Sir Ian Rankin: Almost 40 years of Inspector John Rebus

Like other fictional detectives – Colin Dexter’s Morse and Peter James’s Roy Grace – Rebus has gained a wider audience through TV, firstly played by John Hannah, and then by Ken Stott. Filming of the second series of the BBC reboot, starring Richard Rankin (no relation) as a modern reimagining of the character, has just been wrapped. Rebus, it seems, is not going anywhere. Yet the author, Rankin, 66, is in a dilemma about his own retirement.

“I’m fighting partly against ageing and partly against my wife (Miranda Harvey), who, since I started getting my pension earlier this year, said, ‘You should take your foot off the accelerator, and let’s enjoy ourselves while we can, because you never know what’s around the corner.’” Looking back, he admits that family life suffered in those early years when he was a struggling writer. “It’s a curse of being a writer that a lot of the time I’m physically present, but my head isn’t in the room.”

However, he insists: “I have been slowing down. I mean, when I was skint, when we were young and we had two kids and I had no money, I was writing two books a year just to put food on the table. I’m now in a fortunate position where a book every two, three, four or five years would give me enough money to live on. The ideas don’t come as readily as they once did.”

He has, however, taken a sabbatical from Rebus to pen The Heights, his first standalone thriller in two decades. The title of the book is the setting for a newly built high-end high-rise looming over London’s Hyde Park, where an eclectic mix of the global elite reside. It’s a billionaire’s playground, but when a night concierge is found murdered in the lobby, the building’s rarefied atmosphere is shattered.

Enter another interesting fictional copper: born-and-bred Londoner Detective Gillian Gish, who hails from Tottenham and weaves her way through the power, wealth and influence of the residents to find the murderer.

“I’d been reading up on all these oligarchs and these strange goings-on in London, people with gold-plated Lamborghinis driving up and down outside Harrods, and sheikhs who would hang out in West London in the summer because it was too hot in their own country and stay in these palatial apartment buildings that they only used a few weeks of the year. One night I happened to go past one in a taxi and could see it was completely in darkness, apart from the ground floor where the concierge was sitting behind the desk looking bored. That tells us so much about what London has become – a hollowed-out capital, there for the wealthy, the cosseted. And then there’s this other London that basically services that, the night watchmen, the cleaners, the chauffeurs and everybody else.”

The Heights was originally going to be a film, he reveals, but confesses he knew nothing about the film industry and isn’t enamoured of writing scripts. The first version was a short story, but the film came to nothing, so he expanded it to become a full-length novel. That version has now been optioned by a TV company, possibly culminating in a six or eight-hour series, but he isn’t holding his breath. “It took years for us to get Rebus on the TV screen, whereas this so far, touch wood, has been fairly painless.”

He hasn’t been asked to write the script, though. “I’m not a great collaborator. I like to play God. The novelist gets to play God. We’ve got complete control until I hand the manuscript over, whereas in the worlds of television and film, you’re always at the beck and call of producers and directors and everybody else. You’re a very small cog in a very big machine.”

You sense, though, that Rankin may be a little more involved in the Rebus reboot than in previous TV adaptations. “In the early days of Rebus, I was very hands-off, and then it wasn’t made in a way that I thought was satisfactory. It didn’t serve the books well, because you cannot shoehorn a 300-page novel into an hour of television, and that’s pretty much what they were trying to do in the early versions of Rebus on TV.” For the new series, he’s executive producer. “It means I get to look at the scripts, I give them feedback, and in fact they’re very amenable.”

Since creating Rebus nearly 40 years ago, Rankin says that the fears of audiences have changed. “A lot of crime fiction today focuses on paranoia and technology. Technology is out to get you. You cannot trust your computer or your phone or your Ring doorbell. Your identity’s being stolen; something is happening to rob you of your ID or your life. This can be the rise of fake news – what can you trust on screen now? A lot of the crime fiction now on television and in books is (based on fear that) you can’t trust your partner, your kids, or your next-door neighbour. That kind of paranoia, I think, reflects the fact that we live in a time when we are finding it difficult to trust what we see with our own eyes.”

It’s doubtful he has finished with him. “We’re hoping to do quite a lot to help celebrate the 40th anniversary – and the idea of (writing) a book is certainly very appealing. I’ll have to do a wider tour, go to some of the other countries where he’s been successful. Then I can sell it to my wife as a world trip.”

The Heights by Ian Rankin (Orion, £25.)