“I honestly haven’t thought about it,” says Rankin, from the comfort of an armchair in the salubrious surroundings of his Edinburgh home. “I’m only going to do two more Rebus books: one next year, which is the G8 novel and one for 2007. Rebus will be sixty, which is retirement age, plus the smoking ban in Scotland comes in that year. I think he’ll probably have to retire to Marbella or something,” says Rankin, and laughs at the prospect of his most famous character in sunnier surroundings.

With no definite plans for the future, does Rankin have any ideas being tossed around? “I’ve got a file of ideas for things that aren’t Rebus books. They’re just sitting waiting for me to find the time and will probably happen after the end of Rebus or in the gap between the last two.” A problem most authors wish they also had.

But things weren’t always like this for Rankin. Even before the first few Rebus books hit the shelves, it was a while before he even considered himself a crime writer. “The Rebus books didn’t begin as a series,” he says. “Knots and Crosses was meant to be a one-off. I went away and did other things like Watchmen, which is a spy novel set in London, and Westwind, a techno-thriller, and I came back to Rebus quite slowly. Even when I wrote the second book I still wasn’t sure it was a series. I think when I wrote the third one, which was set in London, I thought the only reason I'm writing this is because I'm living in London and I don’t like it. I want Rebus to come here and not like it. I wanted him to be a fish out of water and it was really only after writing that book that I felt there was a lot I could do with this guy. I realised he doesn’t have to be in Edinburgh, he doesn’t have to be doing a certain kind of thing, the crime book doesn’t have to be a traditional whodunit.”

For several years Rankin served what he often describes as “the longest apprenticeship in literary history.” After he graduated from Edinburgh University in 1982 he commenced a Phd on the Modern Scottish Novel focussing on the works of Muriel Spark. This was interrupted by his desire to write and a year later The Flood, his first recognised novel, was published. Knots and Crosses followed four years later but it wasn’t until the release of Black and Blue that Rankin finally moved from “apprentice” to seriously accomplished author.

“There were a lot of years back then when I just wasn’t selling. The first six or seven books sold very poorly and then suddenly Black and Blue came along at a time when my publishers were getting ready to drop me. They felt they had done everything they could to try and break me into a bigger market, so they were getting ready to let another publisher take a shot. Everything just clicked. I've got diary entries from around Mortal Causes time saying how disastrous it all was; ‘the books aren’t selling, they’re not getting well reviewed,’ and that was eight years of my writing career. I was panicking.”

Black and Blue was the catalyst for a meteoric literary career that has strengthened year by year. The Rebus novels have been so successful, firing Rankin to the top of the UK’s best seller list with a record six titles in the Scottish Top 10 bestsellers list simultaneously, but have also seen him winning the coveted Gold Dagger Award in 1997 for Black and Blue, an OBE in 2002 and numerous other accolades. But with the end of the series coming to a natural close, isn’t there going to be anything for the fans to look forward to after Rebus is gone?

“There's a whole twenty years of his life we know nothing about, because when we first meet him (in Knots and Crosses) he’s forty and he’s been a cop for nearly twenty years. You get the occasional flashback to his life; his marriage breaking apart and his daughter being born, but the actual police cases he was working on you get very few references to them, so there's a hell of a lot there that could possibly be written about. Rebus; the Early Years, perhaps?”

The prospect of more Rebus books beyond the final two is bound excite fans of the series despite there being no concrete plans. Online forums and readers' groups have long-wished to find out more about Edinburgh’s crankiest and most loveable cop.

“The thing that tempts me is being able to write about Edinburgh in the seventies. I’d be able to go back and put in all this historical stuff about big Loon jeans and Deep Purple concerts and when Cockburn Street was just all dope shops and stores selling Hubbly-Bubbly’s. It would be a lot of fun doing a historical recreation of seventies Edinburgh.”

Part of Rebus’s appeal to the fans has always been Rankin’s use of real locations in and around Edinburgh. “Edinburgh is the main character in the stories,” he says matter-of-factly. “If Edinburgh wasn’t there then the stories couldn’t happen.”

The use of Edinburgh’s secret history provided Rankin with the inspiration to flag up to the readers things about Edinburgh’s past they might not know. It’s this desire to dig deep that has made Rebus such an interesting character and Rankin such an accomplished author. “Part of the reason for writing the books, is to disseminate these great stories and keep the history alive; keep that sense of Edinburgh as a fascinating and complex city alive. I don’t think the Rebus novels would have worked in any other place. I think he really has been affected, not just by the job but by the city he lives in.”

Some of Rankin’s fans have tentatively suggested a move towards Cafferty; Rebus’s opposing number. “A Cafferty novel is tempting,” admits Rankin. “I can imagine all kinds of possibilities with him. I love writing about him. He’s the Moriarty to Rebus's Holmes and I can see all kinds of resonances between those two. When Cafferty enters a book I think the book really picks up and I get a real buzz. He started life as a very small character in a scene in book three, but he just got under my skin right away. I thought there was a lot I could do with the guy.”

Writers from Edinburgh’s history have also provided Rankin with inspiration for the Rebus novels. Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale, Jekyll and Hyde, may seem obvious to some who analyse Rankin’s work - Rebus is to Rankin what Jekyll was to Hyde - but Rankin disagrees, citing a number of grey areas when trying to define such a relationship. “Cafferty lives in this house for a start,” says Rankin. “So in some ways he is the flipside of me as well.”

I suggest that something deeper is at work in the writer’s mind, that this can never really be explained satisfactorily. “Well you have to ask where these characters come from?” Rankin explains. “Every character you create comes from inside your head and so obviously you’ve got facets of his personality sitting inside you, which is why all authors are potentially psychopaths. We’d be in trouble if we didn’t write all this stuff down; all these different warring personalities. But I think a lot of folk are like that; it’s like a who's who - were not schizophrenic, were quadrophrenic.”

Some of Rankin’s characters could indeed be described as psychopathic, so how does Rankin handle the transference of these characters when writing a novel? Does he enjoy being in the killers head or is Rebus his main priority when writing.

“I don’t do that very much,” says Rankin. “I’ve done it occasionally but not very much because I enjoy looking at the challenge; looking at the puzzle from Rebus’s point of view and him trying to work everything out rather than giving the reader all this information. I’m on the side of this puzzled and battered individual who is Rebus. He represents the reader because the reader is going through the book, saying ‘what’s happening here, we’re not sure, we’ve got to go here and find out.’ So he leads you through it - leads you through the maze, as it were.”

“I think the old idea of being inside the head of the serial killer, or the psychopath is just done for cheap effect. It’s just done to see how far we can push the envelope, how much gore can we get away with; how shocking can we make it? And I shy away from all that, I don't think the reader needs all that graphic description of violence and psychopathic behaviour, they can fill in the blanks themselves, you just need to paint a little bit.”

Rankin’s work has often been described as acutely detailed in perception as opposed to in-your-face graphical violence; something a lot of writer’s in his genre tend to do. “I remember somebody once coming up and complaining to me about the amount of graphic detail in a scene in a mortuary in one of my early books. I said to go back and look at it, its just two lines and all it described was the smell; you’re never shown anything, but the reader had thought they had been shown it because they had painted the picture themselves based on those two lines. And that’s the kind of stuff I like reading, is where you’re not trying to shock the reader, you’re just giving them enough to go and fill in the blanks from themselves.”

So with Rankin about to commence the writing of his penultimate Rebus novel surrounding the G8 Summit in Scotland earlier this year, I wondered how much preparation Rankin had already been done for the book.

“I have a cuts file that’s about twelve inches thick,” he boasts. “When it comes to the day I start writing the book I’ll just get it all that out and make a timeline and decide from there. And that's only the backdrop, not the plot of the book; I need to get the backdrop right. By the end of it I’ll have thousands of pages of research notes and I’ll dump 99.9% of it.”

One idea Ranking is toying with is the inclusion of an infamous incident at the Gleneagles Hotel during the G8 Summit, which may well prove to be a classic ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ moment. “I’m toying with writing about when Bush went out on a bike ride while staying at Gleneagles. He ran straight into a cop and put him into hospital. Well, I’m thinking that cop might be Rebus in the next novel. How much fun would that be?” Rankin reveals, with a mischievous glint in his eye.

I was surprised to hear he did all the research himself, but his grounded attitude to his writing seems to support his own wish to keep enjoying it. “I don’t have assistants and I don’t have PA's or anything like that who go around and do all the burrowing for me. I’m happy doing it myself, and for me some of the best fun is doing the research. You get to meet some really interesting people and you get a really different take on the world.”

Rankin’s success as a writer doesn’t seem to have affected him in any major way. Dressed in casual slacks and a baggy black t-shirt, he looks every bit the frustrated rock musician he always wanted to be. The money and the fame don’t seem to have done anything but keep him grounded and always trying to write the perfect book.

“Writers have got anonymity, which is fantastic, you can hide behind that. The fame thing isn’t important. The most important thing is leaving behind a legacy, leaving behind books that you think are still going to be read in a hundred years time. I can think of plenty crime writers who, as soon as they are dead, they stop writing and that's then end of their reputation!”

One thing for certain is Rankin’s place in Scottish literature’s Hall of Fame. And no matter where Rankin sees his future after Rebus, the question all fans and writers who have spent so many times on the head of a character, regardless whether they like them or not, is, will Rankin miss Rebus?

“I suppose I will to the extent that I’ve used him as a punch bag all these years. Any personal problems I’ve had I just gave them to Rebus, so writing about him has been very therapeutic Writing fiction is great because you get to play God. I’ll miss him from that point of view. But he’s a curmudgeonly old bugger and a misanthrope and I’m not. I tend to see the world in a fairly positive light, so it would nice to have some different voices that are a bit more positive. Maybe Siobhan, if she was going to take over the series, would be a bit more positive but would also have those flawed elements that make Rebus an interesting character.”

Fans of the series are hoping that with the tying up of the series Rankin might be tempted to round off some of the longer standing issues. “I don’t think you can possibly know everything there is to know about a person. So I think at the end of the series there will still be unanswered questions, I’m sure,” he says with a wry smirk.

Back to Winter 2006