‘Every question you want to ask,you can do it via a crime novel’

Rankin is a lumbering presence amid small-built Indians,dressed in a black jacket and a dark blue shirt. The other colours in the room are the piercing green of his eyes and the pale straw sunlight of a Delhi evening sun. He looks tired and slightly out of focus,there are bags under his eyes and a scruffy stubble. But he is patient with photo requests. When he signs a book,it is not the usual autograph. Beneath the scrawl of his name is a small grid to play noughts and crosses (Knots and Crosses was his first Rebus novel). An amiable visitor from the dark side.

Rankin’s idea of slowing down is to write one novel in two years — he wrote The Complaints “in three,maybe four months”,and in the early years of his career his rate was two a year. He almost never got this far. He was about to become an academic when he decided to take up writing full time. It has never been a dull life. He has ticked all the boxes and some more: worked as journalist and alcohol researcher,as swineherd and journalist,played in a punk band The Dancing Pigs (you met them in Black and Blue) and written an opera libretto. When he moved into a leafy Edinburgh colony,with J.K. Rowling,Alexander McCall Smith and Kate Atkinson as neighbours,a strange thing happened: after 60 years,the neighbourhood had its first murder. “A journalist asked me if I wanted to say anything. I said I didn’t do it,for sure,” he says wrily.

If contemporary crime fiction has grown in popularity and complexity in the face of a dismissive “literary” establishment over the years,Rankin has been one of its most accomplished practitioners. In the 18 Rebus novels written over 20 years,he created an unforgettable character,an honest detective with a fragile sense of sanity,always “on the side of angels” though stuck often in situations when “shite hits the fan”. He did more. He scoured away the gloss of touristy Edinburgh to reveal its “noir-ish” edge and did what the great novelists of the 19th century had done: he spoke of the reality of his time. “When I started writing in the ’80s,nobody seemed to be writing about contemporary Edinburgh. The city had a terrible problem with AIDS and heroin. Housing estates were so troubled that Oxfam was running convoys of aid there,the first place in the UK that Oxfam did any work was Edinburgh. And no one was writing about that because it happened on the outskirts. It was a Jekyll and Hyde city,” he says. In the Rebus novels,he says,he decided to update R.L. Stevenson’s novel,drag it from London to Edinburgh,replace the doctor with a policeman.

It’s a city,he says,that still keeps its secrets from him. He is,like Rebus,an outsider. Rankin grew up in Cardenden,a small coal mining town of 5,000 people in Fife,Scotland. “My parents were solid working class. Dad worked in a shop,mum in a canteen. They never owned a house or a car. I was the first person in the family to go to university,” he says. It was hardly a life immersed in books but even as a child,he says he was fascinated by stories and would try and draw comic strips. “I only showed it to my mum. Even at that early stage,it wasn’t enough for me to read,I wanted to be writing too,” he says. He squints into the sun streaming into the room and adds thoughtfully,“It was an extension of the games kids play,the imaginary friends they have. At some point of time,the adult world tells us we can’t do that anymore. Writers are just kids who refuse to grow up. We have a vivid interior world and we still play with imaginary friends.”

This is his first visit to the country and he is clearly bewildered by Indian road etiquette: “You do use the automobile horn too often. It could drive one crazy.” On the flight to Delhi,he watched Salman Khan bashing up the bad guys in Wanted and spotted “a very crooked policeman”. He is surprised when I tell him that the Indian readers are yet to get their own versions of Harry Bosch or John Rebus. Flipping through Mumbai’s newspapers,he says,he found two dozen crime novels leaping up at him. “The cricketer auction,I see enormous possibilities there. Imagine if a player were kidnapped or killed,” he says.

When Rankin first needed to give Rebus an address,he looked out the window of his apartment in Edinburgh and fixed him in a place across the road,Arden Street,Marchmont. Like Rebus,he drinks at the Oxford bar (he even had a drinking problem). Over the 20 years he has lived with Rebus inside his head,the detective has become somewhat of an alter ego,a means to channel the writer’s own darkness.

“It was terrific to hide behind him. He can say things I possibly can’t. He is politically incorrect. He doesn’t deal with authority well and I have always given in to authority. It’s nice to have an alter ego who is darker,more complex and dangerous,” he says. And yet,Rebus,he says,would probably tell him to sod off if he met him. “I’m much more like Siobhan Clarke. We even like the same music. Rebus is too much of an Old Testament guy: there are the good guys and the bad guys. And my job in the book is to convince Rebus that the world is more complicated than he thinks it is. I don’t think he would like me if he met me,” he says.

Rankin sees himself as the rare crime fiction author who wasn’t a fan of the genre when he started writing out. “I thought it had ended with Agatha Christie.” But as he discovered writers like James Ellroy,P.D. James,Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham,he realised he had found his medium. “I loved the sense of place,the pace,the strong traditional narrative and the big moral questions.… Crime writers are continually fascinated by the concept of evil and the reality of evil. A detective,it struck me,was a perfect means to look at society,because he has access to every layer,from the corporations and politicians to the unemployed and the dissolute,the junkies and prostitutes. Everything I wanted to say about the world or every question I wanted to ask about the world I thought I could do in a crime novel,” he says.

And Rebus? “I’m not done with him. He could come back in his own book,digging up an old crime. Or if I continue to write about the complaints department,they might want to investigate a past misdemeanour by a certain John Rebus. I’ll make up my mind this year,” he says.