Certainly, there’s no gleaming flatscreen in the corner of the apartment in Edinburgh where he writes, listens to music and constructs elaborate Lego models (all four Beatles, their Yellow Submarine and, once, a 6ft version of the Eiffel Tower). Did he not see the most recent incarnation of his most famous creation, Detective Inspector John Rebus, this time played by Richard Rankin (no relation), in the wake of previous performances by Ken Stott and John Hannah? It sits on top of a plain, compact trestle-table desk he bought on London’s Charing Cross Road in 1987 and lugged back to his Tottenham flat on the tube; both have accompanied him from London to rural Dordogne, in southwest France, where he lived for a few years with his wife, Miranda, in the 1990s, and back to Edinburgh, where the couple and their two sons have been ever since.
But if all this makes him sound doggedly attached to the past, wary of change and of modernity, his work stands in stark contradiction. Across 26 Rebus books, a smaller series involving the detective Malcolm Fox, and a number of standalone novels and plays, Rankin has shown himself to be fiercely attentive to the most serious aspects of contemporary life. Its title refers to a Knightsbridge apartment building aimed squarely at the highest end of the property market, its inhabitants the rich and famous who take as read that their residence will include a cinema and a luxury spa, and that visitors will pass by Chapman brothers artworks in its marble entrance hall.
They are perhaps not expecting that their concierge will be discovered with his head bludgeoned, and that DS Gillian Gish will quickly appear on the scene to quiz them as to their whereabouts. One of the influences feeding into Gish, a brand-new lead character, is 1970s American TV detective Columbo, whom Rankin – back in his TV-viewing days – found captivating. I just thought that was extraordinary.
It’s to do with class: he’s the underclass, they’re the overclass, and he’s going to bring them down. Rebus has done that in quite a few of the books. And Gish, I think, secretly really enjoys the idea that she’s going to upset them by asking the wrong questions and by interfering in their very comfortable, cosseted world.” Gish has the kind of hinterland that Rebus lacks; she’s embedded in her own neighbourhood, in Rankin’s previous stomping ground of Tottenham, and after work she goes home to care for her mother.
Her off-duty life contributes to the portrait of London as a series of wildly disconnected locations and social milieux. I ask him whether it was nerve-racking to leave the Edinburgh setting that he’s written about for so long? You get an idea for a story, you say, ‘Well, could that be contained in Edinburgh?
And if it can’t be contained in Edinburgh, can I write it?’” And he’s convinced that his story of the ostentatious performance of wealth combined, paradoxically, with the obsession with privacy of the ultra-rich, wouldn’t have worked in Edinburgh. A prosperous city it may be, but “You’re not going to see a Rolls-Royce or a Bugatti Veyron. The wealth here is discreet.” The success of his novels has, of course, made Rankin himself a wealthy man, even if it did take him until his 60s – he’s 66 now – to get an office of his own.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
