Ian Rankin was recently named the tenth bestselling fiction writer in Britain since 1998 and it is has been estimated that he accounts for 10% of all UK crime fiction sales. These are remarkable figures, but a look at the only other crime writers to make the top 10 - John Grisham and James Patterson - reveals that his achievement is more than just commercial. Rankin does share some attributes with these behemoths of the global book racks; the way he has become a strong and reliable brand allied with a Stakhanovite willingness to promote his work. But Rankin has also been widely credited with establishing the now commonly held notion of the literary crime novel and providing the genre in Britain with much of its credibility. And while it is not unheard of for a commercial career to be launched, as was Rankin's, with the most esoteric of literary ambitions, what makes him almost unique in a market where sales can be measured in tons, is that he has managed, to a large extent, to fulfil these ambitions while simultaneously building his vast audience.
As a PhD student at Edinburgh University in the mid-80s - "up to my oxters in deconstruction and semiotics" - Rankin set out to write a modern-day Scottish gothic novel featuring a policeman and his alter ego. The book self-consciously drew on the tradition of RL Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Its title, Knots And Crosses, and the name of the policeman, Rebus, a type of picture puzzle, made clear his ludic intent. But while the book was received well enough, Rankin was perplexed that people thought it was a crime novel and disappointed that no-one seemed to get his "smart-ass PhD student" jokes.
He wrote another two novels before returning to Rebus, "and this time there'd be no question of what I was up to. The working title of the book was Hyde and Seek although I did change it to Hide right at the death because I suspected I might have been bludgeoning people too much about Stevenson." This time a single reviewer did note the allusion, but Rankin was more relaxed that it was again assumed to be a crime novel. He had learned to embrace the genre via a crash course in "the likes of Rendell, James, Hill, Ellroy, Block. And the stuff wasn't bad. The form was flexible. I could say everything I wanted to say about the world, and still give readers a pacy, gripping narrative." And in Rebus he knew he had found his mouthpiece.
Although there are few references to the detective's physical appearance in the books - a mention of brown hair and green eyes is about it - his history and psyche have been utterly exposed; he's SAS trained, shares Rankin's obsession with rock music, has suffered a nervous breakdown, failed as a husband and a father and has sought solace in alcohol and Christianity. In the subsequent 13 Rebus novels, Rankin has continued to provide an oblique guide to Scottish literature - "there's a rough housing estate called the Kelman and Muriel Spark gets a few nods here and there" - but he has more importantly prompted Rebus to explore the darker sides of modern Scotland as he comes up against sectarianism, aged war criminals, paedophilia, internet crime and skulduggery in the new Scottish parliament. The books have now been translated into 26 languages and last year Rankin picked up a prestigious Edgar Award in America. A few weeks ago, his 2004 novel Fleshmarket Close, about asylum seekers in Edinburgh, was named crime book of the year and he has just been awarded the Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement by the Crime Writers' Association. A stage show with the Scottish singer-songwriter Jackie Leven has played to packed venues across Europe, and his appearance next Saturday at Hay will be one of the highlights of the literary festival. He is also a judge, with Jacqueline Wilson and Guardian columnist Erwin James, of the prize for a children's story on the theme "a prisoner in the family", also to be announced in Hay.
Professor Stephen Knight of the University of Cardiff has written extensively on crime fiction. He explains that "the British tradition was either intellectual and mumsie detectives like Miss Marple, or honourable and boring policemen. I think one reason why Rankin has been so successful is that he was the first person to successfully transplant into Britain the mood and the feel of the great American private eye tradition. Although Rebus is a policeman, he is a troubled loner with this mixture of morality and fallibility that seems to provide some deeper insight. Added to this Rankin has provided a very strong sense of place. His books have a shade of the mysticism and ghostly elements which are in the Edinburgh tradition going back to Stevenson."
Crime writer David Peace was recently chosen by Granta for its best young British writers list. "I was rather sceptical about most British crime writers because Inspector Morse wasn't really the kind of thing I liked. But then I read Rankin's Black and Blue [1997]. There was a remarkable quality to the writing and an almost discernible feeling of him raising the bar. I do wonder if my being on the Granta list would have been possible without Ian making people look more seriously at crime writers."
Although Rankin didn't set out to write a series - he complains that he started Rebus too old and didn't initially provide a sidekick - he has spoken admiringly of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time and says he soon came to appreciate that by re-visiting Rebus every year or so - the novels are more or less in real time - he could fulfil larger ambitions. "A series does give you scope to see the past impinging on the present across the whole range of daily political, social, artistic and economic life."
The Scottish novelist, critic and commentator Allan Massie was writer in residence at Edinburgh University and an early supporter. "One of the advantages of the crime novel is that it deals more convincingly with different levels of society than is now easy to do in a straight novel," he says. "Ian writes very seriously about modern society and has a very convincing take on Edinburgh and Scotland."
The Edinburgh of Rankin's fiction is a city of public probity and private vice, or "all fur coat and nae knickers", as one of his characters puts it. He explains that there is a tension in the books between acknowledging that Edinburgh is a very civilised place without much crime, "and the fact that real-life cops in Edinburgh would not see that side of the city. All they deal with is the underbelly where people have been abused or hurt or have done the hurting. Some of Rebus's women friends occasionally try to show him the better side of Edinburgh, but all he sees are crime scenes. They'll see a wonderful view and he'll be reminded of a suicide jump."
Rankin lives in the affluent Merchiston district of the city, next door but one to Alexander McCall Smith and down the road from JK Rowling. He notes that they make a significant contribution to the Scottish balance of payments - financially and culturally. "There are a lot of people wondering about Scottish identity and our place in the world. Lots of artists are pressuring the government to put more money into the arts to take Scotland out to the world. But quietly the writers are doing that anyway by typing away."
His latest project is a volume of short stories, out next month. "When I finish a Rebus novel I've got to exorcise this dour Edinburgh personality out of my skull so I usually write short stories that are very different in tone; sometimes more comedic or set in the past and they may have a criminal element or they may not." He has included a new Rebus story in the collection - sinister allegations from a retired policeman now resident in an old people's home - and has spent the past few months delving into his own as well as Rebus's past.
All his novels are being re-issued and he has been writing new introductions. He has also been trawling his diaries, assiduously kept from the age of 10 to 30, for a book called Rebus's Scotland due later this year. "I think it's going to be a very odd book. It started as a primer about Edinburgh and was composed almost entirely of photographs. Then we had lots of lovely shots of Aberdeen and the Borders so it became about Scotland. But as I've mulled it over some more it's also become a book about me."
Rankin says re-reading the early books has revealed that Rebus, although a generation ahead of him, "was basically me in that his thought processes were very like mine and his childhood memories are my early memories because this was the material I had to fall back on. But there were traps with that and he was also way too literary. He would quote Walt Whitman and King Lear and Dostoevsky when there was no way you could expect a Scottish working-class policeman who left school at 15 to know anything about Whitman. But I did."
All his family knew about the young Rankin's literary leanings and his elder step-sisters would buy him diaries for Christmas. He says he forced himself to fill a page a day for 20 years and is wary of an obsessive side to his nature. "I gave up playing computer games very early on when I found myself up all night playing Hungry Horace on a Sinclair Spectrum. But I'm really sorry I stopped doing my diary."
He was born in 1960 in Cardenden, a former mining town 30 miles north of Edinburgh. His mother, Isobel, was from Yorkshire and worked in school and factory canteens. His father, James, first worked in a grocer's shop and then at the Rosyth naval dockyard. His parents married after the deaths of their previous spouses and already had a daughter each. There were few books at home but Rankin "haunted" the local library where he was especially attracted by the freedom to take out adult books. "You couldn't see the film of The Godfather, but you could read the book. Same with Clockwork Orange. Books were hidden treasure. And while neither of my parents were great readers, my father and I both loved words and we'd do the easy crossword in the paper together, with help from a little Collins Gem dictionary. I remember once filling in some form with him and we put his occupation down as 'hydrographic cartographer'. In fact his job was to get the maps out of a store room, but we both liked that."
Rankin describes the Cardenden he grew up in as "full of Slade fans and soccer hooligans and you couldn't really grow up there and not be seen to be of that persuasion. But I was always on the periphery and whenever any trouble started I would make my excuses." Schoolfriend John Scott agrees that the pervading youth culture revolved around "football and booze and Ian wasn't much interested in either. But there were a bunch of us who were hugely interested in music - particularly punk but also alternative rock from America - as well as in exploring some of the wilder fringes of European writing. We had a sense of the world being opened to us through music and literature."
At Beath Senior High School in Cowdenbeath, six miles from Cardenden, Rankin edited a magazine that was closed down after just one issue because the headmaster objected to the title, Mainline. He also wrote a story about "junkies in a squat. Even though I had no experience whatsoever of drugs or squats." Rankin picks out Ron Gillespie, his English teacher, as an important figure and, in an article in Guardian Education, Gillespie recalled Rankin's early writing as "evocative and darkly atmospheric. He was really quite publishable even then, at 15. I remember one sixth-year lesson on TS Eliot's The Waste Land. Ian was hidden behind a pile of about a dozen critical texts on the subject, some of which I'd never seen before."
Rankin says the plan was to study accountancy because he had an accountant uncle in Bradford who owned his own house and had a car, "neither of which my parents had". But at the last moment he opted to read English at Edinburgh: "I did like English but I think I really thought I would become a rock star."
At university he became involved in the film and poetry societies and had poems published in magazines. "But I had no real spark for poetry. I've always seen things as part of a story." After completing his degree, he undertook a PhD on Muriel Spark, whose Jean Brodie was named after Deacon Brodie, the 18th-century gentleman thief, the model for Stevenson's Hyde. He still admires Spark's work. "Her books aren't as good as in her heyday, but she still has something to say and they are still beautifully written."
Rankin's first tutor at Edinburgh, Colin Nicholson, remembers that he was seen as a promising academic researcher. "But he was always going to be a creative writer and he found his feet in that at the same time." Rankin had intended to teach at university. "But the real subtext was that the grant I got to do my PhD also paid for me to write my own stuff. In 1983 I wrote a novel that is still unpublished and I wrote three more in the next three years. So I had written over a thousand pages of my own work and just enough about Muriel Spark for them not to kick me out."
This period saw a remarkable surge in Scottish literary creativity, with writers such as James Kelman and Alasdair Gray being published. Rankin's first book owed a debt to Kelman in that the Edinburgh student publishing house, Polygon, brought out Kelman's first book of stories, which did well enough to fund Rankin's 1986 debut The Flood, which is being re-issued for the first time this year. Rankin has said how impressed he was by Kelman's use of Scottish vernacular and how he enthusiastically showed Kelman's stories to his father. "But he said he couldn't read it because it wasn't in English. Now my dad is from the same working-class linguistic community as Kelman writes about. If he couldn't read it, but half of Hampstead was lapping it up, that to me was a huge failure and I decided then not to write phonetically."
Massie remembers Rankin's early writing as "very much a young man's work in that it talked about childhood and adolescence. But there was certainly something there. It was quite obvious that he had talent and he was serious about writing in a way that lots of students who write are not serious." Massie took a Rankin story for the Edinburgh Review which he edited, was a judge for a Scotsman story competition in which Rankin came second - entries were anonymous - and recommended Rankin to his London publisher, who accepted Knots and Crosses after five others had turned it down. It was issued in 1987.
By this time Rankin had married Miranda Harvey, whom he had met at university, and moved to London. He took a job editing a hi-fi magazine while continuing to write and Miranda was a senior civil servant running the private office of then trade minister Francis Maude. He says when he first arrived in London he became something of a literary stalker. "I would pore over phone books looking for famous people and mark their addresses in my A-Z. I remember finding William Boyd and Melvyn Bragg, if he was the M. Bragg in NW3. God knows why I did that. And I certainly never went to their houses. I suppose it was something about being close to the talent."
In 1990, after four years in London, both husband and wife were close to burning out and they decided to move to rural France where they could live cheaply and he could concentrate on his fiction. Scott says the "mild obsessiveness of our school-days in terms of music and books and movies might have been slightly translated into his determination to dig into his writing career. To move to rural France and live just on your writing was a very big thing coming from our working-class Scottish background."
Rankin says "we had no TV and there were no cinemas so I just wrote books". He produced four Rebus novels and another three books under the pseudonym of Jack Harvey. "But I couldn't speak French very well, I became homesick and my publishers were complaining that it was difficult to promote me when I was so far away. I think we would have moved back anyway when Jack reached school age even if it hadn't been for Kit."
The Rankins' sons, first Jack and then Kit, were born in France. There were concerns about Kit's progress from the outset but it wasn't until he was 18 months old that he was diagnosed with Angelman Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes severely arrested development, and the family returned to Edinburgh in 1996. Rankin says since moving to their Merchiston home a couple of years ago he has had some snide comments about "mansions and ivory towers. But you must remember that it was 12 years after my first book that I could even afford to get a mortgage on a house in Edinburgh. And the serious money didn't come for a while after that. This house was essentially bought for Kit so he can have one level and virtually a wing for himself."
Rankin's recent rise in income has been accompanied by increased work for children's charities. But friends say he is largely unchanged by wealth or success and still essentially lives "like a student and is never happier than when talking about Hawkwind LPs in the pub". He says almost no matter how much money he earns it can never be enough, with Kit always needing to be cared for. "We'd be snookered if we couldn't afford to bring in private care."
The book that marked Rankin's commercial breakthrough was Black and Blue, which won the 1997 Gold Dagger. The novel incorporated the story of Bible John, who murdered three women in late-60s Glasgow, was never caught and became a bogeyman figure in the west of Scotland - "mothers would say to their children, 'you'd better watch out or Bible John will get you'." Rankin's editor Caroline Oakley says before Black and Blue he had reached a make-or-break point. "Ian had written eight or nine books by then, which were selling about 30,000 in paperback, which is okay, but people at the publisher were asking how long can we put money behind him. We needed one more big effort and he pulled it off."
Rankin says his writing has always been therapeutic. "I do get a lot of stuff out on to the page. Subconsciously a lot of the anger comes out in my books and there was a definite shift from Let It Bleed [1995] to Black and Blue [1997]. It was a much bigger, angrier and more questioning book that reflected my personal experience with Kit. I've always said that crime writers are quite well-balanced individuals because we get all this stuff out on paper. If we didn't, God help us." He says he was amazed when re-reading the books to write the new introductions "that I didn't remember any of the endings until Resurrection Men [2001], which was only three books ago. It is partly about getting rid of things and so when you finish the book that is it."
Oakley acknowledges that commercial success on the scale Rankin has achieved - his books now sell half a million copies in paperback within three months of publication - can bring creative restrictions as people demand more of the same. "But Ian has always wanted to make it interesting for himself and one of the reasons he has continued to sell at these levels is that he has always managed to find something new and interesting to work with. Like with the last one about asylum seekers. It's almost uncanny. He'll write something and three weeks later it will be on the news. He is also emotionally astute and is genuinely insightful into what might be called the human condition."
In one of the novels Rebus listens to some songs by Leven. Both men acknowledge a shared preoccupation with issues around manhood and family relationships and when Leven subsequently got in touch with Rankin they ended up putting together a stage show - Rankin reads and Leven provides musical counterpoint - which has spawned a CD. Leven says: "There's a wonderful expression that 'you cannot trust a man until you know of his defeats'. John Rebus has been defeated in many ways but he hasn't been ultimately defeated and nor is he going to be. He's got down to some sort of irreducible core and from that he works in an almost mystical way. I think the best of my work is formed in a similar way. It is about men and women who find their spirits at bay and then, unexpectedly perhaps, begin to find better things about themselves."
Gill Plain of St Andrew's University has written a critical primer about Black and Blue and teaches the book to undergraduates. "Rebus, who is somewhat conflicted in that he is constructed as a combination of the traditional Scottish working-class male and also aware of the problems in his make-up, is a fascinating character. You can't miss in the books the notion that whatever it meant to be a Scottish man just isn't working any more."
Plain says Rankin has artfully combined several strands of crime writing and in Rebus has "brought them together in a new product, which is quite usefully mutable. So in some books he can behave quite cooperatively with his colleagues and in others he can run around the country confronting people in a completely irresponsible way. Some of the books are more innovative than others but Rankin has never sat back on his haunches."
Ever since Rankin's emergence into the mainstream, critics have been questioning how much more he can get out of the crime genre. Sean O'Brien, reviewing Dead Souls in 1999, wrote about Rankin reading Edinburgh, "as an immense, unsleeping graveyard" and while acknowledging that the book was "reliably readable", O'Brien also wondered aloud as to whether, "there is an ambitious and rather different novel to be written about the city. It will be interesting to see whether Rankin accepts the challenge of seeing how far downwards and inwards he can penetrate."
Rankin says he has signed up for two more novels, by which time Rebus will be just about 60. "He can then retire and drink himself to death. I don't think I'm going to kill him. Although if you do bump them off you can bring them back as that other fine Edinburgh crime writer Conan Doyle showed. But I think two books is about right and then that'll be that.
"And if I then get an idea for a non-crime story I'll write it. But so far every theme I've wanted to explore I've been able to explore in a crime novel. I know that might not always be the case. But what's happened is rather than me having to write a non-crime books to be taken seriously, Britain has got a lot better in recognising that crime fiction can be literature. I write crime novels but I don't think that makes me a niche writer. You can call me a crime writer or a Scottish writer or whatever. As long as people read the books."
Life at a glance: Ian Rankin
Born: April 28 1960, Cardenden, Fife.
Education: Denend Primary School, Cardenden; Auchterderran Junior High; Beath Senior High; University of Edinburgh.
Married: 1986 Miranda Harvey; two sons, Jack and Kit.
Novels: 1986 The Flood; '88 Watchman; '89 Westwind; (as Jack Harvey) '93 Witch Hunt; '94 Bleeding Hearts; '95 Blood Hunt.
Short Stories: 1992 A Good Hanging; 2002 Beggars Banquet; '05 Collected Stories.
Rebus novels: 1987 Knots and Crosses; '90 Hide and Seek; '92 Tooth and Nail, Strip Jack; '93 The Black Book; '94 Mortal Causes; '95 Let it Bleed; '97 Black and Blue; '98 The Hanging Garden; '99 Dead Souls; 2000 Set in Darkness; '01 The Falls, Resurrection Men; '03 Question of Blood; '04 Fleshmarket Close.
Awards: 1997 Gold Dagger; 2002 OBE; ' 04 Edgar Award; '05 Diamond Dagger.
Ian Rankin's The Collected Short Stories is published by Orion at £17.99 on June 16. Jackie Leven and Ian Rankin's Jackie Leven Said is on Cooking Vinyl Records. Ian Rankin appears at the Guardian Hay Festival on June 4 at 8.30 pm. www.hayfestival.com. Tel. 0870 0990 1299.