‘The crime fiction I’m interested in is political’: Ian Rankin on his new novel about the super-rich

Ian Rankin. Photograph: Robert Ormerod/The GuardianView image in fullscreenIan Rankin. Photograph: Robert Ormerod/The GuardianInterview‘The crime fiction I’m interested in is political’: Ian Rankin on his new novel about the super-richAlex ClarkThe bestselling writer talks about leaving Edinburgh for London in his latest mystery, and what the future holds for Rebus

Sir Ian Rankin rarely watches television. Certainly, there’s no gleaming flatscreen in the corner of the apartment in Edinburgh where he writes, listens to music and constructs elaborate Lego models (all four Beatles, their Yellow Submarine and, once, a 6ft version of the Eiffel Tower). Did he not see the most recent incarnation of his most famous creation, Detective Inspector John Rebus, this time played by Richard Rankin (no relation), in the wake of previous performances by Ken Stott and John Hannah? “I did,” he concedes. “They gave me them on DVD, so I could play them on my computer.”

Ah, his computer – it’s had its screen and hard drive replaced, and there are grooves in the keys. It sits on top of a plain, compact trestle-table desk he bought on London’s Charing Cross Road in 1987 and lugged back to his Tottenham flat on the tube; both have accompanied him from London to rural Dordogne, in southwest France, where he lived for a few years with his wife, Miranda, in the 1990s, and back to Edinburgh, where the couple and their two sons have been ever since.

But if all this makes him sound doggedly attached to the past, wary of change and of modernity, his work stands in stark contradiction. Across 26 Rebus books, a smaller series involving the detective Malcolm Fox, and a number of standalone novels and plays, Rankin has shown himself to be fiercely attentive to the most serious aspects of contemporary life. “The crime fiction I’m interested in,” he tells me, “is the crime fiction that’s looking at society and the mess we’re in and how we got there, and it’s predominantly political.”

His new novel, The Heights, takes on the challenge in dramatic and glittering style. Its title refers to a Knightsbridge apartment building aimed squarely at the highest end of the property market, its inhabitants the rich and famous who take as read that their residence will include a cinema and a luxury spa, and that visitors will pass by Chapman brothers artworks in its marble entrance hall. They are perhaps not expecting that their concierge will be discovered with his head bludgeoned, and that DS Gillian Gish will quickly appear on the scene to quiz them as to their whereabouts.

One of the influences feeding into Gish, a brand-new lead character, is 1970s American TV detective Columbo, whom Rankin – back in his TV-viewing days – found captivating. “I didn’t realise it when I was watching as a teenager, but he’s a socialist figure,” Rankin says. “He comes into these very rich people’s lives and tears them apart, and they don’t know he’s doing it until he’s already done it. I just thought that was extraordinary. It’s to do with class: he’s the underclass, they’re the overclass, and he’s going to bring them down. Rebus has done that in quite a few of the books. And Gish, I think, secretly really enjoys the idea that she’s going to upset them by asking the wrong questions and by interfering in their very comfortable, cosseted world.”

Gish has the kind of hinterland that Rebus lacks; she’s embedded in her own neighbourhood, in Rankin’s previous stomping ground of Tottenham, and after work she goes home to care for her mother. Her off-duty life contributes to the portrait of London as a series of wildly disconnected locations and social milieux. I ask him whether it was nerve-racking to leave the Edinburgh setting that he’s written about for so long? “I didn’t feel any trepidation,” he replies. “In some ways it can be a wee bit stifling. You get an idea for a story, you say, ‘Well, could that be contained in Edinburgh? And if it can’t be contained in Edinburgh, can I write it?’”

And he’s convinced that his story of the ostentatious performance of wealth combined, paradoxically, with the obsession with privacy of the ultra-rich, wouldn’t have worked in Edinburgh. A prosperous city it may be, but “You’re not going to see a Rolls-Royce or a Bugatti Veyron. The wealth here is discreet.”

The success of his novels has, of course, made Rankin himself a wealthy man, even if it did take him until his 60s – he’s 66 now – to get an office of his own. Over the years, he’s worked in a succession of spare rooms, attics and even next to a juddering washing machine, a clothes airer over his head. He is, he says, glad he didn’t make it big when he was young: “I was stupid. I’m sure I would have bought a Lamborghini and a pinball machine for every room in the house.”

View image in fullscreenKen Stott as Rebus in the ITV series. Photograph: ITV/ShutterstockNow, he and Miranda live a few minutes’ walk away from the writing flat, and take trips to far-flung places. “Miranda decided a few years ago that, now the kids have left and we’ve got money in the bank: before we get too old and we lose the use of our limbs and our brains, we should travel. I am holiday agnostic. She’s the one who tells me, right, you’re going here and you’re going there. So we do a lot of travelling, just in the last three or four years maybe. She’s booking through to 2028 at the moment.”

When he’s away, he researches but can’t actually write. On a recent cruise around South America, he hadn’t even taken the ancient laptop and was making notes in longhand when a fellow passenger offered him the loan of a computer – which explains the message of gratitude at the end of The Heights. But when he does come back to base, he writes quickly, and determinedly, although he bats away being described as unusually productive. At the couple’s house in Cromarty, “if the weather’s nice, I get no writing done. If the weather’s bad, I get a lot of writing done because there’s nothing else to do. I’m the laziest, hard-working author I know.”

But aside from buying vinyl, seeing the odd live band – seated gigs only these days, he concedes ruefully – Lego and holidays, Rankin has another use for his earnings. Each year, between 30 and 40% of his net income goes into the charitable trust that he and Miranda set up, for which their older son, Jack, also works. “I’ve got more money than I can spend. Once you’ve bought a nice hi-fi system and you’ve got a nice car, what are you going to do?”

The trust’s focus is on smaller charities, often those supporting young people and adults with special needs – people like the Rankins’ younger son, Kit, who has Angelman syndrome, a genetic condition that means he has severe learning difficulties, and has also experienced epilepsy and vision problems. Now in his early 30s, Kit lives in a care facility nearby, and all four of them meet up every Sunday. “Any money that we leave behind when we shuffle off this mortal coil will get channelled to him to make sure that he’s always looked after. And our older son will be part of that process of looking after him financially.”

I feel that I can’t leave without asking about Rebus, whom we last saw behind bars, following the death of his old adversary, gangster “Big Ger” Cafferty. Rankin is tight-lipped on his next project – back to Rebus, or perhaps another outing for Gillian Gish? – but does shed some light on Rebus’s future. After all, I say, you left him in a pretty parlous state. “Everybody says that, but it’s not true,” he protests. “At the end of the book, his lawyer says, ‘You’ve got some very good news.’ So he’s obviously getting out. You know the appeal is going to be heard and he’s going to get out. I have no doubt in my mind that’s the happy ending.”

And with that, Sir Ian Rankin is off to do a bit of writing before an evening out. Possibly he’ll drop into the Oxford Bar, where the locals’ only acknowledgment of his elevated status is to ask, “Where’s your horse”? And you sense he wouldn’t have it any other way.