Puppet-master Ian Rankin exorcises dark stuff on his pages

Crime writers are the most well-balanced people in the world, Rebus creator Ian Rankin tells MICHELE HEWITSON.

In Edinburgh a police dog puppy has just been named Rebus.

In an Auckland hotel room a crumpled looking bloke in baggy jeans not-so-fresh off a long-haul flight from that city, is describing the writer who pens the Rebus crime novels that that puppy is named after. "I'm just nobody, the loser who sits and writes these things down. They didn't call it after me," he pretends to complain.

He is puppet-master and best-selling Rebus creator Ian Rankin. It is Rankin who pulls the strings which weave the stories through which the self-destructive, dour, music-loving Edinburgh detective inspector Rebus staggers and blunders his way. It is Rebus who is honoured: there is that puppy; a walk named after him where a guide will take you on a tour of fictional murder scenes, ending in a pub called the Oxford.

The Oxford is Rankin's local. The tourists go there because, in Rankin's books, it is Rebus' local.

The Oxford is where, as Rankin's readers know, Harry the rudest barman in Scotland is to be found pouring pints and serving up a scowl. The pub is not so easy to find without a guide, as it is tucked up an alleyway. Nor, if not for the Rebus/Rankin fame, is it a place most tourists would venture should they have stumbled across it. It is, says Rankin, "a tiny little, poky, smelly drinking bar. It's got none of the modern attributes of a bar. No fruit machines, televisions ... "

When he discovered the Oxford, it was love at first sight: "It seemed like a part of the hidden Edinburgh I was exploring in the books."

Rankin - whose latest Rebus offering The Falls went straight to No 1 on the Sunday Times best-seller list - has been peeling back Edinburgh's "cloak of darkness" as seen through Rebus' eyes since 1986. The Falls is the 41-year-old's 12th book but it is only, he says, in the past couple of years that the peculiar sort of fame that accompanies being a best-selling crime novelist has come his way.

It is the sort of paradox which would have the cynical Rebus snorting into his whisky. As would the idea that Rankin's women readers would like to change him. "They reckon if they could get their hands on him," Rankin says, "they could save him from himself. They tend to say things like: 'I wish he would cut down on his smoking, I wish he'd cut down on his drinking, I wish he'd get a decent love life, I wish he'd get a decent diet.'

"All the blokes say, 'No, no, we like him exactly the way he is because he's the only character in fiction who makes us feel fit and young and healthy.' And, compared to him, they are."

There is often a blurring of the boundaries of writer and character in the strange relationship that exists between crime writer and crime reader. In the case of Rankin/Rebus, it is marked.

That is possibly because Rankin admits that although he's not sure they would get on together, there is "a lot of stuff that's happened in Rebus' private life" that he can all too well identify with. You couldn't comfortably read Rebus if, for example, you were trying to give up drinking. He is constantly wanting a drink, not wanting to have that drink - and having that drink.

Even people who don't drink whisky, Rankin says, are overwhelmed with the desire to have a shot. "His battle with the booze, yeah, I've been through that," says Rankin, who still "drinks to excess, occasionally." And putting Rebus' daughter Sammy in a wheelchair after a hit-and-run accident was a way of getting out of his system the fact that one of his sons had been born disabled. "I didn't think at the time about why I was doing it. You know, right you bastard, if my son's not going to be able to walk ... I just give it to Rebus."

Crime writers are the most well-balanced people in the world, Rankin maintains. "Because all the dark stuff gets out on the page."

As does the fun stuff. One of the joys of being a fiction writer, Rankin says, is that it is about wish-fulfilment - and about being able to take the ultimate revenge. In a novel he can recreate his teenage band: the short-lived, little-lamented punk band, the Dancing Pigs. In real life they played six gigs. In fiction they made a comeback as a worldwide phenomenon. In a novel he can fictionalise a despised university professor, transpose two letters of his surname and stick him in a book as a nasty cop. His comeuppance? "He got a transfer to the Borders where all you do is arrest sheep shaggers."