Ian Rankin: ‘I’ve had Rebus’s endpoints in mind for donkey’s years but he just keeps defeating them’
Ever wondered what would happen if hard-boiled Scottish detective John Rebus turned up in an Agatha Christie plot? How would he behave at a posh mansion house dinner party where everyone has a secret and, inevitably, someone doesn’t survive to see the cheese board?
During the pandemic, multi-million copy bestselling author and creator of Rebus, Ian Rankin, had exactly this idea and came up with Rebus: A Game Called Malice, which is appearing at the Cambridge Arts Theatre.
“The play was written during lockdown, and it was just written because I wanted something to do that would be a little bit of fun, so I constructed it as a traditional whodunnit, in almost an Agatha Christie style,” says Ian.
“I decided we would have this dinner party of wealthy people, and the hostess has devised a Cluedo-style game for them, where they’ve got to play detective and find out who killed the lord of the manor, and they’re happily playing that while revealing sides of their personalities and secret bits of their pasts to the one detective in the room, who is Rebus.
“He’s been invited along by a lawyer friend as her plus one. And then at the end of Act One, somebody goes to the bathroom and comes back and there’s a body.”
The play’s setting is pure Christie – a smart drawing room, covered in paintings, and there are just six characters at the meal. A murder needs to be solved. But the guests have secrets of their own, threatened by the mystery game they are playing. Rebus has already been sizing them up and, even though he is just retired, his skills are about to be put to the test.
Ian says: “We never leave the room, and most of the characters are on stage throughout. So the audience are getting a really good look at these people and really getting to dig into what secrets they might be holding back from us.”
The cosy murder mystery typical of Golden Age detective fiction of the 1930s is a direction that Ian has never taken his grizzled police officer in before.
“Like a lot of writers of my generation, we felt we somehow had to push all that to one side,” he says.
“Back when I was young and starting out in this game, which is basically going back 40 years, I felt you had to subvert the tropes of the traditional English whodunnit. So my books were more based on the American model. They were gritty and hard-boiled and urban, as opposed to urbane. But there’s a real pleasure to a good, strong, traditional mystery story.
“So now this gives the audience two for the price of one, because you’ve got the game that’s being played, and so you’re busy watching them trying to work out who the murderer is in the game. And then you’ve also got Rebus in the midst of it, both doing that and then also turning detective. He’s a retired detective in this play, and so the first thing he does is phone the real police and say, ‘Can you come there’s been an incident’. Then he’s got about 20 minutes to half an hour to try and work out what’s going on before the police arrive and steal his thunder.”
Although Rebus is the star of more than 20 books, there is no need to have read a word of them before going to play. It stands alone, Ian assures us.
“This is not part of the canon with Rebus so you can walk into this play just for a good night out of the theatre. You don’t need to know anything about Rebus. You don’t need to know the back story. There are no other characters or incidents from the books. It’s a completely new story.
“In this story, specifically, he is socially awkward because he’s been invited to this dinner party in a very posh house. It’s a sort of world that is unknown to him because, of course, most of his working life would have been spent at the other extremity of society. So he’s suddenly in one of the poshest bits of Edinburgh, in a very posh house surrounded by posh people, and he just feels awkward. He feels this is not his place. And so I’m looking at that. I’m looking at the sort of class conflict.
“Like Columbo, which was a crime series in which the killer always underestimated the detective, because they saw them as being from the lower orders, there’s a little bit of that going on.”
As Rebus is now a retired police officer, he doesn’t have quite the same power he used to, and that rankles.
“It pains him that he’s no longer a member of that world and is supposed to be enjoying a quiet retirement, which he is determined not to do, he’s determined to keep busy,” says Ian.
“He’s a detective to his very bones. He spent his whole life investigating other people’s lives and trying to unearth their secrets in a way to stop him having to think too much about his own shortcomings as a human being. So here he gets to have his cake and eat it. Because he’s dissecting everybody in this room. He’s unpicking their secrets. He’s unpicking their lives.
“He’s looking past the self that they present to the outside world, and he’s finding out what lies just beneath. And every character in this play has a secret life, has some mystery attached to them, that they’ve done a very good job of hiding from the world. And Rebus, being a very good psychologist, picks all that apart, and then he has a murder mystery to solve as well, which is not unconnected to all the secrets that these people have been holding back.
“So it’s a character study, it’s a psychological mystery. I think it’s a very intriguing package, and I think it makes for a great night at the theatre, especially since there is an interval, which means you can go off to the bar and you can discuss with your pals what you think is going on, and you can find out if you make as good a detective as John Rebus.”
Are there enough clues for a canny amateur sleuth to solve the mystery before Rebus gets there?
“That’s an interesting question,” laughs Ian. “I think there’s a lot of fun to be had whether you solve it or not. One of the particular pleasures of the whodunnit is pitting yourself as a reader against the writer to see if you can spot the clues. Yes, there are plenty of clues dotted throughout this and and yet I think you would have to be a really, really good detective to work out what’s going on before the last five minutes of the play.”
Ian himself would not relish the chance to sit down at a dinner party with Rebus.
“What have we got to talk about? He would see me as being a wishy-washy liberal. He comes from from a similar background to me, but he comes from a very different place, philosophically. So we wouldn’t have that much in common to talk about.”
Instead, the person Ian would most like to sit down with over dinner is the author Robert Louis Stevenson.
“Probably not going to be possible now,” he jokes. “I would ask him, did you really burn the manuscript of the first draft of Jekyll and Hyde? Because famously, his wife didn’t think it was very good, and so he threw it on the fire. He told her he had thrown it out on the fire, and we will never know what was in that draft. What had he got wrong? What was she worried about? So I would love to ask him about that, because that book has been probably the biggest influence on me of any work of literature.”
Why has it fascinated him so much?
“Number one, I was sitting in Edinburgh as a student, wondering why Stevenson had set the book in London, when it seemed to me to be such an Edinburgh book, the fact that Edinburgh itself is a Jekyll and Hyde city. I mean, structurally, as the new town in the old town, the planned and the unplanned, the rational and the irrational. It’s physically there in the structure. The make-up of the city and Edinburgh has always seemed to me to be a Jekyll and Hyde city, a city of great wealth and culture, but also a city with huge problems. And so Jekyll and Hyde speaks to me of that.
“And also it’s an extraordinary book about good and evil. It’s a book about what drives human beings to do terrible things. And that is a question that drives all crime fiction and drives most of world literature. Why do we human beings continue to do terrible things? Is it nature or nurture? Is it the devil? What is it? So that question is continually being asked, and Jekyll and Hyde tackles it better than most. I couldn’t, couldn’t ever live up to that story.”
Ian went to pay homage to Stevenson earlier this year at his final resting place.
“I was on a cruise earlier this year, and we had one stop at Samoa. I went to Robert Louis Stevenson’s house, where he spent the last four years of his life, and then I nearly died climbing this big, steep hill in 98 per cent humidity and 40 degree heat to get to the top where his mausoleum is. But I had to, I mean, it was a pilgrimage that I had to make, even though it nearly killed me. And I think he would have been tickled if I had somehow popped my clogs on the way up.”
Including the first book – Knots and Crosses – in 1987, there have been 24 Rebus crime novels. Popular titles include The Black Book, The Naming of the Dead and A Question of Blood. Rankin’s Rebus novels have been translated into 36 languages worldwide and have been adapted for radio, stage and screen. Most recently in 2024 a six-part television adaptation of Rebus was aired on BBC One starring Richard Rankin. A 25th book is due to be published in October, Midnight & Blue, and Ian may have been hinting that it could be the last.
“It’s not giving away too much to say it’s set in prison because Rebus is in prison for murder. He’s fighting for his life because he’s surrounded by villains who know that he is an ex cop.
“How’s he going to survive this? I mean, it’s tough to say, but what I do is I present him with a locked cell mystery. Someone ends up dead in a cell. The cell has been locked all night. There’s no murder weapon. So when that happens, there’s only one person in the prison with the skills to solve the case and hopefully stop the prisoner from descending into all our bloodshed and riot.”
Even after all this time, Ian reckons that Rebus can surprise him and that’s how the stories keep evolving.
“It’s the fact that I still don’t know quite what makes him tick. I’ve still not quite got to the core of his personality, his psyche, his being,” he says.
“He continues to hold information back from me, and he’s just a fascinating, complex, damaged character. And every time I write about him, I learn a little bit more.
“I’ve had endpoints in mind from for donkey’s years but he just keeps defeating them. When he hit 60, he had to retire from the police. And so I wrote what I thought was going to be the final book, but then he found a way to come back. He decided he would be working on a cold case review team as a civilian. So I brought him back to work on a cold case story that I had, and he just stuck around. He refuses to leave the building. And that will continue to be the case as long as I’ve got something new to say about him or something I want to find out, and as long as the stories that I come up with, as long as the answer to the question of who’s the best person to tell the story is John Rebus, then he will stick around. But as he gets older, it’s getting tougher for me to inveigle him into police investigations.
“He turns up a police station now, and the cops are 20 years old and going, ‘Who the hell is this?’ They don’t know who he is. They’ve no interest in him. He’s just an old aged pensioner, as far as they’re concerned, and he should just enjoy his retirement.”
Could Ian be considering retirement too if Rebus comes to the end of the line?
“If it’s up to my wife, I’ll be just about to enter semi-retirement,” he says.
“I’ll be 65 next year. She’s saying, ‘Look, while we still got her wits about us and we’ve still got the use of our knees and legs, we should go off and do some travelling’. So she is very determined I’m going to write less and enjoy myself more.
“I’m in partial agreement. The thing is writing is enjoyment for me. Writing was my hobby before it ever became my job or my livelihood. So it’s fun when it’s going well. But she’s right, all the time I’m writing a book, I’m in a little room on my own, and she’s never seeing me. And then when she does see me ,my head is still in the book. So although I’m physically there eating dinner, psychically, I’m still in the office solving some problem or wondering what happens next.
“So yeah, she stuck with me since we were in her early 20s, and we’re now in our mid-60s, I think she deserves a bit more of my time. And maybe travelling the world will give me some new ideas.”
Rebus: A Game Called Malice is at the Cambridge Arts Theatre 29 August to 7 September. Tickets, priced from £25, are available from
