Big Interview with Ian Rankin whose Inspector Rebus play heads to York this week

The play was conceived in the pandemic. “It was written during lockdown when I was basically trapped in a room and had nothing to do except write,” says Rankin. “I thought the setting of a dinner party would work well and I quite liked the idea of taking an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery and twisting it a bit. When I had the idea for the story, it immediately felt like a stage play. It is a lot of fun for the audience as they wonder what the characters are not telling us, what the secrets are and what is going on. It turns the whole theatre audience into detectives.”

This is Rankin’s third stage play – he co-wrote the murder-mystery Dark Road with director Mark Thomson in 2013, then teamed up with playwright Rona Munro in 2018 for Rebus: Long Shadows – and he has clearly enjoyed writing for theatre again. “It is completely different writing a stage play to writing a novel – when you have written a script you are a very small cog in a big wheel and it lives and dies by what the actors and the director do with it. What I do is ink on a page, it is the work that the actors and director do that brings it alive. Suddenly the way that the actor speaks, the way they look and their gestures all adds to the experience so the words are no longer just words, they are part of somebody’s personality and I just love that.”

For this production he spent some time in the rehearsal room, attending early read-throughs in London and talking to the actors about their characters. “It has been a real joy watching the actors become those characters and to see the way that the director and actors work together in rehearsal,” he says. “When I am writing a novel, I am not getting any of that. There is no-one sitting in the room with me saying ‘have you thought of this?’”

Rankin’s relationship with John Rebus goes back a long way – the first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, was published in 1987. The character didn’t immediately make his mark, but by the third or fourth book, he was gathering fans and the books, all set in Edinburgh where Rankin has lived for decades, quickly became bestsellers. “Rebus was only meant to be around for one book – I was 25 and I thought I had done with this guy but he just refused to leave my head,” he says. “And if you want to explore a city from top to bottom, I felt that was a great way to do it.” So, the Rebus stories continued.

There was a brief hiatus of about five years after Exit Music, published in 2007, in which Rebus retired – it was meant to be the final Rebus novel. “I thought he was gone but he found a way to come back,” says Rankin. “Even though he had retired he returned as part of the cold case investigations team. Having brought him back for Standing in Another Man’s Grave in 2012, I am having a lot of fun with him and he presents new challenges. And now he is dealing with the ageing process so whenever I write a book with him in it, I am thinking ‘this could be it, the final one’. This next one, Midnight and Blue, is set in prison and Rebus finds himself surrounded by men who want him dead because of who he is.”

Rankin says that the prison setting has presented him with opportunities as well as challenges. “It’s given me a lot of choices exploring how he would cope with being incarcerated with men he happened to have put away. Would he be a loner or would he make alliances and friendships? There was the restriction of having him in a confined space but that was also partly the fun of it. And of course there is a murder.”

His writing process is focused and quite speedy. “I like to write quickly,” he says. “The first draft is written at a fast rate, usually in about 30 to 40 days. Writing quickly injects pace and I also think there is less chance of going wrong. The first draft is rough, does the skeleton of the plot and then it is about putting meat on the characters, making them three dimensional and adding a few red herrings. My wife is always my first reader and she goes through it with a pencil, which is nerve-wracking. Everything that she identifies as a problem, I fix because I trust her judgement. She is a voracious reader and she reads a lot of crime fiction, so she is the perfect editor and she doesn’t go easy on me.”

At the moment he finds himself in the nice position of wondering what to do next. “This is the final book of a contract that I have taken with a publisher so I have that freedom now to do what I like,” he says. “I am not a great planner and I never think one book ahead. It depends on me getting an idea of the theme first, then the plot and who is going to help tell the story. I am 65 next year, that was the age at which my dad retired, and my wife is keen for me to slow down and for us to do some travelling. She would like me to just relax, but writers never relax, we are always on the look-out and thinking, ‘this is an interesting idea’.”

It sounds very much as though retirement is not on his agenda. There will no doubt be another book in the pipeline soon and in the meantime, he’s looking forward to the play stopping off in York; he will be travelling down for it. “My mum was from Bradford, so I am half Yorkshire and I am hoping to get as much of my Yorkshire family as possible along to the play.”

Rebus: A Game Called Malice is at York Theatre Royal, October 15-19. yorktheatreroyal.co.uk The latest Rebus novel Midnight and Blue is out now

Ian Rankin is appearing at Farsley Literature Festival on November 22.