Authors: Otto Penzler
Pendergast: Yes, at Oxford University. I have a dual PhD in classics and philosophy, and I took firsts in both.
Preston: And then, I believe, you went into the Special Forces? We’ve heard rumors that you were engaged in a number of black ops.
Pendergast: If I was, I could hardly be expected to discuss them, could I?
Child: Getting back to your childhood, we know the Pendergast mansion was burned by a mob. Why?
Pendergast: [Long pause] The Pendergast family was, shall we say, eccentric, and not at all popular with the local folk—but it was my great-aunt Cornelia who was the proximate cause.
Child: Cornelia? The one in the Mount Mercy Hospital for the Criminally Insane?
Pendergast: That is correct.
Preston: What did she do?
Pendergast: She was a chemist of no small talent, which is all I am going to say on that subject. I believe I’ve already made it clear that I would prefer to avoid personal topics. Mr. Preston, would you care to be questioned about that streak of mental instability in your own family? For example, I understand that your brother Richard—
Preston: [Loudly clearing his throat] The interview is about you, not me.
Pendergast: Quite.
Child: Moving on, I wonder if you would tell us about some of your more interesting cases.
Pendergast: Other than the ones which you have so regrettably sensationalized in your books? On a personal level, the most remarkable case I worked on was in Tanzania—the attacks of the red lion.
Preston: The “red lion”?
Pendergast: It was, according to the local tribal legend, a monstrous lion that attacked only at night; it had an unquenchable hunger for human flesh. And it was of a color never before seen. The killings flared up while I was on a bushbuck hunting trip. Over the space of five evenings, twenty-four people were killed, their livers eaten.
Child: How horrible. But I assume—since you call it a “case”—the murderer turned out to be human?
Pendergast: More or less.
Preston: More or less? What does that mean?
Pendergast: There are degrees of humanity, Mr. Preston. The two of you wrote up my recent case in Medicine Creek, Kansas; you should know that. In any case, the chief presented me with a brace of elephant tusks by way of thanks. [He nods to a doorway] They make a rather dramatic entrance to my study, don’t you think?
Child: Was this the same hunting expedition on which your wife accompanied you? Where you were charged by the Cape buffalo?
Pendergast: Yes. In fact, my wife was instrumental in working out some of the highly peculiar psychological aspects. It was our last case together.
Preston: If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to her?
Pendergast: [Stiffly] That question lies outside the bounds of this interview. Earlier, I said there are many things about me you will never know. The fate of my beloved wife is one of those. Now, gentlemen, if you don’t mind, this interview is over; Proctor will see you out.
IAN RANKIN
Born in Fife, Scotland, Rankin went to the University of Edinburgh, majoring in English. Writing profusely, he sold several short stories and then a slim novel, The Flood (1986), which had a very small print run. In 1987, he wrote his first John Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, which also had a modest printing. After a spy novel, Watchman (1991), he returned to Rebus with Tooth and Nail (1992) and continued to write about the Scottish policeman until 2008, when Rebus took his last case in Exit Music. Rankin also wrote three novels as Jack Harvey in the early nineties: Witch Hunt, Bleeding Hearts, and Blood Hunt.
In 1991, he received a Chandler-Fulbright Award, with a substantial cash prize that had to be spent in America, which he then toured with his wife, Miranda.
Rankin’s breakout book was Black and Blue, which won the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger as the best novel of 1997. In 2005, he was given the highest honor bestowed by that organization when he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. He won the Best Novel Edgar® in 2004 for Resurrection Men.
A television series based on the Rebus character began in 2000 with John Hannah in the title role; Ken Stott took over in 2005.
Achieving unprecedented success in the UK, Rankin still holds a Guinness world record for simultaneously occupying eight of the top ten spots on the Scottish bestseller list.
Ian Rankin lives in Edinburgh with his wife and two sons.
JOHN REBUS
BY IAN RANKIN
I
“Male hero (a policeman?)”
That was my first note to myself, dated March 15, 1985, about the character who would eventually become Detective Inspector John Rebus. I was twenty-four years old and a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh. I was living in a shared apartment with two other (female) postgrads in Arden Street. I’d been in the city six and a half years, and still I couldn’t fathom the place. My doctoral thesis was concentrating on the novelist Muriel Spark, and through her I was beginning to investigate the Edinburgh of the imagination. In Spark’s most celebrated work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Brodie is a descendant of William Brodie, a real historical character. Brodie was a deacon of the city, a councillor, cabinetmaker, and a man who lived a double life. Respectable and industrious by day, he led a masked gang into the homes of his victims by night, robbing them of their valuables. Brodie was trying to fund his lavish lifestyle (including a couple of demanding mistresses), and had diversified into lock-fitting, meaning he had little trouble gaining unlawful entry. When caught and found guilty, he was hanged on a scaffold he had helped to modernize as part of his day job.
Deacon Brodie provided the template for another great character from Scottish literature, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Henry Jekyll. Muriel Spark was a huge fan of Stevenson, and my research took me to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The idea of the doppelgänger had been explored before, however, in James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, so I had to read that book too. At the same time, I was becoming fascinated by contemporary literary theory, enjoying the “game-playing” aspect of storytelling. Eventually, I would name my own fictional detective after a type of picture-puzzle, and the mystery in his first adventure would be solved with the help of a professor of semiotics.
That’s the problem with Knots and Crosses (and one reason I find it hard to read the book these days)—it is so obviously written by a literature student. Rebus reads too many books and even quotes from Walt Whitman (a writer whose works he really shouldn’t have known). He is overly literate, perhaps because I didn’t quite know him. I was twenty-four and knew little enough of life outside the confines of academia. I certainly didn’t know what it would be like to work as a cop. The plot of Knots and Crosses demanded that Rebus be a seasoned pro, so I made him forty years old. He’s separated from his wife and has a young daughter. Really, this guy was unlike me in so many ways, and our one resemblance—that love of literature—made him less than realistic.
It seems to me now that I wasn’t interested in Rebus as a person. He was a way of telling a story about Edinburgh, and of updating the doppelgänger tradition. Knots and Crosses was self-consciously based on Jekyll and Hyde, just as a later Rebus novel, The Black Book, would use Justified Sinner as its starting point. The thing is, I’d always been a bit of an outsider, always tried to present several faces to the world. I’d grown up in a fairly tough neighborhood—in a town of seven thousand inhabitants—which had existed only as a hamlet and a couple of farms until coal was discovered at the start of the twentieth century. That’s when my grandfather shifted the family east from the Lanarkshire coalfields. Homes were constructed quickly (and cheaply) to house the new labor force. There wasn’t even time to think up names for the streets, so they just got numbers instead. My dad (the youngest of seven) didn’t work down in the mines, but all his brothers did. By the time I came along, however, the coal was running out. The klaxon that signaled the start of each new shift fell silent one day, and that was that. Not that I took much of this in, being too busy living a completely separate life inside my own head.
There was another world in there—a fantastical world filled with spaceships and soldiers and constant thrilling adventure. In winter, I’d pretend that my bed was an Arctic encampment—which wasn’t so far from the truth. There was heating only in the living room downstairs, and in the winter months I’d wake up to a thin film of ice on the insides of my windows. But even that ice seemed strange and wonderful to my young imagination. I’d be under the thick blankets with a flashlight and a good supply of comic books—British and American. Soon I was even making my own versions, folding sheets of paper and slitting the edges to make little eight-page booklets that I would cover with doodles and drawings—more spaceships, more soldiers. I think I remember showing one of my creations to my mum, who seemed bemused. Maybe she’d spotted something I hadn’t: an absolute lack of artistic ability.
Not that this mattered, because by the age of twelve I was moving from comic books to music. I’d started buying chart singles and reading pop magazines. I was decorating the walls of my room with posters. A friend’s older brother opened my ears to Frank Zappa, Jethro Tull, and Led Zeppelin. My mother agreed to buy me a Hendrix album for my birthday, although this meant a terrifying sortie to the “hippie” record shop in nearby Kirkcaldy. As with comic books, however, I wasn’t interested in being a mere bystander—I wanted a band of my own, and created on paper what was impossible in real life. My alter ego was vocalist Ian Kaput, and he was joined by guitarist Blue Lightning and bassist Zed “Killer” Macintosh (plus a drummer with a double-barreled name, but I forget now what it was). The group was called the Amoebas. They started off playing three-minute pop hits but eventually graduated to progressive rock—their masterpiece lasted twenty-six minutes and was called “Continuous Repercussions”—and I was with them all the way, writing their lyrics, designing their record sleeves, planning their world tours and TV appearances. I’d make up a top ten (albums and singles) each week, which entailed the creation of another nine groups, and so it went.
I’m conscious now that what I was doing was “playing God,” re-imagining my world and making it more exciting and evocative than the reality. It’s what all writers do, and already I was starting to feel like a writer. My parents weren’t great readers, and there were few books in the house, but I was drawn to stories. I would haunt the town’s library and soon started borrowing “adult” titles, meaning books whose films I wasn’t old enough to see at the cinema. At age thirteen, I was reading Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. By fourteen it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I also came across Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft books (and would eventually give Rebus the forename John as a nod to “black private dick” John Shaft). I checked the TV schedules to see if there were any programs about books and would watch them, deciding that I really needed to read this guy Solzhenitsyn (I ended up struggling through volume two of The Gulag Archipelago). Later on I would fail to finish Dante’s Inferno but be thrilled by Ian McEwan’s first book of short stories.
My best subject in high school was English. I always enjoyed writing essays (which were in effect short stories). One was called “Paradox” and concerned a man who seemed to be president of the United States but turned out to be an inmate in an insane asylum. My teacher liked it but wondered why I’d chosen that particular title. It was the name of a Hawkwind song, I told him, and I just liked the sound and look of the word.
“And no, sir, I’ve no idea what it means.”
For another essay, we were given the phrase “Dark they were and golden-eyed” and told to use it as our starting point. I wrote about two parents searching a house filled with drug addicts, seeking their errant son.
Words were a passion of mine. I would do crosswords and flick through the dictionary, noting interesting words (including, after the exchange noted above, paradox). And those song lyrics for the Amoebas had become poems, one of which I entered for a national competition. It was called “Euthanasia” (another of those great-sounding words) and was runner-up. When my success was noted in the local newspaper, my parents learned for the first time that I was writing poetry. I hadn’t dared tell anyone until then. (Later, I would learn that Muriel Spark’s first publication had also been a prize-winning school poem.)
I’d always been a successful chameleon, playing the part of fitting in. I played soccer (badly) and had a bicycle. I hung around the street corners with the tough kids. But when a rumble started, I’d be on the periphery of the action, taking it all in without getting involved. When I went home, I’d head for my bedroom and write poems about the fights, the booze, the first sexual fumblings, and then my notebook would go back underneath my bed, hidden from view.
II
Okay, so I’m seventeen now, and I want nothing more than to be an accountant.
See, nobody in my family has been to university, but it seems I’m brainy and it’s expected I’ll go. And if you’re working-class, you go to university to escape your roots—to get a good career: doctor, lawyer, dentist, architect…
I had an uncle in England, and he owned his own house (unlike my parents) and had a flash car (neither of my parents could even drive). Our summer holidays were spent at seaside resorts in Scotland and England, or in a cramped trailer twenty miles north of my hometown. My uncle always seemed to have a tan from foreign holidays. He was the most successful man I knew, and I wanted the same for myself.