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Jim Cassidy:
Let’s go back to the beginning Ian. You
came from a small mining village in Fife, Cardenden. What do you
remember most about those days?
Ian Rankin:
Well Cardenden was a mining town but, in the mid-60s when I was
growing up, suddenly the mines proved to be uneconomic so they were
closed down, so there was a slight air of desperation that was starting
to drift in and I think a lot of the kids who could, we used our
imaginations to make our surroundings, the world that we lived in,
seem a much more exciting place, a much more adventurous and thrilling
place than it really was.
And, in some
ways, I think writers really are like kids who’ve never grown up,
because in some ways what I was doing back then is what I do now:
I was creating an alternative universe, where I could move into
other people’s skins, playing games of cowboys an Indians or commandos
or whatever, you really felt like you were that person for the amount
of time that you were playing that game.
And that’s what
it’s like when I pick up a pen or switch on a computer and start
writing; that I really do inhabit these people. And it means that
in real life I can be quite a boring, pedestrian individual, because
I get all my kicks in this fantasy world inside my head.
Jim Cassidy:
But you went to university, at Edinburgh. Were you the first in
the family to go to university?
Ian Rankin:
I was the first in the family to go to university, yes, and neither
of my parents was a big reader so we didn’t have that many books
in the house but my penchant for comic books was indulged to the
full, so it was the Dandy and the Beano and the Topper and the Beezer
and all that lot; and then moving onto Superman and Batman, you
know, I was reading these things and then finally moved onto reading
lots of books.
And the reason
I started reading books, I think, was predominantly that there was
no censorship. I wasn’t old enough to go and see Kung Fu films or
Clockwork Orange or the Godfather - they wouldn’t let me in aged
eleven or twelve - but nobody stopped me taking the books out of
the library.
I think that
was something I found, being brought up in a mining village as well,
was that the library was extremely important to the working class
people there. Well there was no book shop in - I say it was Cardenden,
it was actually Bowhill which is even smaller than Cardenden and
is now kind of part of it. There was no bookshop; there was a newsagent’s
with a few kind of JT Edson cowboy books and things like that.
The library
had been built and paid for by the mining community, by the miners
themselves, and it was a place of refuge and it was expected that
you would use it because it had been put there by working men and
their wives.
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