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Jim Cassidy:
What was your first impression of Edinburgh?
Ian Rankin:
I went to Edinburgh as a student in 1978 and found it terrifying,
just the size of it and the strangeness of it, and the people seemed
very cold. I mean I had grown up in a cul de sac in a village and
everybody knew everybody else; the families in the cul de sac had
all lived there for fifteen years, twenty years.
So it felt a
bit odd going to this city where people didn’t speak to you at bus
stops, you might never speak to your next door neighbour if you
were living in one of the tenement flats.
I started writing
about Edinburgh really just to try and make sense of the place,
to get a handle on it.
Jim Cassidy:
Was that when you decided you could probably make a living as a
writer?
Ian Rankin:
Oh no, no! I didn’t start making a living as a writer until
about five years ago.
No, I suppose
I was, I’d got a kind of false impression because of the very first
things that were published by me did make me some money, because
they were competitions.
I went in for
a poetry competition and won second prize my last year at school
and I got five quid. Went
to university and entered a short story competition and got two
hundred quid - won first prize in that. And so I was earning money.
So I thought
well this is obviously a way of making a living - more fool me!
Then when the first book was published, in 1986, I think I got 500
quid.
I think I sussed
then it wasn’t always to do with the amount of labour involved and
how long it took you to write it; that you got paid the going market
rate and five hundred pounds was not going to keep me going for
a year.
Jim Cassidy:
But how tough were those early days then, before the first big one
came five years ago? Well it was a long time before I could go full
time as a writer. I got married in ’86 and luckily my wife had a
decent job in London as a civil servant and so she supported me
for a while.
And living
in London, it was fairly easy to get a job and I worked for a while
as a secretary in a polytechnic and then moved on to hi-fi journalism
and worked on a monthly magazine. So I was earning a living and
in the little gaps between that I was planning and writing the books.
And they were
ticking over, they were selling, I mean I was lucky I was still
getting published and I was still getting good reviews. But then
were made this big move; in 1990 my wife decided that if I wanted
to be a full time writer we had to get out of London. Her idea was
France, so we bought a rundown, dilapidated farmhouse in France
and moved lock, stock and barrel.
Jim Cassidy:
Was that a good move or not?
Ian Rankin:
In some ways it was a very good move because writers are very paranoid
and in France I was in a field of one; I was the only Scottish crime
writer in the Dordogne so I had no competition at all. And there
were no book shops; I couldn’t go in and see lots of Ruth Rendell’s
and PD James’s and none of mine, which is a perennial problem if
you’re a writer, a perennial worry.
So I got a lot
of writing done; there was nothing to get in the way of the writing.
That was great but we were living on the bread line for a long time
in France and we couldn’t afford to get the house done up so we
did it ourselves and my DIY skills led to several near-death incidents
on my part!
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