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29 October 2014
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Ian Rankin talks to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Norfolk
Listen to the interview by clicking on the links below
listen to the audio.
Part one: Readers, growing up, moving to Edinburgh
Part two: Early days of writing, Edinburgh as an influence
Part three: The TV show, what the police think, the future

<<< page 2  

Jim Cassidy: What was your first impression of Edinburgh?

Ian Rankin: I went to Edinburgh as a student in 1978 and found it terrifying, just the size of it and the strangeness of it, and the people seemed very cold. I mean I had grown up in a cul de sac in a village and everybody knew everybody else; the families in the cul de sac had all lived there for fifteen years, twenty years.

So it felt a bit odd going to this city where people didn’t speak to you at bus stops, you might never speak to your next door neighbour if you were living in one of the tenement flats.

I started writing about Edinburgh really just to try and make sense of the place, to get a handle on it.

Jim Cassidy: Was that when you decided you could probably make a living as a writer?

Ian Rankin: Oh no, no! I didn’t start making a living as a writer until about five years ago.

No, I suppose I was, I’d got a kind of false impression because of the very first things that were published by me did make me some money, because they were competitions.

I went in for a poetry competition and won second prize my last year at school and I got five quid. Went to university and entered a short story competition and got two hundred quid - won first prize in that. And so I was earning money.

So I thought well this is obviously a way of making a living - more fool me! Then when the first book was published, in 1986, I think I got 500 quid.

I think I sussed then it wasn’t always to do with the amount of labour involved and how long it took you to write it; that you got paid the going market rate and five hundred pounds was not going to keep me going for a year.

Jim Cassidy: But how tough were those early days then, before the first big one came five years ago? Well it was a long time before I could go full time as a writer. I got married in ’86 and luckily my wife had a decent job in London as a civil servant and so she supported me for a while.

And living in London, it was fairly easy to get a job and I worked for a while as a secretary in a polytechnic and then moved on to hi-fi journalism and worked on a monthly magazine. So I was earning a living and in the little gaps between that I was planning and writing the books.

And they were ticking over, they were selling, I mean I was lucky I was still getting published and I was still getting good reviews. But then were made this big move; in 1990 my wife decided that if I wanted to be a full time writer we had to get out of London. Her idea was France, so we bought a rundown, dilapidated farmhouse in France and moved lock, stock and barrel.

Jim Cassidy: Was that a good move or not?

Ian Rankin: In some ways it was a very good move because writers are very paranoid and in France I was in a field of one; I was the only Scottish crime writer in the Dordogne so I had no competition at all. And there were no book shops; I couldn’t go in and see lots of Ruth Rendell’s and PD James’s and none of mine, which is a perennial problem if you’re a writer, a perennial worry.

So I got a lot of writing done; there was nothing to get in the way of the writing. That was great but we were living on the bread line for a long time in France and we couldn’t afford to get the house done up so we did it ourselves and my DIY skills led to several near-death incidents on my part!

page 4>>>

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