Ian Rankin

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and six, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

Mike Castaway this week is a novelist. He writes in the main about a Scottish policeman called Rebus, who, he says, is trying, like him, to make sense of the world around him. The Rebus stories have made him one of Britain's best selling writers. Set in Scotland, they capture many different aspects of the darker side of life there today, from paedophilia to political corruption. He wrote the first novel about Rebus when he was twenty five, but it wasn't until he published the eighth that the world seemed to recognise he had a talent that deserved wider recognition. Once an unknown writer, hardly scraping a living, he's now famous, successful, and popular. It seems to me that the figures of the detective and the novelist are similar in some ways, he says. Both seek the truth, both are interested in human nature and motivation, both are voyeurs. He is Ian Rankin. Let's start with being a voyeur then, Ian. Have you always been an outsider looking in?

Ian Rankin1:24

I think so. I mean, when I was a small kid growing up in a coal mining town, I knew I was different from the other kids. You know, I would sit in my room and uh try and write poetry or song lyrics or whatever or strip cartoons. But I I had this kind of knack of looking like I fitted in.

Presenter1:39

And did they live a spot that you didn't go the whole way for a

Ian Rankin1:42

Not for a long time. I think the first inkling they got that I was actually sitting scribbling things in my bedroom was when I um came second in a poetry competition and it was reported in the local newspaper and they saw it and he said, Is that you? You know, Ian Rank Cardin then lad come second in poetry competition. And yes, that is.

Presenter1:59

So you're always on the periphery, always watching, collecting material consciously collecting material.

Ian Rankin2:05

Well, I mean, I think writers are quite voyeuristic. I mean, I do think that we we look at the world and we we we suck the soul from it for our characters. Muriel Spark puts it very nicely. She says we loiter with intent. Uh

Presenter2:15

Uh

Ian Rankin2:15

And I think that's just about right. You know, it's just short of a criminal activity.

Presenter2:19

But it's yourself really you've borrowed from most in Rebus. I mean there's a lot of you in Rebus, isn't there? The background

Ian Rankin2:25

The Pfeiffer. It didn't start like that. I mean, it he was invented as a safety measure because my first novel, people thought they could see themselves in it. So I then wrote a detective novel because Rebus was nothing like me.

Ian Rankin2:37

I was in my twenties and at university and he was in his forties, divorced and with a kid and he was a cop. And it was only really later on that I I realized how much of me was actually being transmitted to him.

Presenter2:49

Which I want to talk to you about. But I mean, let me ask you just one general point about him. I mean, he is arguably I think you said this, a typical working class Scottish male, happiest with his junk food, his fellow drinkers down the local and his music. I mean, how much of you is there?

Ian Rankin3:03

Oh, quite a lot. Quite a lot. You know, sitting in his chair late at night, staring out of the window or going for long night time drives through the streets of Edinburgh. That's me. His musical taste these days is me. The junk food, yes, guilty. He smokes, I've never smoked.

Speaker 23:18

He's got a drink problem.

Ian Rankin3:19

He's got a well, I think his drinking's actually under control. I mean, that's one of the maybe the thing that's least realistic about him now is that he's actually the kind of cop who was prevalent in real life maybe twenty or thirty years ago. So Rebus is a bit of a dinosaur. He represents the last of a dying breed of detective.

Presenter3:36

Okay, let's find out about your musical choice then. What's the first one you're going to take to your island?

Ian Rankin3:40

The first one is is the first single I bought, first pop record I bought, and I'm pretty sure I bought it only because it was number one in the charts and because my sister had just got a record player. It's Double Barrel by David Ansell Collins.

Speaker 43:55

You're good, baby. You're good!

Speaker 43:58

And a twelve spin baby!

Speaker 44:06

I am the Magnetos Sanctuary.

Speaker 44:08

Now we are all

Speaker 44:12

Snap, snap

Speaker 44:15

Scratch it, scratch it, mother.

Speaker 44:19

Good job.

Presenter4:23

Double Barrel by Dave and Ansel Collins. Music you listen to in Rankin on your Dancette Record Player aged ten. Do you remember what colour it was?

Ian Rankin4:30

Yes, it was red and had a carry handle. And I'm pretty sure my parents got it for my sister for her birthday, but they got it with cigarette coupons. So who said smoking's bad for you? Started off a lifetime obsession with music.

Presenter4:42

Tell me a bit more about the birth of Rebus, which we were just calculating is about round about twenty years ago now. You didn't intend to write a crime novel, you've said. In fact, you've said you're not even well, you weren't then, and I'm not sure you are now, a fan of the genre, crime fiction.

Ian Rankin4:56

Well, I'm the only crime writer I know who wasn't a fan of crime fiction before they started writing it. I became a fan thereafter. But at the time, I thought I was writing a dark gothic psychological Scottish novel in the tradition of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, but updating it to contemporary Edinburgh. I think the point I was trying to make was that Edinburgh really hadn't changed that much. That there was still this surface civility and culture, but just underneath, if you scratch the surface, with lots of dark deeds going on. This wasn't it. This was knots and crosses, which started with a pun. I was sitting in my student digs with a gas fire on, and the pun came to me, KNOTS knots, and someone being sent these knotted pieces of string and matchstick crosses, and I pretty much sketched it out in that one evening.

Presenter5:24

This was not silver crosses, was it?

Presenter5:38

Hmm.

Presenter5:41

Of course the name Rebus itself means puzzle.

Ian Rankin5:42

It means a picture puzzle. Yeah, it's a kind of picture puzzle that was prevalent in the Sunday Post newspaper when I was a kid. There was the Merrimack fun page, which was for kids. And you get Urwilly and the Bruins, the strip cartoons, and you would also get puzzles. And you used to have these little pictures with letters taken away or added to the words to make a secret message. And so I thought, you know, being like any smart ass English student, I thought, well, call him Rebus, it means a picture puzzle. Fantastic. He's being sent picture puzzles. Then spent years trying to explain to people why I chose this very unscotch name.

Presenter6:11

Tell me, you say you weren't a fan of the genre, and one of the things you didn't like about it was that it required you to work, you know, and work out the whoddone, and you'd be tempted to look to the end of the book and so on. I mean, what you would argue, as I understand it, is that that yours are novels in the proper sense of the word, that you're writing using that genre to write about the world in which you live and saying something about it.

Ian Rankin6:32

I think the crime novel has grown up, or the English crime novel, there is no tradition of the crime novel in Scotland, but say the English crime novel is, you know, spinsters solving crimes in small villages or mustachioed private detectives. That world is pretty much gone. I mean, there's still an audience for that kind of book, but writers these days are very much using the crime novel as a means of investigating contemporary society and the state that we're in.

Presenter6:55

So are you saying that you're writing n not popular fiction, but literature?

Ian Rankin6:59

Oh well I would hope they're popular. Populist fiction. There's nothing wrong with writing populist fiction that has serious themes. Now the nice thing about the crime novel is that the reader doesn't realize that they're having to tackle quite serious um questions.

Presenter7:10

And they don't spot that so you don't spot that.

Ian Rankin7:11

They don't spot that because the story is roller coastering along. Record number two. Well, I work to music. I always have music playing in the background while I write. And there's one, it's an EP, it's not even an album, it's only 20 minutes long by a Scottish instrumental noise artist, Mogwai. And I can stick it on repeat, and somehow I can listen to that for 10 or 12 hours at a stretch. And if I'm struggling with a book or if I'm blocked, somehow putting this record on has an almost mystical quality. And I start to find out I'm writing again. So this is Mogwai from their four-track EP, and it's called Rage Man.

Presenter8:13

Rage Man by Mugwa, I can't imagine you writing to that.

Ian Rankin8:18

Nobody can.

Presenter8:19

That's better than silence, isn't it?

Presenter8:24

Let's go back to Fife, nineteen sixties. You're a little boy. The family didn't know you say you were scribbling poems and songs and g lyrics in the bedroom. Did they know that you lived in a fantasy world and you decided your house was a spaceship and you were in control of it?

Ian Rankin8:37

I did live this extraordinary fantasy life inside my head and I used to try and make comic books like the sort of Victor or the Hotspur or Dandy Urbino and show them to my mum. And I would put free gifts on the front, little badges and things. And I think she was a bit bemused by this. I mean my parents, you know, solidly working class, my mum worked in a factory, my dad worked for years in a grocery shop and then latterly at a dockyard. Neither had been to college or university. I don't think they could understand. But your dad.

Presenter9:03

But your dad told you stories, didn't he?

Ian Rankin9:05

Oh, when I was three or four or five, I would get into bed with my parents on a Sunday morning, you know, with a cup of tea and a ginger nuts and the the Sunday Post, and my dad would tell stories. He would he had the running character called Johnny Morey.

Ian Rankin9:17

And he would s

Ian Rankin9:18

Basically, he would extrapolate from his own memories of childhood. So he was telling me these stories that I thought were fiction, but were actually based on kids that he ran around with, a dog that he'd had when he was a kid.

Presenter9:28

Yeah.

Ian Rankin9:28

And that was a lot of fun.

Presenter9:29

W were they aspirational for you, the these parents, or did they just think you go down the dockyard like your dad, or in the office down the dockyard like you?

Ian Rankin9:36

Were they always down the Donkey House? No, no, they were. English was always my favourite subject at school. I loved writing essays. I loved reading books. The local library was my haunt in Cardinal. They couldn't really understand that. They took a book on holiday with them in the summer and that was about as far as their reading went. And I think when I decided, I made this decision that I would actually go to university and study English literature. They thought, what are you going to do with that? And the only thing I could say to them was teach, I suppose. You know, they had this idea that you went to university. I was the first member of my family to go to university. You went there to get a professional career, to become a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. And in fact, accountancy was what I was going to do because I had an uncle down in Bradford who owned his own house and had a car and was always tanned from foreign holidays. And he was a chartered accountant. So we thought, well, that's obviously the game to be in. But I wasn't much good at it and didn't much like it. And I suddenly realised, do I want to go to university for four years to study something just for the money at the end of it? No.

Ian Rankin10:35

So I had to break the awful truth to them that I would study English.

Presenter10:39

Number three.

Ian Rankin10:40

At track number three takes me back to my teenage years at high school. I was introduced to the music of John Martin by a mate of mine, Jock Scott, and after all these years I'm still listening to it, and I'm still listening to what I think is his best album, Solid Air, and this is the title track.

Speaker 410:55

Sol in it.

Speaker 410:58

Where is only behind?

Speaker 411:04

I know ya, I love ya.

Speaker 411:08

And I can be your friend, I can follow ya in a way.

Speaker 411:20

Mm-hmm.

Presenter11:26

Solid Air by John Martin. Rebus of course is quite a literary chap, isn't he? And you know, he kind of quotes Walt Whitman or King Lear or whatever.

Ian Rankin11:35

He did in the early books.

Presenter11:36

Well, I mean he left school at fifteen, not sure where he got it from.

Ian Rankin11:38

I'm not sure where he got it from. Well, he got it from me, and it was a bit obvious in the early books. Showing off again? When I was studying America I studied American literature at university.

Presenter11:40

Uh

Presenter11:42

Showing off again.

Presenter11:45

Yeah.

Ian Rankin11:46

The author peeking through the books is is still a source of some embarrassment to me in the early one.

Presenter11:50

But he he operates in Edinburgh, which is where you went to university. We have conflicting stories about you there, because you say, and I quote, that you had a rollicking good time. Miranda, now your wife, whom you met there, says, I'm told, that you were often depressed, if not suicidal.

Ian Rankin12:07

Somewhere between the two or maybe both at the same time. Well, it was an odd time for me because I mean I arrived October 78, aged 18, I arrived at university. A month later my mum took ill. So I'd been at university a month and my parents were preparing for retirement. They were you know my dad was in his sixties and she was nearing sixty and here was the last child having left a nest. She took ill and for my first year at university she just got worse and worse. So there was a year when she just I would be at university during the week studying Milton and Wordsworth and things like that and Shakespeare. And then I would go home at weekends and my mum would be in the bed in the living room downstairs'cause my dad couldn't get her up and down the stairs.

Presenter12:46

What was wrong with her?

Ian Rankin12:47

They said she had a stroke and then they said it was multiple sclerosis, but I've got a feeling on the death certificate that said some kind of cancer, so I'm not sure that she was ever properly diagnosed.

Presenter12:56

Again, echoes in Rebus. He lost his mother, did he?

Ian Rankin12:59

He lost his mother when he was very young. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's me peeking through him again.

Presenter13:05

He also in one of the books is asked to touch the forehead of a of the

Ian Rankin13:10

Yeah, that happened to me when my dad died. Actually my dad did it with my mum as well. Dad came upstairs, I was sleeping, it was the middle of the night and he said, Your mum's gone and he took me downstairs to the bed in the living room and uh he he said, Touch her forehead with your finger because then you'll never fear death And then a few years later I found m myself doing the same thing with my dad, touching his forehead.

Ian Rankin13:29

But it was quite devastating. I mean, you know, I was supposed to be going to university and having this fantastic life of undergraduate recklessness, which I did to a certain extent, and I was writing very dark, morbid poetry, and joined a dark, morbid punk band. I felt I was these separate characters.

Ian Rankin13:45

And that came across later on when I started writing novels. Next piece of music.

Ian Rankin13:49

Well this is going to take us back to those days. I was a huge Joy Division fan, they were very dark, very gloomy. Their lead singer committed suicide. I was appearing on stage with my own punk band when we heard the news. But very beautiful music and I never got to see them live. I've still got my ticket because they were coming to Edinburgh but the lead singer committed suicide before they got to Edinburgh. So it's one of the great miseries of my life is that I never did see them live. This is Joy Division with atmosphere.

Speaker 414:26

Insilo Don't walk away

Speaker 414:34

In Silo

Speaker 414:38

See the danger

Speaker 414:42

Uh Always do.

Presenter14:44

That was joy, division and atmosphere. You loved the academic life, Ian Rankin, so much so you went back to do a PhD. I mean you couldn't wait to get back in there, could you?

Ian Rankin14:52

It was more that I couldn't survive in the real commercial world.

Ian Rankin14:55

I just loved being at university and so I pleaded with them to let me go back. And I'd specialised in American literature, but a professor at Edinburgh University said to me, You won't get money from the government to go to come to a Scottish university to study an American writer. He said, Try Muriel Spark. And I went, Who's she? And so he went, Miss Jean Brody, and I went, Oh, of course. And so I spent a happy three years at Edinburgh, being funded by the taxpayer, supposedly doing a thesis on Muriel Spark, but in reality sitting in the National Library writing my own books. And then eventually the money ran out and luckily I was getting married at the time and my wife had a job in London.

Presenter15:13

Yeah.

Ian Rankin15:32

So I moved down to London.

Presenter15:33

But you hated it, and you hated London.

Ian Rankin15:35

We lived in Tottenham in North London and I worked in Crystal Palace which is completely mad which is as far south as you can go before you hit Croydon. So I had a 90 minute commute each way each day. I mean I was working on a hi-fi magazine, reviewing hi-fi equipment and albums and going to concerts. That was great fun. But if you've not got much money and we didn't, London can suck a lot more life out of you than you get back from it. It is a tough place to live.

Presenter15:56

There's

Presenter15:58

So in nineteen ninety you and Miranda piled all your worldly g goods into a rented van, including the cat, and set off

Ian Rankin16:04

Mugwonk the Cat, God Bless her, came with us, yes.

Presenter16:05

In that yes.

Ian Rankin16:06

Uh

Presenter16:06

Set off for France, where you rented a kind of creaky holes in the floor, holes in the ceiling kind of farmhouse, with spectacular views, I gather.

Ian Rankin16:11

Mm-hmm.

Ian Rankin16:13

Well, yeah, after we left university, Miranda and I had gone to France for six months and picked grapes and such like, and so we knew we liked France. And she persuaded me uh that if I wanted to be a full-time writer, we'd have to move to southwest France.

Presenter16:25

And write about C D Edinburgh. Yes. I mean, how'd you do that in beautiful south west?

Ian Rankin16:26

I mean, how'd you do that in beautiful?

Ian Rankin16:29

How did we ever think of it? I don't know. I mean, the problem was that we'd given up two jobs, gone to France, got this ramshackle farmhouse which we had to rewire and clad and all the rest of it. You know, we'd fall off ladders and nearly cut through my leg with a chainsaw and

Presenter16:43

And you were earning very little, I would imagine. I mean, you were kind of mid list or

Ian Rankin16:45

Never

Ian Rankin16:46

About five thousand pounds a year, I think we were living on it at that time. Really? Um but

Presenter16:50

The f

Ian Rankin16:50

Two.

Presenter16:50

Fear of being dropped, presumably.

Ian Rankin16:52

Terrifying. I was having to write two books a year just to get by and the publishers didn't want two Rebus novels a year so I had to write thrillers under a pseudonym, Jack Harvey. I wrote three thrillers in three years. And money was always tight. And I started having panic well, I'd actually started to have panic attacks in London. I remember getting on a train at Victoria to get down to Crystal Palace and suddenly thinking I was having a heart attack and jumping off the train and going back to Tottenham and asking my doctor and he said, well it's panic attacks, people get them. And of course you think it's unique when it happens to you, you think you're the only person in the world.

Presenter17:22

When it hung

Presenter17:24

But it's fear.

Ian Rankin17:25

It's just a surge of adrenaline and I think it is fear. It's just generalised fear that you're not in control of your life or you're not in control of your destiny. And of course that got worse in France to a certain extent. We had a two C V, you know, the old snail mobile. I would drive out into the country in my two C V and just scream and scream and scream at the top of my voice and felt a hell of a lot better as a result. What the neighbours thought of it, God knows.

Presenter17:25

It's just a sort of adrenaline and I think it is fear

Presenter17:46

Number five.

Ian Rankin17:47

Well this is actually going back to when the panic attack started in London and I was advised to take some time off. So I jumped on a train, got as far as York, got off, looked at the notice board, saw Scarborough and thought I'll go to Scarborough. And I walked up and down the beach in out-of-season Scarborough listening to lots of Van Morrison and he was a great balm and healer. So I've chosen a track from that time, Snow in San Anselmo.

Speaker 418:16

On the table.

Speaker 418:19

Snow inside a single morning

Speaker 418:27

Yeah, the deer cross by the lines.

Speaker 418:35

Up the beds and down and old sand refer

Presenter18:39

Snow in San Anselmo by Van Morrison. Ian Rankin, you wrote several Rebus books i in France. You produced your first son, Jack, I think, in 1992, and then you had another son, Kit, in 1994, after which you were to produce what turned out to be your breakthrough book, Black and Blue, and there's a link between the birth of Kit and that book, isn't there?

Ian Rankin19:01

There is. I I was I was writing black and blue or certainly plotting it when Kit was born, but fairly soon after he was born we noticed that he wasn't uh making much progress uh in s some areas. Um you're quite sanguine with your second kid. You know, oh he's not rolling over or doing anything. What you know, well give it a month or two, be fine.

Speaker 219:19

Yeah.

Ian Rankin19:20

But then we started to get a bit worried and went to the local GP

Ian Rankin19:24

And eventually after much toing and froing he was diagnosed with a thing called Angelman syndrome, which slows down progress in lots of areas. He hasn't just got Angelmans, he's got visual problems as well, which a lot of Angelmans kids don't have.

Presenter19:37

It's a genetic disorder then.

Ian Rankin19:39

Yeah, but it just comes out of the blue. It just happens. It's just a luck of the draw, as it were. But we would be driving 50 kilometres, 35 miles, to the hospital. My French wasn't brilliant. Miranda's is pretty good, but even so, dealing with doctors who are talking to you in jargonese, and at the same time you're trying to read between the lines of what they're trying to tell you without actually spelling it out, I found incredibly frustrating, especially someone who makes their living from language. And so I would drive back home and I would climb the steps. My office was in the attic and there was a kind of rickety ladder up. I would climb the rickety ladder into the attic, draw it up after me, shut the trap door, and suddenly there was me and a computer and I would dump all this stuff on Rebus. I reread Black and Blue recently and I can just see the point at which I started doing it.

Presenter20:24

The anger, the rage, the

Ian Rankin20:26

The frustration of why me, all those big questions are.

Presenter20:28

The randomness of response.

Ian Rankin20:31

And in fact, uh I took it to extremes because in the very next book I actually had Rebus's daughter be involved in an accident, uh a hit and run, and uh be in a wheelchair. And this was at a time when we were learning that Kip might not walk.

Ian Rankin20:44

He wouldn't talk. Enjoyment's kids, most of them can't communicate except through maybe some sign language, limited sign language. So we're finding all these things out. It was a very frustrating time in some ways. But on the other hand, you know the silver lining to the extent is that it made the book a better book. It made it a huge, angry book.

Presenter21:02

Hmm.

Presenter21:03

A lot of edge into it.

Ian Rankin21:04

Yeah, and I think that was that was part of the breakthrough. That was a large part of the breakthrough, was the fact that it was a matter of fact.

Presenter21:08

It's a terrible irony.

Ian Rankin21:09

It's an irony. I'm not sure it's a terrible irony. I mean, it's bitter.

Presenter21:12

And get this bitter.

Ian Rankin21:13

But yeah, but he's a but he's a on the other hand, he's a lovely kid.

Presenter21:16

Yeah. What is he now then he's nearly twenty

Ian Rankin21:17

He's nearly twelve. He's nearly twelve and uh he's still not walking, he crawls and he pulls himself up onto the furniture.

Presenter21:18

Oh.

Ian Rankin21:24

He can't communicate. He's got very, very limited sign language that they see at school, but we don't seem to see it at home.

Ian Rankin21:31

Um

Presenter21:31

What would be his mental age?

Ian Rankin21:33

Infant, under 12 months, I think, maybe. So he still plays with baby toys, and but he has such a fun time. And you know, the other irony, of course, is that he helped the books to become better and they became more successful, and suddenly I've got money, and that money goes back into helping Kit. We buy and care for him, so he's always got people around him who are taking him out swimming or taking him for a walk and stuff. And he's never going to know poverty, he's never going to know.

Ian Rankin21:58

War or unemployment or anger or jealousy, he's going to have a childlike existence for the rest of his life.

Presenter22:06

Uh See

Ian Rankin22:06

Uh Yeah.

Ian Rankin22:07

Well, this is the Rolling Stones. I have nicked stuff from the Stones throughout my writing career, mostly titles for books. Black and Blue is a Rolling Stones album. The younger of my two sisters, Linda, one of her boyfriends, was a big Stones fan. And when I was 10 or 11, he introduced me to this album, and I hated it because I was a T-Rex fan at the time. And then.

Ian Rankin22:25

When I grew up a bit, I thought it's one of the greatest rock albums of all time. So it's from Let It Bleed, another Rolling Stones title I've stolen, and this is You Can't Always Get What You Want.

Speaker 422:34

Can it always get what you want?

Speaker 422:40

You can't always get what you want.

Speaker 422:45

But if you try sometime

Speaker 422:48

You might find

Presenter23:02

Rolling stones and you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need. You suggested before now that that that's a line that applies to you and Kit in a way. Maybe.

Presenter23:13

You needed kit to write the book.

Ian Rankin23:15

Well, yeah, it's one of those things that you'll I'll never know if if the books would have been different without Kit coming along. It's it's it's interest an interesting little conundrum. But yeah, you can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.

Presenter23:26

The other thing you did with Reb I mean, you've put him through the emotional wringer a lot of times, haven't you? But but he he does break down at one point in black and blue and he and he and he sobs and he sobs, and it's something

Ian Rankin23:33

Yeah.

Presenter23:37

You know, it's a very real break breakdown. It's very sharply felt. I mean, that was obviously.

Ian Rankin23:40

Yeah.

Presenter23:42

A personal experience.

Ian Rankin23:44

I mean, halfway through, or three-quarters of way through Black and Blue, Rebus ends up having a fight with his best friend in the middle of the night in the middle of Edinburgh, and he's suddenly on his hands and knees with tears and snot coming out of his nose. It's not very pleasant. That is his lowest ebb in the entire series. I mean, that's the lowest point he reaches in the entire series. And that was probably when I was at one of the low points. I mean, maybe not the lowest point in my life, but certainly a low point. Probably written before we'd got a proper diagnosis with Kit. And so it was just all questions, all rage. Why us and why me and what's going on here?

Presenter24:16

And channel

Ian Rankin24:16

And channeling it.

Presenter24:17

Yeah.

Ian Rankin24:18

Look, writing, I think even if writers say it isn't, writing is therapeutic, there's no doubt about it. It's cathartic, it's exorcising your demons, which is why a lot of crime writers are such well balanced individuals in real life, is because we got all the dark stuff out on the page. It's the romance writers you've got to watch out for.

Presenter24:34

So it took you fourteen years to become an overnight sensation, you said. Give me the figures on that then. What does it mean? I don't mean money, I mean sales. You know, if you were selling a paperback when you were kind of mid listing, you'd have sold what?

Ian Rankin24:45

I would have sold maybe ten or twenty thousand paperback. Um and now it's about half a million in the UK. Translated into twenty eight languages, I think, which is half JK rolling, but it's not bad.

Presenter24:48

Paperback. Um

Presenter24:56

Which is hot.

Presenter24:57

And you've won all the prizes, the golden daggers and

Ian Rankin24:58

All the prize.

Ian Rankin25:00

Yeah, including, sadly, the Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Crime Writers, the Diamond Dagger, last year, they gave it to me at 45. I thought, do they want me to go away now and stop or what? It's the bail.

Presenter25:08

You mentioned JK Rowling. I gather you live near her.

Ian Rankin25:12

Yeah, well I mean two years ago we moved into a nice big house in a part of Edinburgh that I didn't know and after we bought the house realized that two doors away from us was Alexander McCall Smith, author of the Number One Ladies Detective Agency, and at the top of the road was J. K. Rowling. Some wag wrote into the newspaper in Edinburgh and said uh we must now start calling this writer's block.

Presenter25:33

But do you, in all of this success, do you still panic that your good fortune might suddenly crash around your ears?

Ian Rankin25:39

Of course, because a writer's only as good as their last book and you never know if your next book's going to be any good.

Presenter25:45

But no panic attacks.

Ian Rankin25:46

Oh, I still get panic attacks. Um usually when I'm writing a book, I I suddenly jump out of bed with the adrenaline rushing, but not as nearly as many as I used to get.

Presenter25:55

Uh

Ian Rankin25:55

Bhaira.

Presenter25:55

Poke number seven.

Ian Rankin25:55

I've tried to sneak as many Scottish artists into this list as I possibly can. They're sneaking, isn't it? I don't know, yeah. Well, because they're good. And Belle and Sebastian did this fantastic breakthrough album, I think, The Boy with the Arab Strap. And again, trying to sneak extras into my desert island. This was also the theme tune to the Channel 4 series Teachers, which I was a great fan of, especially in its early years. And so as I listen to Belle and Sebastian playing The Boy with the Arab Strap, I shall be thinking of one of my favourite TV shows.

Presenter25:58

No sneaking is harder.

Speaker 426:24

Burn up bus tastes a long time, the odour of all bread and food takes a long time to pass you by.

Speaker 426:37

Maybe one day this wandering gets you done Nobody gives you a chance or a dollar in this old town

Speaker 426:50

I'll rent silence from you as

Presenter26:53

Boy With the Arab Strap by Bell and Sebastian. So Rebus has lived in real time, hasn't he? So he was born at forty, as it were, and so now he's nearly sixty. Due for retirement. Scottish CID, gotta go. Um you've got to put an end to him, haven't you?

Ian Rankin27:07

Uh yeah. I've got to put an end I've got to put an end to him. Um it's uh what I do with him is still I I still haven't decided. I've only got one more book to write, and that'll be the book when he hits sixty, and sixty is as as old as you can go in the Scottish CID. Um

Presenter27:08

Have you put it in the middle?

Presenter27:22

So the 18th book will be the last. I mean, will you kill him off, or will he just retire?

Ian Rankin27:24

Kill him

Ian Rankin27:26

At the moment if you ask me today, I'll say no, I can't I couldn't possibly kill him off. I've spoken to Colin Dexter about this because Colin Dexter famously did kill off Morse. And he said the reason he did it was that fans would keep besieging him to if he'd just given them a happy goodbye and I'm out of here. Um they would have said, Well, bring him back, please.

Speaker 227:37

Uh

Presenter27:37

To make

Presenter27:43

But you wouldn't mind killing him off,'cause you don't actually like him, you said very much.

Ian Rankin27:46

Although there are elements of him I don't like. Um you know uh in fact uh it's not that, it's that he wouldn't like me if we met. He would find me, you know, a sort of wishy-washy liberal who's never had to do a hard day's work in his life.

Presenter27:56

He's a tough, resilient, conservative Scot.

Ian Rankin27:56

Yeah.

Ian Rankin27:58

He's a tough, resilient, conservative, working-class Scott. And there's something of the Old Testament about him. He sees the world in black and white, good guys and bad guys. And my job in the books is often to try and change his mind about this and show him that there are elements of grey. You know, there's a.

Presenter28:13

But what about you without him? I mean, the question is, can you find success without him?

Ian Rankin28:17

Yeah, and I won't know that until I try.

Presenter28:19

You frightened of trying?

Ian Rankin28:20

M

Ian Rankin28:22

No, no. I mean, I think I'm young enough to be able to sort of throw off the shackles or to to get his voice out of my head, as it were. And there are other kinds of books that I would like to try and write.

Ian Rankin28:33

I don't think I would stray too far from the thriller or the crime genre, but maybe I would. I remember when I was a teenager, in my late teens, I tried writing a Mils and Boone book. I mean, who knows? Record number eight. Last one. Well, I mean, one of the pleasures of later success is that, you know, as a frustrated rock star myself, I got to meet people in the industry who were fans of the books. And amongst them was a Scottish singer-songwriter called Jackie Levin. And we started working together and we took a show on the road. It was a long, short story of mine, which I would sort of read out, and he would play songs that were thematically relevant. We grew up in the same part of Fife at much the same time from much the same background. And so I've chosen a song. It's not a typical Jackie Levin song, but it's about where we grew up and it's about the 50s and the 60s. And so it's evocative and it will take me back sitting on a desert island to my early life. So the Eternal Triangle have come full circle, to put it squarely. It's called Linseed Oil.

Ian Rankin29:24

Wait.

Speaker 429:24

And I was a boy in the cloud of Lincoln.

Speaker 429:32

There was cobbles and trams, and old men covered in coal.

Speaker 429:39

And hired young men standing in bars listening to rack'n'roll.

Presenter29:50

Lindsey Oil by Jackie Levin. If you could only take one of those eight records, Ian, which one would you take?

Ian Rankin29:56

Well, you know, I had trouble whittling this down from 35 to 8, so whittling it down from 8 to 1 is is tragic, but I think it would have to be the John Martin.

Presenter29:59

Yeah.

Presenter30:04

Solidair by John Martin. And your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Ian Rankin30:08

I'm not sure it exists. If Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Paul exists in a one-volume set, I'd be allowed it, wouldn't I?

Presenter30:14

Yeah, we can find it.

Ian Rankin30:15

We can do that, yeah. I just love that the the way that life is a dance to the music of time. Characters come and go, we see people, we meet them, we get to know them, they disappear, they come back into our lives again. There's that wonderful flow that you get in that book that hopefully you get to a certain extent also over the Rebus series, where characters come and go and incidents reverberate through time.

Presenter30:36

And your luxury.

Ian Rankin30:37

I've given this a lot of thought and I think it's got to be something I haven't played for years, pinball. I'm going to have a pinball machine.'Cause at university I played pinball and when we moved to France the local bar had a pinball machine and I never quite mastered it.

Presenter30:50

And you can tilt it all you like on your desert island.

Ian Rankin30:52

I can. I've got it would have to one of the old fashioned ones because I wouldn't have anything I couldn't plug it in. So it could be one of these new whistles and bells. It would have to be a really old, traditional, nice American pinball machine.

Presenter30:54

Because I wouldn't have it

Presenter30:57

Yeah.

Presenter31:02

Iain Rankin, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Ian Rankin31:05

Thank you.

Speaker 231:13

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.