Ian Rankin

Writer

• Born: April 28, 1960
• Place of Birth: Cardenden, Fife, Scotland

Biography

Ian Rankin was born in 1960 in Cardenden, Fife, Scotland, some thirty miles north of Edinburgh. His father, James Hill Rankin, was a dockyard worker; his mother, Isobel Rankin, was a school meals assistant. The town, a mining community, was hard hit by coal-mine closures, and Rankin experienced poverty firsthand. However, he read books avidly and found the local library the main source for his reading. His father’s taste for crime novels helped form Rankin’s own taste. After attending high school at Cowdenbeath, a nearby town, Rankin went to Edinburgh University in 1978 to study British and American literature.

After graduation, he received a grant to do PhD research on the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark, which he began but abandoned in 1986, choosing to write instead. In that year he married Miranda Harvey, with whom he had two children, the second one born with a rare disease. The couple moved to London, where eventually Rankin found work as a journalist and editor of Hi- Fi Review. In 1990, they moved to the Dordogne area of France, then spent six months traveling in the United States in 1992, having won a Chandler-Fulbright prize. In 1996, the family returned to Edinburgh.

Rankin writes mystery and detective fiction with a specifically Scottish setting. His main character is Inspector Rebus, named after a word and picture puzzle. The first novel in the series was Knots and Crosses (1987). It was meant to be a stand-alone novel, but its success prompted him to develop the characters and introduce others, such as a master criminal, several superior officers, and their assistants. Rebus himself is depicted as a troubled, brooding detective who has problems with women and alcohol and is very much a loner.

Elements in the stories reflect the Scottish gothic style, as developed by Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886), Arthur Conan-Doyle (the Sherlock Holmes series), and others. Most of these literary works undertake some social or political examination of the Scottish present or immediate past. (Indeed, critics have sometimes commented that the genre is too restrictive for what Rankin wants to say.)

Black and Blue (1997), the ninth novel in the Rebus series, is often considered Rankin’s best. It won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award for 1997. It has no fewer than three plot strands, dealing with corruption in the Scottish oil industry, a legendary Scottish serial killer, and a past case that Rebus investigated. Another highly praised novel was Set in Darkness, set around the newly constituted Scottish Parliament. Although cases are solved, justice is not always done.

By 2016, Rankin had managed to publish at least one Rebus novel almost every year, bringing the total to over twenty. However, in 2013, he had announced that he would be taking a year-long sabbatical from writing because the pace had become somewhat grinding, dulling his passion for writing. In addition to his novels, he had also cowritten his first play, Dark Road, which had premiered at London's Lyceum Theatre that same year; though it was highly anticipated and starred popular Scottish actor Maureen Beattie, it received mixed reviews due to its inability to overcome the difficulty of producing a meaningful crime mystery story for the stage. Therefore, over the following year, he reportedly spent time traveling before he inevitably began penning short stories once more. In 2015, he published his first Rebus novel in two years, titled Even Dogs in the Wild. Once again, Rebus comes out of retirement to serve as a consulting detective on a murder case; the novel also features the character of Malcolm Fox, an internal affairs officer Rankin had first introduced in the 2009 novel The Complaints. He announced that his twenty-first Rebus novel, titled Rather Be the Devil, would be published in the fall of 2016. Rankin has also published a number of collections of short stories about Rebus, including The Beggar’s Banquet (2002) and The Beat Goes On (2014), which serves as a complete collection of Rebus short stories. Several more Rebus novels and a stage play based on the Rebus series followed.

Rankin's next major project was an unusual one as he took on the task of completing another man's work. After fellow Scottish author William McIlvanney died in 2015, his wife discovered the partially finished manuscript for The Dark Remains. Publishing house Canongate asked Rankin to finish it. He worked on it during 2020 and it was published in 2021. He followed this with two more Rebus novels, A Heart Full of Headstones (2022) and Midnight & Blue (2024). In early 2024, Rankin's fiction moved to the small screen as Rebus became a six-part television series for British television.

Rankin also used a pseudonym, Jack Harvey, to write a series of thrillers about professional assassins.

Rankin has won a number of honors. In 1988 he was elected a Hawthornden fellow. He won the Chandler-Fulbright Prize in 1992 and was appointed to the Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) in 2002. Adding to his achievements, he was also named a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2015. Then, in June 2023, he became Sir Ian Rankin when he was knighted at Buckingham Palace.

Bibliography

"About." Ian Rankin. Onion, n.d. Web. 2 Oct. 2024.

Brown, Angie. "Ian Rankin: How the Death of my Mum Led Me to Rebus." BBC, 24 Sept. 2024, www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0310wr01ro. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Ferguson, Brian. "Ian Rankin to Take a Year Off Due to Health Fears." Scotsman. Johnston, 23 Aug. 2013. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.

Flood, Alison. "Ian Rankin to complete William McIlvanney’s final novel The Dark Remains." Guardian, 5 Dec. 2020, www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/05/ian-rankin-to-complete-william-mcilvanney-final-unfinished-novel-the-dark-remains. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

"Ian Rankin Returns to Rebus after Year-Long Sabbatical." BBC News. BBC, 15 Mar. 2015. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.

"Ian Rankin Switches to a New Hero in Complaints." NPR. NPR, 24 Mar. 2011. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.

"Sir Ian Rankin receives knighthood at Buckingham Palace." BBC, 13 June 2023, www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-65892940. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Williams, Craig. "Ian Rankin: Young John Rebus returns for new BBC TV series." BBC, 7 Mar. 2024, www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-68494939

Wroe, Nicholas. "Bobby Dazzler." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 27 May 2015. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.