Ian Rankin is pottering about his home in Edinburgh, waking himself up by making a cup of tea and talking about murder. Naturally, this is par for the course: Rankin is the UK’s most popular crime writer, the bestselling neo-noir stylist behind the compellingly constructed, deeply human Rebus novels. Death and dismemberment are to his novels as madeleines are to Proust.

“Any kind of book that you read, the question is, ‘Why do you keep reading?’” the author ponders in his Scottish purr. “‘Why do you want to turn the pages?’ There is always information that is being held back from you; information that you only gain if you keep reading. What crime fiction does is that it codifies that, so right from the beginning the audience knows that they are playing a game. They are being given clues.”

Rankin is playing this game too of course, and, interestingly, usually without much more information than his audience. Unlike some crime fiction authors who relentlessly plan and plot out their novels, Rankin allows himself to be led by the story, often diving into a work without even really knowing where it is going to end up.

When I start writing a book, I genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen. I know as little as the detective in the book.

“I kind of make it up as I go along. When I start writing a book, I genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen. I know as little as the detective in the book. So although usually the books start with a murder or a crime that’s happened, I might not know who the killer is, or who is responsible. The first draft is me being the detective, working out what is going on.

“Usually, two-thirds of the way through the first draft, I’ll go, ‘Oh, it’s you,’” he continues. “And then I’ll go back through the second draft aware of that, tweaking the book so that it’s rational that that person is the killer or the person behind the crime.”

Indeed, though such a style relies on the kind of relentless revisions that some authors try to avoid like the plague, it does mean that Rankin can keep things almost endlessly fresh for himself. That, for example, is how he’s managed to keep writing novels starring his beloved detective John Rebus for 30 years – Rebus is a person whom Rankin uncovers rather than creates, and over the course of each book, his hero slowly becomes more and more real.

“The reason I keep writing Rebus is there is information he keeps withheld from me himself. The only way I can find out more information about him is to keep writing about him. I still haven’t gotten to the core of what makes him who he is. With each new book, I kind of find out a little bit more about him.

“Of course, the books are also written pretty much in real time. So with each new book, Rebus is not the person that he was in the previous book. That keeps me on my toes. I mean, when I started writing these books, he was 40 years old, so he is a very different character now that he is in his 60s. In the early books, he was quite physical, he would chase suspects. Well, he can’t do that any more. So I’m actually writing about a different character.”

Like all ageing men, Rebus eventually had to face retirement. Back in 2007, Rankin said that he thought his famous detective was done – that the arc was complete, and that Rebus would live a new life as a civilian, retired from the force, lurking around police stations and going through cold cases, undisturbed by Rankin’s prying pose.

“A few years ago, I retired him,” the author says now. “I thought that was the end of him. And that was fine. I was having fun writing about other characters. But then when I decided that he should come back, that presented a challenge, because I wasn’t sure if his voice was still there. But as it transpired, his voice was very much still there. It had just been subconsciously in my head. And readers were quite happy to have him back.”

But although Rebus’ essential voice might have remained in Rankin’s head, the detective isn’t the man that he once was. The post-retirement Rebus novels have been tinged with a certain furious melancholy; a kind of raging against the dying of the light that particularly charged Rankin’s 2016 outing, Rather Be The Devil.

“In the later books I’ve introduced mortality,” Rankin agrees. “Rebus is dealing with the things that people do deal with when they get older – Rebus ‘aches in the places where he used to play’, as Leonard Cohen once said. That means all those readers who have been there from the beginning go, ‘Yeah, that’s me. I have those aches, I have those worries. It hurts now while I walk; my hearing is going; my eyesight is going.’”

In that way, Rebus is a cipher to project upon – not only for the readers who have stayed by his side for three decades, but for his author as well. “Certainly the books for me are therapeutic,” Rankin says. “I’ve always written since I was a kid, and I’ve always written to make sense of the world, and partly to communicate with the world.

“When I’m writing a book I’m sort of doing it to work out some problem, some question, to find out some answers.”

Ian Rankin will appear at Who Says Crime Doesn’t Pay?, City Recital Hall, Friday May 26, as part of Sydney Writers’ Festival 2017.

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