Rebus, take a bow

1 Where Eagles Dare by Alistair MacLean

I read this when I was 10 or 11, in bed with something like chickenpox or mumps. It was probably the first adult book I read. There weren't very many books in the house, but we had Alistair MacLean books, which I suppose must have belonged to my dad. It was a fantastic high-voltage adventure story. It's a shame that his books are harder to find these days, because I do think they stand up. They're well written.

||2120|| A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

I read this when I was about 13 because I wasn't allowed to see the film. I read a lot of books for that reason. It made books seem like forbidden knowledge, there was a furtive excitement about it. This was the era of skinheads, of Doc Martens, and A Clockwork Orange seemed to be talking about the town I grew up in. I thought it was a great book, beautifully written. It was a book written by a man in love with words, and at that time I was in love with words. Some of the first things of any length that I ever wrote were pastiches of A Clockwork Orange.

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18|| Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

When I was 16, we studied Catch-22 at Beath High School, Cowdenbeath. It was a revelation to me, so much fun to read and yet so dark and complex. It was a great piece of storytelling. It was the book that made me want to study literature at university - up until then I was going to be an accountant. I had this moment of realisation: why not go to university to study something you're interested in? I chose Edinburgh University because I wanted to specialise in American literature.

So Catch-22 got me into university, doing English at Edinburgh, where I met my wife.

||1716|| The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

I was told that if I wanted to stay on to do a PhD at a Scottish university I would have to specialise in somebody Scottish, so I chose Muriel Spark. I was basically doing it as an excuse to have three years to write books. The Rebus novels - certainly Knots & Crosses - were written as a reaction to Miss Jean Brodie. It seemed nobody was writing books about contemporary Edinburgh; it was as if Jean Brodie had summed up the city for a generation. Her Edinburgh is very prim and proper; it wasn't really a city I recognised, living in student digs, drinking in rough pubs. It wasn't Jean Brodie's Edinburgh I lived in.

5 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Jean Brodie is related to Deacon Brodie, who was an inspiration for Jekyll & Hyde. That got me fascinated by the idea of the doppelganger, the duality of Edinburgh and of the Scottish character. Jekyll & Hyde is the template for just about everything I've written. Knots & Crosses, in particular, is supposed to be a modern reworking of it, it's just that nobody noticed. Like the other great Edinburgh novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg, Jekyll & Hyde is about human capacity for evil, and there's murder at the heart of it. These were the crime novels I was reading at the time I wrote Knots & Crosses.

6 Lanark by Alasdair Gray

At that time there was also a huge explosion in contemporary Scottish literature, and the detonator was Lanark. Alasdair Gray's book showed that you could write exciting contemporary fiction in Scotland which also ranged widely. It was a shot in the arm for Scottish fiction, but also kick-started a lot of small Scottish publishers and magazines. And it got publishers outside Scotland looking for the next big thing in Scotland. The fact that you were writing about Scotland didn't make you parochial any more.

7 Laidlaw by William McIlvanney

Another key event at the time was the release of William McIlvanney's Laidlaw, about a literate Glasgow detective who was interested in philosophy. William McIlvanney was a serious novelist, he had won the Whitbread Prize, so I thought: "Well, if it's OK for him to write crime fiction, then it's probably OK for me to write crime fiction." It made the crime novel respectable. It showed me that you could write and have published a crime novel set in contemporary urban Scotland. And it showed that the crime novel could be used to say something about the society we live in, about big themes.

8 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

I was given the first three of the 12 novels by a friend of mine, started reading the first one and hated it. It's elitist, class-ridden, an English upper-class comedy of manners written by a snob. But the writing was so fine that I kept going with it and now I'm a huge fan. It's beautifully written, beautifully structured. When I was starting to think of Rebus being a series, I decided he was going to live in real time, because that's how Anthony Powell showed the world. Powell also showed me how you can bring characters back in from previous books and do that economically. Reading it is like a great creative writing masterclass. I re-read it every couple of years.

9 Live Flesh by Ruth Rendell

Once I'd had a novel published that had been classified as crime, I started to read crime fiction, to see if I felt comfortable working within that genre and being part of that gang. I devoured this book and went on to read everything else she's done. It seems to me she's a writer who can do anything. She writes novels with great psychological depth, she does great twists and turns and memorable characters. She can do a series with one detective, stand-alones, historical books, urban books, books set in villages, you name it. She's got an inexhaustible imagination and inexhaustible interest in human nature, and she's still writing really good books 40 years after her first one. You can see her progress from fairly traditional whodunits to something a lot darker and more literary. Reading her has shown me you can evolve as a writer, and as you progress you will hopefully write better books.

10 White Jazz by James Ellroy

I was a terribly unsuccessful crime writer until I wrote Black & Blue [the ninth Rebus book], which won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger. That book was heavily influenced by White Jazz. It's almost like the Ulysses of crime fiction; it's a very complex book written in a language that's hard to get your head around. The opening sections of Black & Blue are written in very staccato prose, short sentences, short paragraphs, all of which come from Ellroy. And I start to make up slang for my cops to use, to convince the reader that I know what I'm on about, which is what Ellroy does: the detectives call the constables "woolly suits" and interrogation rooms "biscuit tins". When I read people like Ruth Rendell and James Ellroy I realise they're writing literature as well, it's just in a different bit of the bookshop.

Rankin's debut was a Scotsman ex

clusive
Ian Rankin's first short story

, The Game, won second prize in the Sinclair/Scotsman Short Story Competition in 1983 (first prize went to Iain Crichton Smith). Rankin said at the time: "I won a 48K Spectrum home computer, and I then got money when the story was published. I was still a student - it was phenomenal!" He used his winnings to buy the electric typewriter on which Knots & Crosses was written. Below is an extract from The Game.

HIS feelings on arriving home were as he predicted. He could recall little of the journey. The letter was a crumpled ball in his suit pocket. His shirt, specially ironed by Joanna for the launching, would be filthy. He checked himself in the driver's mirror, angling it until his face filled the glass. It was the face of a 40-year-old executive, which would have been fine had he not been only 36. He smiled, winked at his mirror-self, and turned off the ignition.

Who could he blame? The management, his colleagues, for their attitude to the workforce? The top brass, his elders, for their ineptitude? The economic factors? Or the workforce, culprits in his colleagues' eyes, for their obdurate short-sightedness, their work ethic of not working? He had given up hope of ever sorting it out in his mind. It did no good in any case, apart from furnishing false reassurances that he himself was no part to blame.

He slammed the car door, his mood swayed between resignation and resistance. He was climbing now, becoming a little more confident as he approached the house. They would be all right. He would be all right. There were jobs for those who tried and were not too proud to start again. He was only 36; the climb would be far easier for him than for many. Yes, that would be his rock for the evening. Tomorrow there might be another.

Joanna was talking in the hallway. "Oh, just a minute, Colin, here he is. He'll talk to you himself." She offered her husband the phone and he kissed her noisily before taking it. "Hello Colin. I needed that. Anyway, how are you?"

"Look, Tom," began the voice uneasily.

"That's all right, Colin. You tried. I'm sure you tried your damnedest. It just wasn't on the cards."

Colin's relief was evident in his voice. Within a few more minutes they were arranging to meet for a drink. Colin had some leads he felt his friend should know of.

Hargreaves entered the living room. "That was Colin apologising for me not getting the job."

"I know," said Joanna. "He told me. He's been trying to reach you all day. Don't worry love, something will turn up." She met him halfway and they hugged. Perhaps we're being tested, thought Hargreaves. Then: I wonder what's for dinner?

IT WAS 20 YEARS AGO...
ON 19 MARCH,

1987, Ian Rankin got

caught in a sudden snow storm walking home from work. He stopped off at his local Tesco to buy a steak and a good bottle of red, because he'd had a book published that day. It was a novel called Knots & Crosses, and was about a detective called John Rebus.

There was no fanfare, no press coverage, nothing to herald the arrival of the character who would one day become Scotland's favourite fictional detective. Rankin, then an administrator at a London polytechnic, banked his modest publisher's advance (£450), ate his steak and kept on writing.

"It just seemed to be published and then die," he says, flicking through the pages of his 1987 diary. At the time he wasn't even thinking of a sequel. In fact, he planned to kill off his hero at the end of the book.

"I was about three-quarters of the way through the book when I decided I liked him too much to bump him off. I can remember sitting writing the final scenes: there's a guy with a gun and Rebus does get shot. That could have been it, but I decided he deserved something a bit better, so he's wounded, not killed."

He wrote two more books - a spy novel and a stand-alone thriller - before a thoughtful editor asked after Rebus. "I think what he realised was that writing about Edinburgh was going to be my strength, and that Rebus would be a useful way of doing that."

So Knots & Crosses - which had been rejected by several publishers before it was published by Bodley Head - led to Hide & Seek, Tooth & Nail and many more. Rebus, whose 18th adventure, The Naming of the Dead, was published last year, now accounts for one in ten of all UK crime novels sold.

Scotsman readers can take part in his 20th birthday celebrations by bidding in our Rebus Charity Auction, launched today in the Scotsman Magazine. Prizes include a walk-on part in an STV Rebus adaptation and a trip to Orkney to see the launch of the exclusive Rebus20 malt whisky by Highland Park distillers.

A special collector's edition of Knots & Crosses has also been published, which includes deleted scenes from the original novel, flanked by facsimiles of Rankin's original notes, including one which bears the legend: "Male hero (a policeman?)"

"At least they've cropped it so you don't see the doodles," Rankin sighs. "It seems like a hell of a long time ago that I wrote it, a student in one room in Arden Street with a rickety table and a typewriter."

These days he works in a spacious study with a laptop and a desk that is decidedly non-rickety. And he's hard at work on the 19th Rebus book, which will be the last in which Rebus appears as a serving police officer. Asked how he'll be spending Monday's anniversary, Rankin says: "I'll be writing. Scribble, scribble, scribble. Because you're only as good as your next book, not the book you wrote 20 years ago!"

• The collector's edition of Knots and Crosses is available now priced £10.95. Get a free Rebus Short Story Book, worth £4.99, inside The Scotsman next Saturday.