A Conversation with Sir Ian Rankin and Professor Dame Lorna Dawson

We had the pleasure of welcoming Sir Ian Rankin as our special guest at a Burns Supper we hosted in Edinburgh earlier this year. As one of Scotland’s most celebrated crime writers, Ian has worked closely with our very own Professor Dame Lorna Dawson, Head of the Centre for Forensic Soil Science, to research and shape the science behind his best‑selling novels.

In this Q&A, their conversation ranges from the role of science and forensics in crime fiction and the challenges of portraying police work accurately, to the surprising influence novels can have on public understanding of forensic science. Along the way, Ian reflects on the evolution of John Rebus and his enduring relationship with Edinburgh, while both share thoughtful insights into how memorable characters develop organically over time.

 

Lorna: You were one of The James Hutton Institute’s esteemed guests at a dinner with crime authors and forensic scientists in Edinburgh in 2007. Did you know anything about the life of the man, James Hutton?

Ian: No pressure. I knew a little. Not very much. I mean, I knew about deep time. And I knew that he’d been a member of the Enlightenment. I knew he was connected to the Edinburgh Enlightenment and thought of him specifically in terms of philosophy and agriculture. Not so much in terms of, “could he help me be a crime writer?” But it was a thrill to find out that I could steal from the professionals’ ideas for future books, which I duly did. This is a problem that professionals like Lorna have: I come along and I’m kind of scratching away, going, “What have you got for me? What have you got?” And Sue Black — God bless her — Professor Dame Sue Black, forensic anthropologist, used to get bugged all the time by crime writers going, “Have you got anything for me?” But now, it’s a new guy.

Science is one of these things that the reader of crime fiction loves to see. But we crime writers are not scientists, so we don’t always know what we’re talking about, and we need professionals to help us persuade the reader that we know more than we do. So those quotes that you put up earlier — that’s probably about as much soil analysis as I know, and will ever know. But, it was enough to persuade the general reader—“Oh, this guy’s done his research.” That’s the important thing. And if you do just enough research to pursue the general reader, then you know what you’re talking about.

Lorna: And that’s important, isn’t it? For your reader to be with you. You go into some of that forensic detail, but just enough for them to feel that they understand it. But—do you write that to give it a bit of a forensic feel?

Ian: You know, when I started writing these books, I was very young. I was 24, 25 when I wrote the first Rebus novel. I was a student at Edinburgh University. I didn’t know anything about the police, I didn’t know anything about procedure, I just made it up. But then, when it became a career, I started to feel a little bit guilty that I was making a living telling lies about real professions. I thought, “Ian, you should do the research and make sure that you get the detail right,” and so I would then consult with police officers, I would consult with pathologists.

I started to bug the Chief Pathologist for Edinburgh at the time for information on what would happen at an autopsy. He didn’t take me to an autopsy, but he did take me to the Cowgate and showed me the rooms where it would happen. And he said, “Do you want to come along to something?” And I said, “No, thanks, Tony, I’m fine. I can just make it up. I’ll make people believe that I’ve been to an autopsy. I don’t need to have been to an autopsy.” And all I needed was the smell, and what they were wearing, and that was all I really needed.

The thrill for me, what makes me proud, is when a reader goes, “Oh, that was really, really detailed.” And I say, “Go back and look at it, all I did was describe what they wore. Your imagination did the rest. You painted in all the rest of the detail.” But yeah, I feel that when it became a profession for me, I should get it right. So, I did start to talk to lawyers and social workers, cops, pathologists, people that worked at the labs at Howdenhall. Anywhere I could get access to, I would do it. But then you’ve got to be careful not to put in so much science or so much detail that it gets bogged down and the reader starts to lose interest.

There’s a point where the reader goes, “You’re just telling me that because you know it. You’re not telling me that because it’s germane to the plot. You’re just showing off that you know that.” So, you’ve got to be really careful there.

Lorna: Do you think that sometimes, some of the crime writers, or some of the CSI programmes, get it wrong? And where do they get it wrong? And is that good for the reader?

Ian: Come on, you know that they get it wrong. I mean, number one, they make stuff up. Number two, the stuff you saw in CSI, that glossy American TV show — everything was wrapped up in 45 minutes. No, it can take weeks, months, or years to get a solution to a case.

They had an unlimited budget. No! You know, in my books I pride myself on the fact that the crime, the major incident team, are saying, “Well, can we afford to do that? Can we afford to get somebody to come along and do a soil analysis? How long will it take? Can we afford to get someone in to do this specialist thing? Have we got the budget for that?” They’re always under budget constraints and time constraints. So, a lot of stuff that you see on the screen and you see in other writers’ books doesn’t always happen, for these reasons — budgetary and time constraints. Having said that, I’m a sucker for it. I just love that detail.

There was a thing that I was telling somebody else at the table about. I’ve not used it yet in the books, but Sue Black was talking about how you can actually tell somebody from the back of their hand. You can use the back of someone’s hand to identify them fairly clearly, and in a lot of sex abuse cases where people are trading photographs and images and videos online, all you can see of the abuser is the back of their hand. And she’s able to pinpoint, you did that. That’s your hand. She put together a database of offenders and got photographs of their hands. That’s an extraordinary thing. Everything’s evolving, and the science is evolving so quickly that, as a crime writer, I’m really struggling to keep up with it. But the really interesting ones, I’ll put in my pocket for later on. And that’s part of why Sue stopped talking to a friend of ours.

Lorna: And have you ever read or heard about a particular scientific technique but then decided it might solve your mystery too quickly and then not used it?

Ian: I mean, there’s a few things I’ve not used. I remember a while ago, they came up with ear prints. Normally, fingerprints. You get people who press their ear to the glass of a window to check if anybody is in and it would leave a print on the window.

And it’s pretty good — it turns out people’s ears are pretty different. Everybody’s ears are slightly different, like fingerprints. And I thought, “Oh, I should use that.” But then I thought, “Nobody would believe it. You know, a bit like Sherlock Holmes. Nobody would believe that.” So, I’ve not used it yet. But yeah, I mean, a lot of scientific stuff these days means you could wrap up a crime fairly quickly. In most cases, you do. But in most cases of crime, the perpetrator is known to the police or to the person they attacked or robbed or whatever. Pretty simple. What crime fiction does is deal with the more abstruse cases, the more complex cases, the cases that tell us something a little more complicated about us as human beings.

I mean, all crime fiction deals with a very basic question: Why do we human beings keep doing terrible things? Specifically to each other. And there are many, many ways of answering that question, and they’re all absolutely fascinating. And as readers, and as human beings, we are absolutely fascinated by that notion of why we don’t do bad stuff. Why do the vast majority of us not do bad stuff? And what makes someone do bad stuff? And it’s a very easy question to ask and an almost impossible question to answer.

I spent months, years ago, doing a series for Channel 4, a documentary series on evil. And I had extraordinary access. I interviewed a guy on death row in Texas. I interviewed the chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome. I spoke to a family of murder victims, a psychiatrist from Broadmoor. You name it, I got access. By the end of that series, I was not much further forward. I could point to someone and say, “You committed an act of evil in that moment.” But to point at someone and say, “You are evil” was still quite a complicated thing.

The only person I got access to, and I didn’t use it, was Ian Brady. He wanted me to interview him, but I didn’t. And he’s one person I would say, “Yeah, you are evil. You are irredeemably, unchangeably evil.” But most other people, there’s gradations, and part of my plan in the Rebus books is to persuade Rebus, who’s an Old Testament kind of guy, he sees the world in absolutes: black and white, good and evil. If you’re a baddy, you’re always a baddy, if you’ve committed a crime, you’re always a criminal. The plan was to persuade him that there’s a chance to reform, there’s a chance to change, and that there are going to be grades of badness in people, and you’re not always bad, except for Ian Brady.

Lorna: So, do you think everyone is potentially capable of murder?

Ian: Yeah. Aren’t we? I mean, I bet we’ve all thought about it at one time or another. You know, it could be very minor things. You’re sitting on a train and there’s somebody really noisy in front of you, making phone calls, and you go — “I could kill you.” And if you had the means to get away with it, maybe in that moment you would. But we don’t carry it out. Many of us have murderous thoughts at different times in our lives, but we don’t carry them out. We don’t carry them out specifically because we think we’d get caught, or you think, “I couldn’t live with the guilt.” And that’s a really interesting question as well.

People often say crime writers would make brilliant killers because we know all the ins and outs of covering stuff up, red herrings, and not leaving clues. But we would make terrible killers. If we could do it, we would have done it by now. But we don’t. We’re not good at it. One guy was — I think he was Dutch. There was a crime writer who killed his wife, and he used a modus operandi that was identical to one of his books. And his defense was, “I wouldn’t have done that. Someone’s setting me up.” Guilty!

Lorna: Your writing is very much among the most recognised books based in Edinburgh, and you’re connected to this city, this lovely city of Edinburgh. And as a Fifer born in the Kingdom of Fife, you must feel connected to that Scottish landscape. How do you think that affects your writing?

Ian: I mean, I’ve always wanted to write about Scotland to make sense of Scotland. I’ve always written about Edinburgh to try and make sense of Edinburgh. I mean, as a kid, I would write to try and make sense of the world around me. The world is a very confusing, chaotic, difficult, multi-stranded place, an organism. It’s almost impossible to get to grips with. I use my fiction to try and make sense of it, to make sense of the chaos. I arrived in Edinburgh as a student in 1978 and immediately started writing about Edinburgh to make sense of it, and that’s ongoing. So I’ve still not got to the heart of Edinburgh, what makes Edinburgh what it is. And so many writers write about Edinburgh, but it’s always a slightly different Edinburgh because Edinburgh is a TARDIS. It’s tiny on the outside and vast on the inside. You can explore it for the rest of your life, and you never quite get to the centre of it.

So, I enjoyed that experience and then, when I got confident about Edinburgh and I thought, “Okay, I know what I’m doing now,” I then took Rebus a bit further afield. I took him up to the north coast of Scotland, I took him down to England on a couple of occasions, and took him over to Glasgow to try and explore Scotland in a bit more depth. But I was always coming up against this problem, which is that police officers in the real world don’t really go outside their jurisdiction. If Rebus were a real cop in Edinburgh and wanted to go to Glasgow, he would normally have to tell Glasgow he’s coming. And more often than not, what you would do is, as a cop, you would phone up Glasgow and say, “Can you do this for me, so I don’t have to come myself?” So, Rebus couldn’t really travel widely. And he doesn’t own a passport. So he couldn’t go outside the UK, really, he couldn’t go outside Europe. So I was kind of stuck with him.

But Edinburgh just seems to keep throwing up stories. I’m not done with the place. And every book I’ve written, at heart, is another attempt to rewrite Jekyll and Hyde. The first Rebus novel was meant to be an updated version of Jekyll and Hyde, with Rebus as Jekyll and Hyde, someone who may be the killer as well as the cop investigating the killings. Nobody got it. Nobody understood that, so I wrote the second Rebus novel and called it Hide and Seek and had quotes from Jekyll and Hyde throughout the book, and characters were named after characters in Jekyll and Hyde. Because, to me, Edinburgh is the Jekyll and Hyde city, the city that Stevenson was talking about. It’s a city of great wealth and prosperity and stability, but it’s also a city that is chaotic, with lots of social problems. And Robert Louis Stevenson came from this very rational family. They were lighthouse designers. He was going to be a lawyer. He lived in the New Town, which was rational and planned. But he was attracted to the darker side. And at night, he would tiptoe up the hill to the Old Town, which was higgledy-piggledy and chaotic and full of drunks, poets, and prostitutes. He was attracted to the Hyde, although he came from the Jekyll. And I arrived in Edinburgh in the late 70s, early 80s, and I thought, this is a Jekyll and Hyde city.

There were huge problems with heroin, huge problems with prostitution and social deprivation, and yet it was still a lovely city full of tourist attractions and culture. Every city that I’ve ever been to is a Jekyll and Hyde city. But in Edinburgh, it’s structurally there: the Old Town and the New Town, with what used to be the Nor Loch between them, which is now Princes Street Gardens. You’ve physically got the Jekyll and Hyde when you look at the city. So why would I write about it anywhere else?

Lorna: Ian, are you going to take the readers back to Edinburgh again soon? Which parts of Edinburgh will you have Rebus working in?

Ian: You know, it gets harder. I’ve got a huge map of Edinburgh on my wall in my office. And I’m going, no — I’ve used that. I’ve used that. I’ve used that. I’ve used that incident. I’ve used that period of time. I’ve done the referendum. I’ve done the Queen dying and lying in state. What’s left for him to do? So, the latest book he’s in jail. I thought, I’ve not had Rebus in jail before, let’s put him in Saughton. So, he’s happily in Saughton Prison in his 70s with COPD. And I don’t know what I’m going to write about him. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I might write a book for next year, but I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be yet.

I’ll tell you one funny thing about Saughton though, you’re talking about research. I thought, “Oh, I better find out what happens in Saughton.” So, a mate of mine who’s a photographer used to be a prison officer in Barlinnie. I said, “Do you know anybody?” And he said, “Yeah, I know a few folk.” So he put me in touch eventually with the governor of HMP Edinburgh. And luckily for me, the governor was about to retire, so he was very open to answering my questions. I went in for a meeting with him and then I got what I needed from that day I spent in Saughton and went back, wrote the book, sent it to my publisher, and they said, “It’s great. Although there’s a few things: one is you don’t really describe the clothing. Can you give us a bit more detail on what the prisoners wear?” Oh my god, I forgot! So I emailed the governor and said, “What do they wear?” And he said, “Well, on their own wing — it’s not called a wing in Saughton, it’s called a hall — they wear whatever they like, and if they’re leaving the hall to go elsewhere in the prison or outside the prison, we need to know what kind of prisoner we’re dealing with, so their clothing is colour‑coded.”

There were six different colours to use, but there were two that stood out for me. The governor said, “If you’re a lifer and you’ve committed murder or whatever, you wear green. And if you’re a sex offender, you wear maroon.” Green and maroon… in Edinburgh.

Saughton, next door to where Hearts of Midlothian play in maroon, and if you wear maroon, you’re a sex offender. And I said, “What?!” The governor said, “Oh yeah, the previous governor was a Hibs fan.” I said, “So is it the same in every jail in Scotland?” He said, “No, they’re different. If you go to Perth, it’s exactly the opposite, because the governor there was a Hearts fan.” I didn’t ask him the obvious question: what is it in Barlinnie? I should have asked and I didn’t. I must ask him one of these days.

Lorna: Do you go to the places where you’re setting your stories? You’re going to London next, did you go there to explore the well-known, iconic streets?

Ian: The next book that comes out in October is set in London. It’s about oligarchs and dark money and exiled Arabian princesses and Chinese tech bros and all sorts of stuff. And then there’s a murder in the big shiny high rise, and suddenly the police arrive and shake everything up. But you don’t need to go to London. Everybody knows London. You don’t need to do a lot. You decide, where am I going to set it? Near Hyde Park, okay, that’s it. But I used to live in Tottenham when I was first married, so the cop in the story also lives in Tottenham. So again, I didn’t have to do too much footwork there. I certainly know what Tottenham’s like, and the cop is also a Spurs supporter like me, so that’s another sadness in her life.

I do get people in Edinburgh going, “Hang on a minute!” Especially the TV shows. In one of the TV series, we had Ken Stott as Rebus. He exits the Caledonian Hotel and says to somebody, “Can you give me a lift to the Oxford Bar?” It’s a three-minute walk. The scriptwriter was not from Edinburgh and he didn’t consult me. And people went, “Hey, how come?” I went, “Oh, don’t, don’t.” You know, and people are always picking up things like that. They go, “That’s supposed to be Edinburgh Airport, but it’s actually Glasgow Airport.” It’s cheaper to film there.

I get picked up all the time on details that are wrong about Edinburgh. I’ve made mistakes in the early books. In the first book, I thought these things outside here on the street were called cobbles. But they’re called setts. So, in the first two Rebus novels I referred to them as cobbles, until somebody wrote to me and said, “Mr. Rankin, I think you’ll find…” After which, they became setts. There’s been a lot of things like that, people sort of put me right. Cops will say, “You’ve not got this detail right, that detail is not quite right.” I decided early on that Rebus would work out of St Leonard’s Police Station and the officers in the real St Leonard’s Police Station were thrilled because I gave the fictional St Leonard’s a cafeteria, which had a snack machine.

Things like that happen all the time. A cop friend of mine, who was a good source of information to me in the early days, phoned me up one day and said, “How old is Rebus?” I said, “He’s 58. Why?” He said, “He’s got to retire at 60.” I went, “What? I thought the retirement age was 65!” But no, it’s 60 for detectives and 55 for uniforms. So I said to my publisher, ‘Next book is the last book.’ That was Exit Music, which was meant to be the final book, because Rebus had to retire.

The real world keeps banging into me all the time, and I try and make it as accurate as I can while still leaving it open to being fiction.

Lorna: Many of your books have been turned into television productions. Does that annoy you when they don’t present it as you would? Like the example that you just gave us about the distance between the hotel and the bar.

Ian: There’s no point in getting angry with them, really. They’re not going to change their minds. It makes good TV. I once got in touch with Dougie Henshall, who used to be in Shetland. I was watching an episode of Shetland one night, and there’s a body in an archaeological dig. And Dougie arrives, he’s the only person there, and he jumps into the dig.

And I said, “Dougie, you wouldn’t do that! You’re a cop and you’re immediately contaminating a crime scene. You’re leaving trace evidence.” And he said, “Yeah, but didn’t it look great? It made for great television.” So, all the stuff to do with Rebus on screen, I just hold my hand up and go, “You’ve given me the cheque and I’m happy.” And the current writer, the newer Rebus with Richard Rankin, the screenwriter who does those is really, really good. He’s a mate of mine, he’s from Fife, and I trust him. If you can trust the people, then you can walk away a little bit, and you can relax a wee bit.

Lorna: You do a fabulous job of entertaining your readers and that’s what it’s about – entertainment. People buy your books to read them, to be entertained, and to be taken away from real everyday life. However, do you think that crime fiction shapes public expectations of forensic science?

Ian: We’ve spoken about this a wee bit already, but I think people have this unrealistic expectation of what police officers and scientists and forensics and senior crime and all that can do. They’re human, and they do make mistakes. And some of them are lazy. Present company accepted, but some of them are a wee bit lazy and a wee bit sloppy. So a lot of stuff doesn’t get done that should be done. We see that all the time in the real world. I do sometimes think, am I giving an unrealistic expectation? Because once I give my cops something to do, they will get on with it and they will be dogged, and they won’t let anything get in the way until they get a result. And the real world isn’t like that. I would be cheating the readers if there wasn’t a result at the end of the book. The crime needs to be solved; order needs to be restored to the world. That’s why a lot of readers come to crime fiction. But within that quite inflexible structure, you can have quite a lot of fun, and you can leave quite a lot of loose ends.

You can have moral ambiguities; you can have Rebus putting away the right person for the wrong reasons or vice versa. You can have him feeling guilty about getting a result because he doesn’t really want this person to be found guilty. You can do all of that, but the reader cannot feel cheated. At the end, they must feel that they’ve enjoyed the ride and it’s worked out in a way that is satisfying to them.

Lorna: Brilliant. I think that’s a wonderful way that you are thinking about your reader and how they are learning from what you’re writing. But are there any particular myths that are portrayed in forensic science that you would like to see banned or abolished from any of the writing or the movies that we watch? Is there anything that really annoys you?

Ian: I mean, everybody’s kind of perfect, aren’t they? When you see an autopsy, the pathologist is perfect. They’re doing the right things all the time. Nobody’s really screwing up, and some of the time people do screw up stuff gets missed for a long time and things are on the back burner that shouldn’t be. So, people have this unrealistic expectation of what forensic science can do. But the crime writers who write books tend to work hard to get it right. The screenwriters sometimes take shortcuts because it’s glamourised. People are all immaculately dressed, they’re not stressed out. They’re not got fag ash hanging off their shoulder. They’re not going home to an unhappy relationship or whatever. They’re not going home to any relationship. You’re only seeing them in the lab or you’re seeing them at the crime scene. So, you lose that sense of them as human beings.

I think book writers are much better as crime writers than screenwriters. There’s no screenwriters in the room are there? No, well it’s being recorded. I think screenwriters are terrific, it’s just that they sometimes have to take shortcuts that novelists don’t.

Lorna: How do you get that science right though? Without it actually overwhelming the story, because people are reading the books to be told a story, aren’t they?

Ian: It’s about what you leave out. You know, you do tons and tons of research, but don’t put it all in. This is why cops often have tried to be crime writers and can’t do it – they put in all of the unnecessary details that are part and parcel of their everyday life. They put in a lot of doorstepping and a lot of interviews that take the story nowhere, because that is part and parcel of an actual crime investigation. What I do is, I say, that boring stuff is happening just off the page. There are some other cops doing all that, but we’re going to stay with these cops who are making some progress. And the same with the science. The science is happening over there. The science is happening at the end of a phone line. They’ll get back to us when they’ve done the tests, and they’ll let us know what they know.

Do the research but leave out most of the details. Don’t bog it down with lots of extraneous facts that you know, that you think the reader might be impressed you know. Just give them what they need, not what they might want to know. I think that it’s just paring it back and not showing off. It’s very easy to show off what you’ve done in research. I’m trying not to show off.

Lorna: You don’t show off Ian. But what about the characters? Because it’s absolutely central in any of these stories how well you describe the characteristics of the people, like Rebus or like Siobhan. Where do you get the ideas for these characters from?

Ian: I wish I knew. Characters just jump into my head and always have done since I was a kid. They just want to play. When I retired Rebus, I thought, “I’m done with him, I’ll never see him again.” And for five years, I wrote other books about non-Rebus characters. Then I got an idea for a cold case, and I thought, “Well, Rebus, that’s what he’d be doing. He’d be working as a retired detective for the Cold Case Unit in Edinburgh. But can I write about him? Is he still there in my head?” Oh, he was delighted to come out and play. He’d been sitting in a wee compartment in my head just waiting, waiting, waiting. And he bounded out of that cell, and he was happy to be back in the room again. If a character wants to be written about, they’ll let you know. I’ve invented characters that were major characters and have ended up having no use in life. I had a guy in a book about the Scottish Parliament and he was an MSP. I thought, “Great, I’m going to write a trilogy about the Scottish Parliament within the Rebus series.” He was dead by page 40 because the book said we don’t need this guy. And I had no idea who killed him or why. I just had yet another corpse on my hands. Because the book said I don’t need him.

Then you get a character like Cafferty, the gangster who runs Edinburgh. He was a very minor character in book three, but he just got under my skin. I thought, “There’s a lot I could do with you. You’re the devil tempting Rebus, or you’re the Cain to his Abel, or you’re Mr Hyde from Jekyll and Hyde. I could use you.” So from being a very minor character, he became a very major character. Some characters you think are going to be around for a while don’t last. Some characters you think you’ve invented for one scene stick around because they’re interesting.

I’ll give you an example of that. Almost every book, I auction off the rights to be in the book to real people at charity auctions. And some of them are just for one book only. But one or two of them have stuck around. Christine Esson, who’s a cop who was mentored by Siobhan Clarke in her early days, is a real businesswoman in Edinburgh who paid at a charity auction to be in the books. And I said, “Oh, Christine, tell me something about yourself. Make sure it’s you in the books and not just a character called Christine Esson.” She said, “Well, I don’t drink tea or coffee. I only drink hot water.” That’s all I’ve got to remember now when I start a new Rebus novel. Make sure the character of Christine Esson doesn’t drink tea or coffee. She’s been around for about eight books, in fact, she needs to top up that donation.

The senior crimes guy I’ve used in the last three books, Haj Atwal, is a real guy. Again, a businessman in Edinburgh who paid at a charity auction to be in the books. I said, “Do you want to be a goody or a baddy?” He said, “I want to be a goody.” I said, “Okay, I’ll make you the Head of Senior Crimes.” That’s a solid 20 book sales every year for me because he buys them for his family for Christmas. Top tip.

So, it’s great that these characters stick around because they’re interesting characters. They’ve got a backstory, they’ve got a life to them, they’ve got three-dimensionality. How that happens, I’ve no idea. I’m just happy to go along with it when it does.

Lorna: What about Fife? How often do you think about including Fife in your novels?

Ian: It’s a very leading question, isn’t it? I’m from Fife, I was formed by Fife. I don’t go back very often. I’ve got some family there, cousins and such like. But in terms of really close family, my one sister remaining lives in Perth. I’m still attached to the place. Rebus is a Fifer, he grew up in Cardenden, same as me. I always keep an eye on the football teams, obviously. I support Raith Rovers for my sins, not having a great season this year, unlike Dunfermline. So, I do keep an eye on Fife and Rebus very occasionally has to go there. But I’m always wary, because he’s an Edinburgh cop, so he wouldn’t go to Fife necessarily. He would phone up Fife Constabulary and say, “Well, can you help me with this?” And also, there’s no crime in Fife.

I made a mistake once. I’ve got a house up in Cromarty, up in the Black Isle. And every time I go up there, they would say, “You should set a book here! It’s a really interesting part of the world. You should set a book here.” So, I set a Rebus novel up there. And they said, “Why did you have a murder up here?” What kind of books did you think I wrote? Did you think it was going to be a romance? Rebus was going to open a bookshop and fall in love with a barmaid? I mean, what did you think was going to happen? But I made sure the murder happened in Rosemarkie, which is one town away from Cromarty. So nothing bad happened in Cromarty. It happened in Rosemarkie. I quite like taking readers back to Fife occasionally. I like going back to Fife. But it takes me these days, I’m afraid, for funerals. Used to be weddings, engagements, weddings, christenings, divorces and now we’re getting to the end game.

Lorna: Well, is that the end game now? There’s no more burning questions for now. We just have to thank Ian very, very much for telling us some stories and insights into the wonderful books that you write. And we all love to read them. So keep going, Ian. It’s certainly not the end… there’s always the beginning of your next story.

Ian: Thank you very much.