Ian Rankin's latest novel is In a House of Lies.From his Q&A with Angus MacKinnon of Islay Book Festival:
AM: The Rebus novels have charted how Scotland has changed over the course of the three decades you have been producing them. What would you say were the biggest changes that have taken place over that time?--Marshal Zeringue
IR: The whole structure of the police has changed in Scotland, from having eight regional authorities to having one overarching organisation called Police Scotland. The way that murder inquiries are organised has changed and of course the technology available has changed hugely. If you go back to the early Rebus books, the computer is still not widely available. People tend not to have them in their homes even and certainly in the police station there would be very few available. DNA analysis is not widely used. All this kind of stuff. That has all changed and Scotland has changed with it. Rebus has changed. He has got older. He is now retired, he is no longer a serving police officer, he has some health issues. The world tends to make less sense to him. He looks around in a state of bewilderment at things that happen. The world has moved on but has he moved on with it substantially? He is a bit of a dinosaur in some ways, he has an older way of doing things and an older way of looking at the world.
I guess if we talk about changes in Scotland, the biggest change in my lifetime and certainly in the time of the Rebus books has been devolution. And who knows what happens next? The thing is I’m not a science fiction writer so until stuff has happened I cannot speculate or write about it. Brexit gets a very brief mention in the latest book but that is as much as I can do, I can’t write about Brexit until it has actually happened and I know what it means. I can’t write about independence until it happens because I’m not a sci-fi writer.
All this flux, all the uncertainty in the world. It is not easy for writers to deal with that. The real world at the moment seems so incredible that fiction writers are scratching their heads and going, ‘Well how do I make sense of this?’ You know, what place is there for fiction in this wildly-seeming fictional world.
AM: You’ve often said that you set out planning to write the Great Scottish Novel rather than to be a crime writer. It is not too late for you to have a go at summing it all up, what you have seen and what Rebus has seen in one novel? Philip Roth addressed a lot of the issues we’ve had in Scotland in American Pastoral and that seemed to predict the coming of Trump. Would a bit of you like to kill off Rebus and do something like that?
IR: I think the whole sequence of Rebus novels is...[read on]