Great Scot

Q: You are an astonishingly prolific writer, managing to put out one densely plotted, 400-plus-page mystery novel every year. Describe your writing process.

A: They’re big, fat books, but they’re as long as they need to be, to tell the story I want to tell. I basically make it up as I go along. What I’ve got at the start is a theme or a question I want the answer to. In order to explore that, I have a murder or some sort of crime to investigate that question. The first draft of the book is pretty raggedy. I may not know who the killer is, which is quite useful, because then the reader’s got less chance of knowing.

It wouldn’t bother me in the least if the reader knew from page one who the killer was, because the whodunit elements, the red herrings, are the least interesting part of the project for me. I’m much more interested in writing about contemporary society, contemporary problems, what we’ve got wrong, the kind of mess we’re in. That’s the reason that crime fiction isn’t taken seriously by scholars and literary prizes: these people have got that sense that crime fiction is a puzzle, an entertainment, and once you’ve solved that puzzle, there’s nothing to be gained from re-reading the book. And that’s not the kind of book I’m interested in writing.

Q: Do you feel you’ve redeemed the crime genre in some way?

A: I wasn’t really making a good go of it until Black & Blue [1996] came along, which was Rebus novel number eight, I think, and that changed everything. The novels before that I always call my apprenticeship, and I became an overnight success in 10 or 15 years. Having achieved that success with Black & Blue, there’s been a slow and steady progress of me being taken seriously as a novelist, but not just a crime writer.

When I was made an Officer of the British Empire by the Queen a few years ago, it was for services to literature — that wasn’t for services to popular fiction that you read on a train journey and then throw in a bin because it’s of no value to you after you’ve worked out who did it. I thought that was important for crime fiction. If the Queen’s taking it seriously, we must be doing something right.

(Orion Books)

Q: Did you get the sense that the Queen reads your books?

A:I didn’t get any sense that she reads me. I never even got to meet her. I chose to receive my OBE in Edinburgh. It was with the Lord Lieutenant of Edinburgh, who happened to be the Lord Provost, which is like the mayor. It was hilarious, because if you go to Buckingham Palace to get your award, you can take a maximum of two people with you and there’s no photography. The Lord Provost asked me how many people did I want to bring, he laid down some hot food and afterwards, he took us down in the official car to the local pub, where we sat and had a few pints. Wouldn’t have happened with the Queen. [Laughs.]

Q: Scottish politics has a frequent place in your books.

A: Politics in Scotland just now are very interesting. We’ve got a lot of the problems and the challenges any modern democracy has got, with immigration and asylum seekers and employment and new industries. But we’ve also got this weird thing where the nationalists are now in power, as from May 2007, and their remit is to take Scotland out of the union of England, Northern Ireland and Wales. At the same time, we’ve got a Scottish prime minister in Downing Street who has a Scottish constituency and who is desperate that Scotland remain part of the union. So it’s a really interesting time to be living in Scotland and be a writer in Scotland, because there’s a lot of potentialities there. That’s what my books are about: what if this happened? If Scotland became an independent nation, what would be the future, would it attract the wrong kind of people, looking to make a quick buck?

Q: Given how steeped they are in Scottish slang and culture, are you surprised that your books have became a worldwide phenomenon?

A: I do sometimes wonder what someone sitting in an underground train in Tokyo is getting from my books about this weird, small country. I think the thing is, a lot of people think they know Edinburgh — they’ve been to the festival, or on a tour or they’ve been to the castle or they know it’s a country with tartan and golf and whiskey. They know the surface, what the tourist board wants them to see. What I’ve always tried to do is explain Edinburgh, and Scotland, to the world. It’s a really complex, small country — with a lot of complexes.

Q: Was it with a heavy heart that you retired Rebus?

A: Naw, not with a heavy heart; nothing to feel heavy-hearted about, he’s still alive at the end of the book. I didn’t have it in my heart to kill him off, couldn’t do that Conan Doyle-Sherlock Holmes thing of sending him off the Reichenbach Falls — thought about it, but couldn’t do it. I took a decision early on in the series that Rebus would live in real time — he would age, realistically, unlike most fictional detectives. He gets older, he gets slower, he gets creakier, he gets fatter as the series progresses. Having started the series in ’87, when he was 40, in 2007 he must be 60. In Scotland, if you’re a cop, if you’re a detective, you’ve got to retire at 60. So I was sort of forced into it. If they changed the law, then he would happily come back and be a cop again.

Q: So what you’re saying is that the Rebus series is beholden to Scottish law.

A: I’ve got a fan who’s a member of Scottish parliament and she asked the justice minister on the floor of the Parliament if he could change the retirement age for cops in Edinburgh so that my fictional detective could keep working. I’ve never had so much hate mail in my life from real-life serving detectives, who didn’t want to work an extra five years, thank you very much, so my fictional detective character could continue to work.

Q: Pop music seems to be one of the few consolations in Rebus’s life. How big a part does music play in the creation of your books?

A: I’ve always got music on when I write, usually instrumental music — jazz or some instrumental rock. Exit Music was written with quite a lot of Tangerine Dream, the German synth band, playing in the background. Like a lot of crime writers, I’m a frustrated rock star. I would have much rather been in a rock band — a successful rock band. When I was 19, I was in a punk band for six months. But I think I got it out of my system. But I love hi-fi, I love compact discs, I love music.

Rebus is from a different generation than me. I’ve got to always be careful that it’s his musical tastes [in the books], and not mine. You’d have to put him and his colleague, Siobhan, who’s in her thirties, together and you’d get my musical taste. I love stuff from the ‘60s and ‘70s, but I love brand-new stuff as well.

Q: What have you bought recently?

A: Bizarrely, I found that most of what I’ve bought recently is Canadian. I didn’t know that when I bought it. The last half-dozen albums that I’ve bought, one was Patrick Watson. Then I bought Joni Mitchell’s new album, of course she’s Canadian, I’d just forgotten. Oh, and Feist. And there’s a band called Godspeed You! Black Emperor, from Montreal, and I can write to [their music], because it’s mostly instrumental and found noises.

Q: What’s next for you? There’s some chatter that DI Siobhan Clarke, Rebus’s partner, will become the focus.

A: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve got projects on the go that will keep me busy right through next year. It’ll be 2009 before I need to seriously think about this. But there are all kinds of get-out clauses. Rebus could work cold cases. Siobhan could become the main cop, and we could see the books from her point of view, but she’s not going to lose touch with Rebus, so even though he’s retired, he would be peripheral. We could go back in time; when we first met him, in 1987, he’d already been a cop for 15 years. So there’s 15 years worth of stuff that we don’t know about, from the ‘70s — so it would allow me to dust off my record collection.