Paul Blezard talks to Ian Rankin, whose Rebus novels have been translated into twenty-two languages, about illegal immigrants, the publicity trail, whether his stubborn Inspector will ever retire, and why a crime novel will probably never win the Booker Prize.

Transcript of the audio interview with Ian Rankin about Fleshmarket Close

I’m Paul Blezard from Oneword Radio, and I’ve kindly been invited by Orion Audiobooks to have a quick chat with Ian Rankin, from his studio up in Scotland. Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin was, in 1997, awarded the Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction for his novel Black and Blue. His subsequent Rebus novels have all been international bestsellers; he’s a resident of Edinburgh; and in 2003 he received an OBE for his service to literature.

PB: Ian, it’s very, very kind of you to let us come and talk to you. How are things going?

IR: Fine, at the moment, y’know. A writer’s life is a happy one.

Fleshmarket Close

PB: The latest novel is Fleshmarket Close. What can you tell us about it?

IR: It’s about asylum seekers.

PB: Hmm.

IR: Yeah. It’s about the marketing of flesh, which is why the pun “Fleshmarket Close”, which is actually a street in Edinburgh, is used. It’s about buying and selling people, it’s about people smuggling, it’s about illegal refugees, illegal immigrants. The whole situation is quite fresh in people’s minds at the moment.

PB: All very timely. Rebus has become absolutely defined in people’s minds as the, I mean I know you hate this, but, the Morse of Edinburgh. The great interesting thing is that, of course, he ages in real time. Each year you put a book out, he’s a year older. When is he going to retire? Do you see him retiring? How do you see that working?

IR: Well, I know a lot of writers, especially crime writers with a serial character, and they know when they begin the series how it’s gonna end, how it’s gonna progress. I write the Rebus books on a wing and a prayer, really, one book at a time – bit like an alcoholic, taking it one day at a time – and I don’t even know what the next book will be about, until I start thinking about it, and I just trust that the muse will descend, and ideas will come springing up from all kinds of different weird places. So I don’t know when he’s gonna retire. I mean, you’re right, he lives in real time, therefore he is in his mid-fifties, and he must retire at 60, because you can’t be a cop in Scotland any later than that. In fact, if you’re uniform, i.e. not CID, you retire at 55. So he’s got his full pension, he could retire at the moment if he wanted to, but he’s got at least two more books in him, because I’ve just signed up to write two more books.

PB: [laughs]

IR: [laughs] And I am slowing the clock down slightly, I think, because…I used to write two books a year, and then I went to one book a year, and the latest deal is for a book every two years.

Slowing Down

PB: Why are you slowing down?

IR: Pffff…I think, y’know, it’s a kinda boring reason, but it’s because the more successful you become as a writer, the less time you have to write the books. And so I spend so much of the year now on the road, and doing interviews, and doing other stuff that keeps my profile high so the publishers like it, that I get less and less time to write the books that made me successful in the first place.

PB: I’m incredibly sensitive to that dynamic, the fact that writing is such an insular, solitary task, that you create the universe in your head and that requires lots of time on your own and thinking and so on and so forth; and that the mindset used to publicise books is so completely the other polarity of that, that you have to go out there, have to be talking about it. How do you deal with that? Do you enjoy it? Is it a pain in the arse?

IR: It’s both. I mean it’s…there are swings and roundabouts about touring and meeting your public. For one thing, you’re right. I mean, the reason you become a writer is not because you enjoy going out and pressing the flesh and talkin’ to people. Y’know, it’s not like you’re a politician or something. Y’know, you become a writer because you’re most at ease with the world when you are writing about it in a small confined space with just yourself and a notebook and pen, or word processor. And that’s how you communicate with the world. But it is such a solitary occupation that is nice to get out into the world, and find out from readers what you’re doing right and what they think you’re doing wrong. And I get a lot of my ideas from readers. Y’know, they’ll say to me, “Oh, why don’t you talk about the private school system in Edinburgh.” Bing - I get, y’know, A Question Of Blood. Someone’ll say, “Oh these little skeletons in the museum in Edinburgh, why don’t you do something about them?” Bing – I get The Falls. So I’m picking up ideas from actually meeting people, and if you just locked yourself away in this hermetic existence, you would never get to meet people, and you might miss out on your next great book.

PB: Indeed.

Titles

PB: How do the titles come to you? I’m just running through the list of titles: Knots and Crosses; Hide and Seek; Tooth and Nail; A Good Hanging; Strip Jack; Black Book; Mortal Causes. Brilliant titles. Do you ever start with the title and then write the story round it?

IR: I almost always start with a title, a theme and a title, and once I’ve got my title I’m then happy. It has to resonate on more than one level. I mean, Fleshmarket Close, for example, is a real street in Edinburgh, but what I was wanting to write about was the marketing of flesh, it was trading in human beings, and in fact this situation is closer to us in Scotland than we might otherwise think. So “Fleshmarket Close” suddenly takes on a whole new resonance. The Falls took on a resonance for me, it’s all kinds of different things - it’s the fall of man, obviously. So I get the title first, and the theme, but the title doesn’t always make it. My working title isn’t always, always the title it comes out with, because my publishers often say things like, “Oh, it’s far too dark. Women won’t like it.”

PB: [laughs]

IR: For a while now I’ve been trying “Dark Entries”, I’m desperate to write a book called Dark Entries, and I keep proposing it as the title of my next book, and my publishers keep poo-pooing it. And with the new one, Fleshmarket Close, we started off with Dark Entries, and went to Knoxland, which is the name of the estate where the murder takes place in the book, but also, to me, is Scotland. Y’know, it’s still the country of John Knox. And they didn’t like that either, so we ended up with Fleshmarket Close. But it America it ain’t even gonna be called that, because in America they don’t know what a close is, they don’t know that it’s an alley way, or a kinda slim passageway. So in the states it’s gonna be called Fleshmarket Alley.

PB: [laughs]

IR: A street that does not exist in Edinburgh.

PB: And loses the nice double entendre in the title.

IR: Yeah. It’s a fun thing, titles – I love thinking up titles.

Dark Arts

PB: How do you get on with your editor? The whole process of editing fiction is a complete dark art as far as I’m concerned…

IR: [laughs]

PB: …and given that you have such a reputation - such a brilliant writer – what role does the editor play in the text version of the books?

IR: Erm, well…that’s a – it’s an interesting relationship. My editor used to work full time for Orion, my UK publisher, and then she left to go live in the wilds of Wales, and I begged her to stay with me as a freelance. So the only editing work she does, as far as I know, per year, she does one Rebus novel. I’ll send her the manuscript and she’ll send me a nice email, saying, “This is great. I’ve just got a few comments to make, and I'll be following up. Then I’ll get what used to be a 16 page fax. It’s now a 16 page email when I print it off. In fact, for the latest book it was 14 pages, so I’m obviously getting’ better as a writer.

PB: [laughs]

IR: And, y’know, it’s really minute stuff, like, “Oh, this person changes name half-way through the book”, or “this person has a moustache then they have a full beard 60 pages later”, but also, thematically, she picks up on things: relationships; not getting in Rebus’s head as much as we need to. She’s a very good reader, she’s a very good reader of fiction, and that’s what you want. I mean, the ideal editor is someone who loves to read books, and while they’re reading the books they’re thinking, “Oh, this doesn’t quite work for me. Why doesn’t it work?” And so, every suggestion she makes I know is from the heart, and I now that she really thinks it’s gonna make the books better. In the past I’ve had various editors who were writers manqué.

PB: Ah.

IR: They wanted it to be their book, and you were just…k’know, they were channeling it through you.

PB: You were just writing it for them.

IR: Yeah. So they would say things like, “Well, this is fantastic, but can it not be set in America and not be a comedy.” And I’d say, “Yeah, sure. Of course I can change that.” They would want to imprint their own personality on the book. I mean, a good editor does not imprint their own personality on the book. They know what the personality of the book is and they just want to make it as good as it possibly can be.

PB: Indeed. Let’s talk about abridgers for a second, ‘cos I know that Kati Nicholl has abridged most of your audiobooks. I understand you trust her so well that you don’t even read the abridgement she does any more.

IR: [laughs]

PB: Is this true?

IR: Yeah, yeah it is. We’ve talked about dark arts, I think abridgement is a very dark art in itself, especially with crime fiction, because in crime fiction every scene is there to make the plot move on, and actually deciding which scenes you can take out is a very difficult thing. I mean, I know they do it on television, when they turn the books into TV, and that’s why I didn’t want anything to do with the TV, but the same goes with abridgement, because, y’know, the writer is the last person qualified to talk about that kind of work. I mean, which of your children do you want to kill? I know that the cliché has it that you kill all your darlings; take out all the stuff you like ‘cos that’s the stuff that’s no good. But with a crime novel, every thread is interweaved so closely that it must be hellish hard to actually decide, “Oh, I don’t need that”, or, “That can go, ‘cos I need to cut this down from 36 hours, to 4 or 5.” You’ve got to take out a lot. And what tends to get taken out are the things that I really like, so I tend not to go into it too closely.

PB: I can understand that.

OBE’s and the Booker Prize

PB: Briefly, because we’re running out of time: you received the OBE for your services to literature last year – many congratulations. How has that helped this, sort of, cause that you and I have discussed in the past, in our various meeting, of trying to get crime fiction, sort of more into the mainstream of, accepted by the mainstream sort of literary fiction people – the people that run the Booker Prize for example, which hasn’t had a decent crime novel since can’t remember when. Has it helped at all?

IR: Who knows? I think the only thing that crime writers can do is to keep writing the best possible books that they can, and hope that the world eventually takes notice. I think that it is happening slowly in Britain. It’s happened overseas already, in some countries. I do think that crime fiction at its best talks about the real world, the world we all have to live in, the urban world that most of us inhabit. The problems that we’ve got, whether it be with unemployment, prostitution, drugs, refugees – can be anything – and it asks the reader big questions, big moral questions, about how we got here, what kind of mess are we’re in, and what can we do about it. Now that to me is good fiction, it’s fiction that’s making you ask yourself big questions. It isn’t necessarily posing answers, but it’s making you ask yourself the questions. And it is dealing with the real world, and that’s what the best crime fiction does. There’s plenty of crime fiction out there, I guess, that doesn’t do that, but there’s an awful lot of literary fiction out there that doesn’t do that either. It talks about people having affairs in NW3. It’s very inward looking, it’s very self-reflexive, the literary novel, a lot of the time. Or it’s based in the past; it’s historical, and crime fiction is about the here and now, and you know, hopefully, eventually, we will get crime novels short-listed for the Booker Prize. But, of course, by then they will be said to have transcended the genre, and will no longer be crime novels themselves.

PB: Yes, exactly. I think the illustration we came up with in the past, Ian, was that if crime writes at the cutting edge of social, sexual and national morays of its time, Charles Dickens did exactly that in his time; he’s literature, and so should you be. Ian Rankin, many congratulations on Fleshmarket Close, look forward to talking to you in the future. Thank you very much for talking to us.

IR: Thank you.