The author’s new book is a London-set standalone featuring the super-rich and their lavish homes (Image: Hamish Brown / Getty)
When Edinburgh’s five-star Balmoral Hotel renamed three of its function rooms after leading Scottish literary figures, they chose to honour Dame Muriel Spark, Robert Burns… and Rebus! “They named it after the fictional character, not the author,” chuckles Sir Ian Rankin. “I don’t blame them. He’s more real to people than I am.”
Perhaps it’s not such a surprising decision given the cultural importance of Ian’s Det Insp John Rebus over nearly four decades. Surely he must rank as one of Scotland’s best-known exports alongside haggis, whisky and North Sea oil? But when he first started writing, Ian admits today, the Edinburgh Tourist Board feared his gritty depictions of the Scottish capital as crime-ridden, and its inhabitants as heavy-drinking, dour and partial to a bit of murder, might put potential visitors off.
“Back in the early days, they thought my books were not a good advertisement for Edinburgh. Now, of course, they jump on them,” he smiles. “By the time Irvine Welsh came along, you could do a Trainspotting tour. They love literary tourism.” And there’s certainly no bad feelings. Ian supports plans for a statue of Muriel Spark – renowned novelist, playwright and poet – in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens.
Ian Rankin is back with a London-set standalone skewering the super-rich (Image: Paul Grover/Shutterstock)
“There are more public statues of animals than women in Scotland,” he tells me. But he has a particular interest in Dame Muriel, having written half a PhD on her in the late eighties. “I never finished it. I got too busy writing my books, and I gave up. But I’ve got an honorary PhD from Edinburgh – so I don’t need to do the hard work any more.”
He remains a staunch admirer however and his wider conversation is peppered with nods to other writers and musicians. He might be a multi-million selling author but at heart he’s still a fan – prepared to go the extra mile to pay his respects. Like the time on Samoa when, in 40C heat and carrying no water, he hiked up a mountainside to the hilltop mausoleum of Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, who spent his last years living on the Polynesian island.
“It was the middle of the day but I’m just a stupid Scottish guy, you know, so off I went, no water or anything, up this steep, steep hill,” the father-of-two recalls. “I was drenched in sweat. Halfway up, I’m cursing Robert Louis Stevenson for all his worth, saying, ‘I’m never going to read you again’. I got to the top just soaked, absolutely soaked in sweat, but I did make my pilgrimage.”
Or the time he took the poet Seamus Heaney to the Oxford Bar, famously Rebus’s hang-out and one of Ian’s own haunts. “He loved it, but he’d not long had heart surgery, so he unbuttoned his shirt in the middle of the bar to show us his scars.” One can only imagine.
At the age of 66, having achieved worldwide fame and fortune, he could probably be resting on his laurels. His wife, Miranda Harvey, who helps run the charitable trust that gives away a fair old chunk of his earnings every year (in 2023 it was £300,000), would certainly prefer it if he did, so they could travel together more.
Ian in front of mausoleum of Robert Louis Stevenson on Samoa… after dragging himself up mountain (Image: Courtesy Ian Rankin)
And in fairness, he has slowed down. From writing two books a year to put food on the table, he’s settled into a more comfortable pattern. His last Rebus book, Midnight and Blue, came out in 2024 and since then he’s been largely resting. Er, except for a new book that is (sorry, Miranda). “She keeps booking these holidays and cruises and adventures to various places, which is great,” says Ian. “I don’t know whether all these cruises are giving me an inkling of what it’s like to be super-rich.”
Admittedly, there is something of Edinburgh so deeply embedded in Ian’s persona that it’s a bit of a shock to think of him anywhere else. And as for the fact his new standalone novel, The Heights, is set in London… well, pass the smelling salts!
Its title refers to a newly-built residential high-rise towering over London’s Hyde Park – a luxurious home for very high net worth individuals. But the building’s gilded, secretive atmosphere is shattered when a night concierge is found murdered. Enter Ian’s fictional heroine, London-born DS Gillian Gish, and sit back for the fireworks that inevitably follow in what is almost certainly his most political book – highlighting as it does the inevitable tensions between the super-rich and the rest of us.
“I wanted to look at the way London is being hollowed out by billionaires and dark money,” he explains. “These huge skyscrapers are being built where you have to spend tens of millions to get a flat. And all you’re doing is hiding your money away from various tax authorities or the regime back home. What they want is exclusivity, privacy and a gilded life. Well, when a crime happens and the police arrive, that all falls apart. Gish is my Columbo. He’s that shambling, working-class guy who walks into wealth and privilege and tears it down.”
It’s not just in fiction that money causes tensions. In 2024 the Edinburgh Book Festival was forced by climate change campaigners to end its 20-year partnership with sponsors, fund managers Baillie Gifford over their investments in fossil fuels. While remaining diplomatic, Ian remains disappointed at the fallout – which saw less children able to attend and cuts to author programmes in prisons.
“A book festival should be about freedom of speech, and if you don’t like what somebody does, you have a discussion about it, you have a debate,” he says. But although Baillie Gifford withdrew, several writers stepped in with donations. “A bunch of us ponied up. It wasn’t enough to replace the sponsorship but…”
Richard Rankin, no relation to author, as Det Insp John Rebus in BBC reboot (Image: BBC/Viaplay/Eleventh Hour/Mark Mainz)
The idea behind The Heights originally arrived via a 2023 Amazon e-book short story called The Rise. “I loved the characters, I loved the setting and the theme, and I wanted to do more with it,” Ian continues. “We were going on a long cruise last January-February – 55 days circumnavigating South America. So I took all the notes and a big pad of A4 paper.” What he didn’t take, quite deliberately, not really writing as he was, was his laptop.
Luckily, the “lovely Welsh couple” Ian and Miranda sat with in the restaurant every day came to the rescue. “She was amazing, like Mary Poppins – she had everything you needed. So Miranda needed a thimble, she had a spare thimble. And when I said, ‘I’m writing this out by hand’, she loaned me her spare laptop. I emailed it to myself and, when I got back to Edinburgh, printed that off and started writing.”
(The couple in question, “Liz and Justin”, get a nice shout out at the end of the book). “In the short story, there was no room to do anything except thumbnail sketches. The cast list wasn’t nearly as big and we didn’t get a detailed backstory.
“My publisher said, ‘We need to change the title so people don’t think they’re getting the same story’. And my agent said, ‘We need to change the killer, so people get a surprise’. So I did both of those things, but also I managed to bring in Gish’s home life. Actually, the bits of the book I most enjoyed writing were where we go home to Tottenham where she lives with her mum who’s got dementia.”
For an author so embedded in Edinburgh, Ian’s feel for London is instinctive and authentic. He’s walked these streets and, as it turns out, he knows Tottenham well.
“We got married in July 1986 and moved to London. My wife worked in Victoria Street as a civil servant so we went up and down the Victoria Line on the Tube looking for somewhere we could afford to buy a flat,” he explains. “We couldn’t afford anything until we got to Tottenham Hale. So we bought a maisonette. It was the time of the Big Bang so suddenly foreign wealth was moving in and people were very brash and show-offy – it was red braces and chunky mobile phones.” He remains a Spurs fan to this day, travelling to London to watch matches.
He put Gish in Tottenham because it still has a community feel. “She depends a lot on neighbours and friends coming in, looking after her mum,” he says. “That’s the antithesis of the lives these characters in The Heights lead. They have no friends, nobody they can depend on, everything is transactional to them. I wanted her to be the counterpoint to that.”
The Heights by Ian Rankin is out now (Image: Orion)
While his fictional block overlooks Hyde Park, and readers might suspect it owes something of its existence to One Hyde Park, often described as the most expensive apartment building in the UK, Ian insists it’s not based on any individual building.
Its architect Lorne Macneal, however, who lives in The Heights, is real. “His daughter won a charity auction to be in my next book. I said, ‘Well, okay, he’s an architect, I’ll just have him living in The Heights’. So I got a physical description and some photos and there he is in the book.”
One book Ian didn’t refer to, at least not until after he’d finished The Heights, was London Falling, the runaway non-fiction bestseller by US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe – exploring the real-life death of London teenager Zac Brettler who fell from a riverside block.
“It’s interesting because there are superficial similarities in terms of dodgy money and big, expensive buildings that sit on the River Thames,” says Ian. “His take, of course, is very different and being a journalist, he doesn’t know exactly what happened – whereas I can just make stuff up.”
He puts me straight when I suggest his publishers must have been disappointed he wasn’t writing another Rebus. “They were thrilled because here I was introducing a new character who’s much younger than Rebus,” he insists.
“Their thinking is, ‘There’s mileage in this. Ian will write another and another and another’. I think Gish is a good character, but I won’t write about her again until I get a story that can only be told in London. So if that happens, we might see her again.”
Fans will be happy, Miranda possibly less so. “My wife will kill me,” he chuckles. “What she wants me to do is retire so we can just go travelling non-stop.” As for Rebus, there’s every chance of another book at some point. Next year marks his 40th anniversary so plans are afoot to celebrate. A second series of Rebus, the new BBC reboot, is due in the spring.
And unlike some authors who become defined by their characters, Ian hasn’t come to hate Rebus. “People have said, ‘Are you going to kill him off?’ And I just can’t imagine that. Maybe time will do that,” he adds. “He’s in his early 70s now after all.”
The Heights by Ian Rankin (Orion, £25) is out now
