HI IAN, you’re just back from a book tour in Canada – how did it go?
Canada was exhausting but fun. Big audiences everywhere I went and I caught up with a few friends. I also met up with Laura Smith. In my books, she is a crime reporter: in real life she is from Ottawa and gave money to charity to be featured in one of my books.
What was the inspiration for the new Rebus novel In A House of Lies?
The inspiration was a story that's been featured down the years in Private Eye magazine, concerning a private detective who was investigating alleged links between senior police officers and organised crime.
He was found hacked to death in the car park of a London pub. Something about the story got the cogs turning in my brain.
Your new Investigating Murder Tour finds you being joined by crime scene experts. How did that come about and are these folks the same people who help you research the books?
Last year in Edinburgh we had a weekend event called RebusFest, celebrating 30 years on the Rebus novels. As part of that, we staged a talk where I was joined onstage by a retired detective and a serving detective, plus a forensic anthropologist. We discussed what crime fiction gets right and what it gets wrong.
The audience found it fascinating, so we decided to try to replicate it, using different experts in each city of the current tour. Most of them I've not met before, so I'm making a few new contacts potentially.
Do you ever encounter real police who tell you that John Rebus inspired them to join the force?
I very occasionally meet someone who tells me my books inspired them to become a police officer or to study forensics or criminal law. It's always flattering; I just hope they don't go about things the way Rebus does.
The new play Rebus: Long Shadows finds Ulsterman Charlie Lawson taking on the title role. How tricky was it to put together?
I was approached by a producer who really wanted to see Rebus on the stage, locking horns with his nemesis Cafferty. Playwright Rona Munro and I then set about constructing a story that could only or best be told by live actors in a theatre setting.
The casting was masterful (I think). Charles Lawson does a fine Scottish accent, and actually used to drink in the Oxford Bar [in Edinburgh] long before I did – a friend of his was a regular there in the mid-1970s.
What’s happening with the TV version of Rebus? Will there be another series with the original cast or is a ‘reboot’ on the cards?
A scriptwriter is busy working on the Rebus TV reboot right now. He's the brilliant playwright and screenwriter Gregory Burke, who wrote the wonderful '71, set in Belfast during the Troubles.
I'm leaving him to it, so have no idea what he's doing with it, but I can't wait to see it when it's finished. Mind you, the way TV works, it might be a couple of years before anything makes it to the screen.
Like Judge Dredd, Rebus has been aging in ‘real’ time throughout the books – have you considered jumping back to his early years for a story or setting one in between previous novels?
People keep mentioning this to me as a possible way of keeping Rebus going. I mean, it has worked pretty well for Inspector Morse, so why not? But I've no immediate plans to put Rebus in a time machine.
Having said that, there's plenty of his past that could be explored. Right now, I'm just hoping for one more book...
Famously, Rebus died in your first draft of the first book. Have you put any thought into how you might kill him off when his time finally does come?
When I start a new book, I never know if Rebus will be alive or dead at the end. I wait for the story to tell me how it wants to end. So I've given no thought to that very final page or pages. Maybe I'll even peg it before he does.
Do you know everything about Rebus at this point, or do you discover something new every time you revisit him?
There's probably a lot about Rebus from the early books that I've forgotten. And he used to listen to jazz and classical music; I only started him listening to rock around book three or four.
I often say that I keep writing about him in order to find out new things about him. And of course he keeps changing, because he ages between books. That means I can't get complacent, and it also helps keep the series fresh.
What are you listening to at the moment – and is your band still on the go?
Last album I bought was a while back – I've been too busy on tour to buy much of anything. I think it was Kathryn Joseph's From When I Wake The Want Is. She's like a Scottish Kate Bush, the experimental Kate Bush of side two of Hounds of Love. That's a recommendation.
My own band are in hiatus. We played in Edinburgh to celebrate publication of In A House of Lies, but our bassist has got himself a job in London so we're not sure what happens now.
If you could do a ‘team-up’ novel pairing Rebus with the creation of one your crime fiction contemporaries, who would it be and why?
I've often wondered what would happen if Rebus met Michael Connelly's character Harry Bosch. There are so many parallels between the two characters.
They'd have a lot to talk about and I reckon they'd make a good team, were it not for the fact Harry probably wouldn't be able to make out a word John was saying to him.
Who is your favourite Irish writer?
Of all time? Maybe Samuel Beckett. But there are so many: Brian Moore and John McGahern and Edna O'Brien and Seamus Heaney and Yeats and Joyce and so many others.
Such great contemporary crime and thriller writers, too: Tana French, Adrian McKinty, Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville, Liz Nugent, Steve Cavanagh, Colin Bateman. I'm going to miss people out and they're going to batter me for it...
:: Ian Rankin will be 'in conversation' with with Brian McGilloway on Friday November 16 at The Lagan Suite, The Hilton, Belfast, 7:30pm. Tickets £10 via Noireland.com
