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Ian RankinIan Rankin
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Critical perspective
BiographyIan Rankin is the UK's number one best-selling crime writer. He lives in Edinburgh, and writes about the city in his award-winning 'Inspector Rebus' novels. The books have twice been dramatised for television (starring John Hannah and Ken Stott respectively), and are translated into 36 languages. Ian Rankin also appears regularly on television, notably as a reviewer on BBC2's 'Newsnight Review'. His three-part documentary series on the subject of evil was broadcast on Channel 4 in December 2002.
Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh and has since been employed as grape-picker, swineherd, taxman, alcohol researcher, hi-fi journalist and punk musician. He was a prize-winning poet and short-story writer before turning to novels with The Flood (1986), followed by Knots & Crosses, the first of his powerful Inspector Rebus novels, in 1987.
Ian has won many writing awards, including the Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction for Black & Blue (1997), the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel for Resurrection Men (2004) – which also won the Deutsche Krimi Prize, Germany’s most prestigious award for crime fiction – and he has twice won the Crime Writers' Association Macallan Short Story Dagger Award (1994 and 1996). In 2005 he received the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement, the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year for Fleshmarket Close (2004) and France’s most prestigious award for crime fiction, the Grand Prix du Roman Policier, for Set in Darkness (2000). In 2007 he repeated his success at the British Book Awards, winning the Crime Thriller of the Year for The Naming of the Dead (2006).
In 2009 Ian was rewarded for his outstanding contribution to the cultural and social landscape of Edinburgh when he became the first recipient of the Edinburgh Award and was also appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Edinburgh. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Abertay Dundee, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Hull and the Open University. He has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, is a past winner of the prestigious Chandler-Fulbright Award and was recently elected Edinburgh University’s Alumnus of the Year. He has an Honorary Fellowship from the University of Edinburgh and was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Birthday Honours List in June 2003.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction
BibliographyThe Flood Polygon, 1986 Knots and Crosses Bodley Head, 1987 Watchman Bodley Head, 1988 Westwind Barrie & Jenkins, 1990 Hide and Seek Barrie & Jenkins, 1991 A Good Hanging and Other Stories Century, 1992 Strip Jack Orion, 1992 Wolfman (re-issued as 'Tooth and Nail' in 1998) Century, 1992 The Black Book Orion, 1993 Witch Hunt (writing as Jack Harvey) Headline, 1993 Bleeding Hearts (writing as Jack Harvey) Headline, 1994 Mortal Causes Orion, 1994 Blood Hunt (writing as Jack Harvey) Headline, 1995 Let It Bleed Orion, 1995 Black and Blue Orion, 1997 Death is Not the End Orion, 1998 The Hanging Garden Orion, 1998 Dead Souls Orion, 1999 Set in Darkness Orion, 2000 The Falls Orion, 2001 Beggars Banquet Orion, 2002 Resurrection Men Orion, 2002 A Question of Blood Orion, 2003 Rebus: The Lost Years (Let it Bleed, Black & Blue, The Hanging Garden) Orion, 2003 Fleshmarket Close Orion, 2004 Three Great Novels: Capital Crimes (contents: 'Dead Souls'; 'Set in Darkness'; 'The Falls') Orion, 2005 The Naming of the Dead Orion, 2006 Exit Music Orion, 2007 Doors Open Orion, 2008 A Cool Head Orion, 2009 Dark Entries Vertigo (US), 2009 The Complaints Orion, 2009
Prizes and awards1991 Chandler-Fulbright Award 1994 Crime Writers' Association Macallan Short Story Dagger ('A Deep Hole') 1996 Crime Writers' Association Macallan Short Story Dagger ('Herbert in Motion') 1997 Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction Black and Blue 1999 Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction (shortlist) Dead Souls 2000 Palle Rosencrantz Prize (Denmark) 2003 Grand Prix du Roman Noir (France) 2003 OBE 2003 Whodunnit Prize (Finland) 2004 Edgar Award for Best Novel Resurrection Men 2004 WH Smith People's Choice Award (shortlist) A Question of Blood 2005 British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year Fleshmarket Close 2005 Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger (lifetime achievement award) 2005 Deutsche Krimi Prize (Germany) Resurrection Men 2005 Grand Prix du Roman Policier (France) Set in Darkness 2006 Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year (shortlist) Fleshmarket Close 2007 British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year The Naming of the Dead 2007 Edinburgh Award 2008 British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year (shortlist) Exit Music 2009 Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year (shortlist) Exit Music
Critical Perspective
What really makes the books distinctive is the Edinburgh setting. Behind architectural elegance, monuments and tourist traps, the city's human history awaits. Standing in Greyfriars Kirkyard during The Falls, Rebus feels that 'Edinburgh seemed always to have thrived on cruelty … its centuries of barbarism masked by an exterior by turns douce and strict'. The city's lawyers, politicians and rich businessmen co-exist in Rebus's world with a thriving underworld of gangsters, petty criminals, and delinquent youths tempted in from surrounding sink estates. The books register continual routine investigations into drug smuggling, robbery, assault, arson and shootings; Rebus's speciality is the baffling murder, his classic antagonist the serial killer. Their impact depends on psychology as much as topography. To Rebus, Edinburgh is 'a state of mind': hidden secrets, fears, violence, and danger lurk in alleyways, behind the smart Georgian façade of the New Town and the Scottish Parliament; even below its street surface, where corpses are discovered, atrocities and fights to the death take place.
In terms of crime fiction, the Rebus novels are of the 'police procedural' type, though they can also be seen in the tradition of Georges Simenon's Maigret, where the focus is not just on crime and criminals but on the detective's everyday details. So we learn about Rebus's uneasy relationship with his family, his occasional affairs, heavy drinking, and tastes in rock music (about which he makes good jokes). Rebus spends much time people-watching in bars, cafes and restaurants. He considers moral grey areas, and asks what makes people do bad things. 'It was what Rebus enjoyed about the job: constructing a web of relationships, peering into other people's lives, wondering and questioning' (The Falls). He also lives in 'real time' from Knots and Crosses onwards, where he is aged forty-one with fifteen years service in the force and a 'busted marriage'. We first learn here about his experiences as a former soldier haunted by the trauma of SAS training. The book also sets the pattern in that Rebus invariably gets personally involved: his own young daughter is abducted, and he receives a series of cryptic clues throughout. We also meet important secondary characters in the series, notably Gill Templer, whom he has an affair with, and years later she becomes his typically exasperated boss. The scenario of the ex-SAS man turned killer links it to the current Rebus, A Question of Blood, but also to Blood Hunt (1995), the last of three conspiracy thrillers Rankin wrote under the name 'Jack Harvey'. Villain Gordon Reeve appears in it - this time as the hero, going to the United States to investigate a chemical multi-national company's role in his brother's death. 'You'd make a good detective', Mr Reeve', he is told, and he uses his SAS survival techniques to confront hired killers who pursue him back to Mallaig.
Rankin returned to Rebus in Hide and Seek (1991), whose epigraph from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde underscores the updating of its themes: Rebus's investigation of the death of a heroin junkie leads to prominent businessmen connected to Edinburgh's drugs and gay rent boy scene. By Black and Blue, Rebus is given much greater emotional depth, as personal and professional pressures push him near to breaking point and alcoholism. A serial killer, emulating the (real life) unsolved 'Bible John' cases of the late 1960s, is at large. The twist is that Bible John, a respectable businessman in America, returns to Scotland to search for the killer himself. The case takes Rebus to the Aberdeen oil industry and the Scottish islands for a subplot involving environmental protesters. He comes under the media spotlight for his conduct on a former case, and all the while Bible John and Rebus get menacingly closer together. The macabre atmosphere and historical dimensions conjured up in The Falls make it one of the best novels. The shades of body-snatchers Burke and Hare haunt the book, when an elderly pathologist, interested in the disappearance of a wealthy female student, tells Rebus: 'the history of surgery is the history of Edinburgh'. The appearance of dolls in coffins at murder scenes brings in an unsolved crime from the 1830s; and Rebus's latest lady friend, a museum curator, joins the case. Meanwhile, his police partner Siobhan Clarke becomes hooked on clues via e-mails from a cyberspace Quizmaster, and solving them becomes an obsession.
As A Question of Blood opens, Rebus is fifty-five and in hot water yet again: he goes through the action hampered by badly scalded hands. Its opening statement by Siobhan, 'There's no mystery', sets up investigations into an ex-SAS soldier's past: the question is not who shot dead two schoolboys and wounded another, but why he apparently did so. As always, the case has a personal dimension for Rebus: one of the victims is his cousin's son, and his own SAS past comes in useful. All the time, he is under suspicion of murdering a petty criminal in a house fire. Complicating matters still further is an army intelligence team investigating a helicopter crash on a Scottish island, plus the antagonism of a publicity-seeking Scottish MSP. And Rebus's protégée Siobhan has started taking on his risk-taking habits. Progressive revelations and a dangerous climax are expertly choreographed towards the finish. Ian Rankin may well be the finest and most popular Scottish writer of detective fiction since his great Edinburgh predecessor Conan Doyle. But he has become even more than that: through his mouthpiece Rebus, Rankin has much to say about the condition of modern Scotland, and is helping to redefine the image of itself in literature.
Dr Jules Smith, 2003
Author statementI started writing novels while an undergraduate student, in an attempt to make sense of the city of Edinburgh, using a detective as my protagonist. Each book hopefully adds another piece to the jigsaw that is modern Scotland, asking questions about the nation's politics, economy, psyche and history ... and perhaps pointing towards its possible future.
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