I'm chatting with Australian author Dominic Amarna about his debut
Speaker 1: novel I Want Everything Read. This is a Schwarz Media
Speaker 1: production made possible by the generous support of ar Group
Speaker 1: The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with
Speaker 1: mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, See you next week.