Ian Rankin: ‘Rebus Is Out There Right Now, On Some Edinburgh Street’

Ian Rankin offers a piece in the British newspaper the Guardian on John Rebus, his Scottish detective character.

Next year I’ll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Inspector Rebus series, and right now I’m about to launch his 21st adventure, Rather Be the Devil. It sometimes seems that Rebus has taken on a life of his own, yet he was never intended to stick around for longer than that first book. I was a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh when I wrote it (which may explain why I never finished my PhD on Muriel Spark). I vaguely knew I was writing a detective novel – because William McIlvanney had been there before me and I’d read the result, featuring a dour but philosophical Glasgow cop called Laidlaw. Indeed, when McIlvanney visited the Edinburgh book festival in August 1985, I told him I was writing the Edinburgh equivalent, and he signed my copy of his book: “Good luck with the Edinburgh Laidlaw.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/28/ian-rankin-rebus-edinburgh-street

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Ian Rankin via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/03/my-crime-beat-column-king-of-tartan.html  

Note: The above photo of Ian Rankin was taken by Tom Dunkin.

Ian Rankin To Frederick Forsyth At Edinburgh Book Festival: Is 'The Outsider' A Memoir Or A Thriller?

Allan Alstead at Edinburghguide.com offers offers a piece on writers Ian Rankin and Frederick Forsyth at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

Ian Rankin introduced Frederick Forsyth to the packed house by wondering if his new book 'The Outsider' was actually a new thriller or Forsyth's autobiography?

Forsyth replied that for it to be a 'proper' autobiography would have entailed a great deal of research and this seemed rather a boring requirement to him so, therefore, it was actually a 'life story' where he started at zero and went on to seventy five. He said that he had been through it and the only person living to whom he had been rude was one in a care home! On this basis he felt that he could go for publication!

Ian Rankin said that what he had done and what he had achieved by the age of twenty four was absolutely remarkable as by that age he, Rankin, had not yet left university. But Forsyth had travelled, become an RAF pilot and seen the world, been part of a Hunter squadron and had then become a journalist with Reuters working from Berlin.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.edinburghguide.com/festival/2016/edinburghbookfestival-frederick-forsyth-Is-this-a-memoir-or-thriller