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The Sunday Times - Curious case of Rebus and the lesbian thriller drillers
PROFILE: Ian Rankin

The 47-year-old writer found himself in the mire again last week when something else from his past came back to haunt him. The venue was the Edinburgh international book festival, where one of Rankin’s leading female rivals, Val McDermid, took exception to remarks he had made in an interview last year — “The people writing the most graphic novels today are women. They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.”

McDermid, a lesbian whose gritty crime novels have been adapted for the television series Wire in the Blood, described his comments as “arrant rubbish” and “offensive”. Women, she argued, did not need permission to write about violence, which they did not see as “groovy pornography” but as a source of hurt that damaged lives. Her book The Last Temptation, whose killer is in the habit of taking a pubic “scalp” from his victims, does not quite square with this assertion.

(Val McDermid’s my other favourite modern mystery writer. Though I think I’d have to say that I like her Tony Hill novels better than John Rebus. But then there are less of them, and I own more Rebuses, so it’s hard to say, really.)

Soon, however, both Rankin and McDermid were claiming that the whole thing was a storm in a teacup, while stoutly defending their views. “We are still friends — he danced at my wedding, for Christ’s sake,” said McDermid, referring to her civil partnership ceremony.

In fact McDermid had done Rankin a great favour. By complete coincidence, he was about to announce Rebus’s retirement from the police in his latest book, Exit Music, the 20th in the series, which will be published on September 6. So he had an attentive audience when he revealed that the dour sleuth would not run a B&B or retire quietly abroad but may continue in some form, either by helping out detectives or working in a “cold case” squad. “It would be very hard to let go,” he said. “Rebus has been my punchbag and psychiatrist for the last 20 years.”

Yet superficially John Rebus and Rankin could not be more different. The surly detective inspector sees the dregs of society through a whisky glass, returning to a house he can ill afford. SAS trained and obsessed with rock music, he has suffered a nervous breakdown, failed as a husband and father and turned to drink, fags and Christianity. Rankin, a tall man with green-brown eyes and a farmer’s haircut, lives in a seven-bedroom Victorian house in Merchiston, Edinburgh’s most exclusive area, with his wife Miranda and their two young sons. A Jacuzzi and a trampoline are in the garden with a life-sized pink cow.

His neighbours include Alexander McCall Smith, who penned the successful No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books, and JK Rowling, the squillionaire author of the Harry Potter series. Rankin’s wife spotted JKR the other day “scribbling away in a cafe”, he said last week, speculating whether she was “writing her Edinburgh detective novel”.

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