Ian Rankin from January Magazine

 Ian Rankin writes detective/crime fiction set in Scotland. I finally got around to reading him in prison and wrote up my readings but they are not here with me. January Magazine interviewed him in 2000. We might find some similarities with him, with being in a place where the bright lights are not always shining. I recall a woman forty years ago referring to Anderson as a hole above ground.

J. Kingston Pierce: I've heard not only that you didn't set out to be a crime novelist, but that as a boy in Cardenden, you didn't even have a bookstore at which you might have been exposed to this sort of fiction.

Ian Rankin: No, but we did have a small library, which was funded by the local coal miners. The coal miners funded everything, you know. They funded the public swimming pool, they funded the sports center and the library. It was a nice little library, but the nearest bookstore was six, seven miles away.

Whenever you've talked about Cardenden in the past, you've made it sound like such a lonely place. Was it?

We used to call it "Car-dead-end," if that gives you the picture. But the place did kind of prime me for writing, because in the 1960s, when the Scottish coal mines all closed out for economic reasons, and even as a 6- year-old you could see the hope seeping out of the town, I found escape through my imagination. I tried to create a better world in my mind, a world in which Cardenden was a kind of exciting place to be. I was always an obsessive sort of kid, and I just took my imagination to extremes, you know. I used to write stories and make up comic books and stuff like that, anything to vent my imagination.

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Tell me how you look at Edinburgh. The reader gets a certain idea of what the city is like from reading your novels. But do you really see it as so dark and gloomy a place?

I'm a pretty pessimistic sort of guy. I'm attracted to the dark side. It doesn't matter which city in the world you set me down in, after five minutes of aimless wandering, I'll be in the sleaze section of town -- I'm a magnet for that kind of stuff. And I think that by dealing with this darkness in fiction, in real life I can be a happy, well-adjusted guy. I think a lot of crime writers would be very seriously unstable people if they weren't able to deal with their fantasies, fears, whatever on paper.

But about Edinburgh: it's got a very dark history. It's a very repressed city, a very Calvinist, Presbyterian place. As opposed to Glasgow, which seems to be very Celtic and open and brash and loud. Even the crime in Edinburgh is different from what you see in Glasgow. Glasgow crime tends to be easily identified and solved. Maybe you're wearing the wrong football colors and you get stabbed to death -- that's a typical Glasgow crime. But in Edinburgh, the typical crime is grave robbing. Things happen under cloak of darkness. It's a place of conspiracies, a city with a village mentality, where everybody knows everybody else.

How do Edinburgh residents feel about the way you portray their city in these books?

For some reason, the Edinburgh people love them, though I think the Tourist Board is unlikely to recommend them. Even the cops like my books, although I make the occasional mistake. Some of the villains I've met like them. It's no accident that last year, I had eight out of the top-10 Scottish bestsellers. Somebody recently called Rebus "the Harry Potter of Noir."

You know, don't you, that the Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling, also lives in Edinburgh? This place that was totally fuckin' barren of writers back in the 80s when I was starting now has Rowling; Irvine Welsh, who wrote Trainspotting; Ian Banks, who writes science fiction and literary novels; Dorothy Dunnett, who writes historical fiction; and me. You want any sort of literature, Edinburgh's got it. By comparison, Glasgow just seems to be starting out as a home to authors.

Frankly, I am not sure what the locals will think of my stories - if I should ever get them published! 

But do try to find his Rebus novels, I found them enthralling.