Peter Lewis now runs a small press, Flambard, specialising in poetry and crime fiction, but as an academic twenty years ago he introduced courses in crime fiction at Durham University's Department of English. He and Ian Rankin were at one time been fellow-members of the Scottish Chapter of the Crime Writers' Association. So he was well placed to summarise, for the audience of crime addicts who filled Durham's main Gala Theatre, the details of Ian Rankin's claim on their attention: with Fleshmarket Close he had written his eighteenth novel about Inspector John Rebus; an earlier book in the series, Black and Blue won the CWA's Gold Dagger award for the best crime novel of the year; this recognition had helped expand his readership in the US, and earlier this year his novel Resurrection Men won the US equivalent prize, the Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America. In 2002 he was awarded the OBE, the main effect of which, according to Ian Rankin himself, was that his twelve-year old son could now refer to him as "Ian Ran-KinOBE, Obi-Wan Kenobi's less intelligent brother".
After reading from Fleshmarket Close, the author didn't even wait to be asked the traditional question "Where do you get your ideas from?", but took it as a starting point for talking about the new book. Part of his inspiration had come, as is often the case, from the city of Edinburgh itself (there is an interactive map of Rebus's Edinburgh on his website): he had been walking past Fleshmarket Close and the name had caught his imagination, and set him wondering what sort of book would have that title. Simultaneously, he had been concerned by the strand of racism revealed by Scotland's reception of an influx of asylum seekers ("it is generally thought that we Scots are too preoccupied with religious bigotry to be racist", he explained). This chimed with his discovery that the name Rebus (which he thought he had invented for the hero of his novel Knots & Crosses) did exist, and was Polish. "So then all I needed was a murder."
When he wrote Knots & Crosses, Ian Rankin was not consciously writing a crime novel, still less the first of a series of crime novels: he wanted to write about contemporary society, and chose a policeman as his central character because his profession would allow him to explore different aspects of Scottish life. But he was happy with the crime genre's appetite for "series characters", which allowed him to explore both character and setting in greater depth than is possible in a stand-alone novel. By the end of the series, he hoped to have painted a panorama of Scottish society in much the same way Anthony Powell had depicted English society in A Dance to the Music of Time - "my favourite novel" (adding later "and my second-favourite novel is Jilly Cooper's Rivals").
Ian Rankin sees his novels as part of the Scottish gothic tradition; they describe a country, and in particular a city, which is prone to play up its beauty and tourist-friendly traditions, but which also has a darker side. He writes on his website:
"Edinburgh is the perfect setting for crime writing. It has a split personality - on the one hand it is the city of history and museums and royalty, but at the same time there is this feeling that behind the thick walls of those Georgian townhouses there are all sorts of terrible things happening.""It's a Jekyll and Hyde city", he told his audience, "a bit like Durham." and went on to explain how he had first come to Durham for a seminar, as a postgraduate student in 1984. "There's this fabulous view from the station, and then when I got down to the Market Place, there were people in the streets collecting money in buckets for the striking miners."
After a few questions from the audience, Ian Rankin signed books for a long queue of fans; the only complaint to be heard was that people would have liked the evening to go on longer.
Rachel Bignell reviewed this event for Wear FM, and Barney Britton reviewed it for Durham 21.
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