{"id":643143,"date":"2026-10-11T12:24:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T12:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/643143\/"},"modified":"2026-10-11T12:24:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T12:24:10","slug":"the-crime-fiction-im-interested-in-is-political-ian-rankin-on-his-new-novel-about-the-super-rich-ian-rankin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/643143\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The crime fiction I\u2019m interested in is political\u2019: Ian Rankin on his new novel about the super-rich | Ian Rankin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sir Ian Rankin<\/a> rarely watches television. Certainly, there\u2019s 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? \u201cI did,\u201d he concedes. \u201cThey gave me them on DVD, so I could play them on my computer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ah, his computer \u2013 it\u2019s had its screen and hard drive replaced, and there are grooves in the keys. It sits on top of a plain, compact trestle-table desk he bought on London\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThe crime fiction I\u2019m interested in,\u201d he tells me, \u201cis the crime fiction that\u2019s looking at society and the mess we\u2019re in and how we got there, and it\u2019s predominantly political.\u201d<\/p>\n

His new novel, The Heights, takes on the challenge in dramatic and glittering style. 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.<\/p>\n

One of the influences feeding into Gish, a brand-new lead character, is 1970s American TV detective Columbo, whom Rankin \u2013 back in his TV-viewing days \u2013 found captivating. \u201cI didn\u2019t realise it when I was watching as a teenager, but he\u2019s a socialist figure,\u201d Rankin says. \u201cHe comes into these very rich people\u2019s lives and tears them apart, and they don\u2019t know he\u2019s doing it until he\u2019s already done it. I just thought that was extraordinary. It\u2019s to do with class: he\u2019s the underclass, they\u2019re the overclass, and he\u2019s 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\u2019s going to upset them by asking the wrong questions and by interfering in their very comfortable, cosseted world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gish has the kind of hinterland that Rebus lacks; she\u2019s embedded in her own neighbourhood, in Rankin\u2019s 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\u2019s written about for so long? \u201cI didn\u2019t feel any trepidation,\u201d he replies. \u201cIn some ways it can be a wee bit stifling. You get an idea for a story, you say, \u2018Well, could that be contained in Edinburgh? And if it can\u2019t be contained in Edinburgh, can I write it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

And he\u2019s convinced that his story of\u00a0the ostentatious performance of wealth combined, paradoxically, with\u00a0the obsession with privacy of the ultra-rich, wouldn\u2019t have worked in Edinburgh. A prosperous city it may be, but \u201cYou\u2019re not going to see a Rolls-Royce or a Bugatti Veyron. The\u00a0wealth here is discreet.\u201d<\/p>\n

The success of his novels has, of course, made Rankin himself a wealthy man, even if it did take him until his 60s \u2013 he\u2019s 66 now \u2013 to get an office of his own. Over the years, he\u2019s worked in a succession of spare rooms, attics and even next to a juddering washing machine, a clothes airer over his head. He is, he says, glad he didn\u2019t make it big when he was young: \u201cI was stupid. I\u2019m sure I would have bought a Lamborghini and a pinball machine for every room in the house.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ken Stott as Rebus in the ITV series. Photograph: ITV\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

Now, he and Miranda live a few minutes\u2019 walk away from the writing flat, and take trips to far-flung places. \u201cMiranda decided a few years ago that, now the kids have left and we\u2019ve got money in the bank: before we get too old and we lose the use of our limbs and our brains, we should travel. I am holiday agnostic. She\u2019s the one who tells me, right, you\u2019re going here and you\u2019re going there. So we do a lot of travelling, just in the last three or four years maybe. She\u2019s booking through to 2028 at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he\u2019s away, he researches but can\u2019t actually write. On a recent cruise around South America, he hadn\u2019t even taken the ancient laptop and was making notes in longhand when a fellow passenger offered him the loan of a computer \u2013 which explains the message of gratitude at the end of The Heights. But when he does come back to base, he writes quickly, and determinedly, although he bats away being described as unusually productive. At the couple\u2019s house in Cromarty, \u201cif the weather\u2019s nice, I get no writing done. If the weather\u2019s bad, I get a lot of writing done because there\u2019s nothing else to do. I\u2019m the laziest, hard-working author I know.\u201d<\/p>\n

But aside from buying vinyl, seeing the odd live band \u2013 seated gigs only these days, he concedes ruefully \u2013 Lego and holidays, Rankin has another use for his earnings. Each year, between 30 and 40% of his net income goes into the charitable trust that he and Miranda set up, for which their older son, Jack, also works. \u201cI\u2019ve got more money than I can spend. Once you\u2019ve bought a nice hi-fi system and you\u2019ve got a nice car, what are you going to do?\u201d<\/p>\n

The trust\u2019s focus is on smaller charities, often those supporting young people and adults with special needs \u2013 people like the Rankins\u2019 younger son, Kit, who has Angelman syndrome, a\u00a0genetic condition that means he has severe learning difficulties, and has also experienced epilepsy and vision problems. Now in his early 30s, Kit lives in a care facility nearby, and all four of them meet up every Sunday. \u201cAny money that we leave behind when we shuffle off this mortal coil will get channelled to him to make sure that he\u2019s always looked after. And our older son will be part of that process of looking after him financially.\u201d<\/p>\n

I feel that I can\u2019t leave without asking about Rebus, whom we last saw behind bars, following the death of his\u00a0old adversary, gangster \u201cBig Ger\u201d Cafferty. Rankin is tight-lipped on his next project \u2013 back to Rebus, or perhaps another outing for Gillian Gish? \u2013 but does shed some light on Rebus\u2019s future. After all, I say, you left him in a pretty parlous state. \u201cEverybody says that, but it\u2019s not true,\u201d he protests. \u201cAt the end of the book, his lawyer says, \u2018You\u2019ve got some very good news.\u2019 So he\u2019s obviously getting out. You know the appeal is going to be heard and he\u2019s going to get out. I have no doubt in my mind that\u2019s the happy ending.\u201d<\/p>\n

And with that, Sir Ian Rankin is off to do a bit of writing before an evening out. Possibly he\u2019ll drop into the Oxford Bar, where the locals\u2019 only acknowledgment of his elevated status is to ask, \u201cWhere\u2019s your horse\u201d? And you sense he wouldn\u2019t have it any other way.<\/p>\n

The Heights by Ian Rankin is published by Orion (\u00a325). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sir Ian Rankin rarely watches television. Certainly, there\u2019s no gleaming flatscreen in the corner of the apartment in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":643144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-643143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/643144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}