Sir Ian Rankin

We're honoured to have Sir Ian Rankin, one of the most successful authors in the world, as our guest today. If you love to read, you'll almost certainly have read one of Ian's novels - and in John Rebus, he created one of the most enduring, complicated and loved central characters in modern fiction. In this really absorbing conversation, Ian describes his childhood in a working class home in Fife, where his parents taught him the value of "thrawn" - resilience and determination against the odds. Ian was a quiet and bookish child, who spent hours at his desk in his tiny bedroom making up stories and imaginary pop groups who would compete each other in an invented top ten. He became a punk, started to be interested in girls, and realised that he didn't want to be an accountant - but instead wanted to defy his family and study English at university. He went to Edinburgh, met his wife, and discovered a world beyond his home town which has captivated and inspired him ever since. Ian also talks to Gyles about his son, Kit, who has a chromosomal defect and is severely disabled. He talks about his writing process and philanthropy. And finally he talks about his new novel, The Heights, which is out now. Ian's book, The Heights, is available here https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-heights/ian-rankin/9781398730601. It is Ian's first standalone thriller in two decades, and tells the story of the dark underbelly of a luxury apartment block in London. It is highly recommended. Our thanks to Sir Ian for his time, energy and charming conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 1:48Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to another episode of Rosebud. I'm Gyles Brandreth and I'm speaking to you from Edinburgh, one of my favorite cities. Because, well, I've read a lot about Edinburgh. And when I read about Edinburgh, the writer I like reading the most, I think, is the person who's my guest today. It is Ian Rankin. Now, Sir Ian Rankin, the creator of really one of the most memorable characters in crime fiction in our time. They talk about Tartan Noir. And at the heart of Tartan Noir are the novels about Detective Inspector Rebus, created by Ian Rankin. The first Rebus book was Knots and Crosses, a long time ago now. Since then, there have been many of them.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  They've sold some 35 million copies around the world. He's written about other things, other detectives, other mysteries. Can I say something? This isn't just another interview with another crime writer who's got a new book to plug. This is a proper conversation about a very interesting life. The man happens to be a writer. I found it revelatory. I found it moving. I think he's very impressive. I mean, I love his books, but that's almost by the by. Having met the man, I now rather love the man. He is remarkable. So, sit back and listen to the story of a man who's written some of the best stories, I think, of our time. That is Ian Rankin. Cue the music.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  How long have you been called Sir Ian?

• 3:32Speaker 04

  Not long, two or three years.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Have you got used to it?

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Nobody calls me Sir Ian.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  I've just suddenly realized, of course, I have to call you Sir Ian. Quite exciting, isn't it?

• 3:40Speaker 04

  Only in front of the Queen do you need to call me Sir Ian.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Very good.

• 3:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  But you were excited. Did that, you wouldn't have said, yes.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  It was, yeah, no, it was extraordinary. I just thought how proud my parents would have been to receive it. And I got an OBE a while ago, but I got that in Edinburgh. This, I decided to go down to Buckingham Palace. And it was Princess Anne who did the honors. And it was all very lovely. It was, it was great. But it's never opened many doors for me, Giles, I have to say.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Well, you are Sir Ian Rankin. I love that. Born on the 28th of April, 1960. Got that right? So I want to ask you, Ian, what is your very first memory?

• 4:18Speaker 04

  There are a few conflicting notions in my head, but the one that sticks out clearly is that I was in a pram or a buggy of some description in a very small dowdy sweet shop in the village where I grew up, being bought sweets by an mom, an auntie, I'm not sure who. And just the elderly woman behind the counter reaching down to give me the sweets. And it was a corrugated iron shack, basically. Tiny corrugated iron shack in the middle of the village. And that was where I went to get sweets. And it must also have sold newspapers and things.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Do you have a favorite childhood sweet that comes to mind?

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Milky Bar.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Oh, well, it's chocolate.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, white chocolate. Remember the Milky Bar Kid?

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  And in fact, that's another early memory is that you could save up tokens and you could send away for a Milky Bar Kid rifle. And I fell down the stairs one day. And as I was being comforted at the bottom of the stairs, I would have been about four or five, the door opened and there was the postman with my Milky Bar Kid rifle. So then I cheered up immediately.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  That's marvelous. So here you are on this corrugated iron roof, this shed, where sweets are being bought for you by an auntie and your mom. Who, who was your mom? Who was the auntie?

• 5:36Speaker 04

  My mom, Isabel, born in Bradford.

• 5:40Speaker 04

  My dad and her, that was both their second marriages. She had moved to Fife because her husband was from there. He had died. She went into the local greengrocers or grocery shop. And there was my dad who ran it. And they eventually got married and I came along. The aunt would have been, the village we grew up in was very tribal. It was a very working class, tribal mining village in Fife. So my mom didn't have any family nearby. It was all my dad's family. But my goodness, there were so many of them. I had an aunt and uncle, his brother, over the back fence. Two doors away from us on our cul-de-sac was my dad's sister. So it would have been her, my Aunt Lizzie, and possibly my mom as well.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  Aunt Lizzie did a lot of looking after me in the early days because my parents both worked.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  What did they work at, your parents?

• 6:31Speaker 04

  Well, my dad was in this grocery shop in Loch Gally, which was three miles away. He got the bus to work every, every day. Neither of my parents could drive. My mom worked in a school canteen and then latterly in a chicken factory canteen.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Goodness.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  In Glenrothes. And she had to get a lift from somebody in a car because again, there was no transport links between the village I lived in and Glenrothes.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  What were they like to look at? What was your, what did your dad look like? And what, if you came into the room now, what sort of person would we be meeting?

• 7:00Speaker 04

  Charming and charismatic, a twinkle in the eye. Bald from a very young age, which made me very worried when I was young. But I retain a thick head of hair, good, thank goodness. He, yeah, he was a, he ran a shop. You've got to be charming and be a people person and be sociable. And he was all of those things. Telling terrible jokes, singing songs.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Did he have a dark side?

• 7:24Speaker 04

  He did not have a dark side at all. Didn't swear. Neither of my parents, I think, ever, I ever heard swear. No drinking or hardly any drinking. When he came home on a Friday night, he went out, I think on a Friday, for a couple of drinks with his mates. And when he came home, I was in bed and he always had to come up to bed to assure me that he wasn't drunk. I made sure that he told me that. He'd also tell me terrible stories about World War II, which it turns out were all fictitious. But that's another, that's another story.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Well, and had he had, he had had a first wife?

• 7:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  What happened to her?

• 7:54Speaker 04

  His first wife had died young. I'm not sure how. There was a daughter from that marriage.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Who you knew?

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Yes, Maureen, she was about 15, 16 years older than me. So the year I was-

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Did she live at home with you?

• 8:06Speaker 04

  No, no, she was married the year I was born. So she'd never lived with us. My other sister, Linda, who was from my mom's first marriage. It's getting complicated now. My half, so two half sisters. Linda was seven years older than me and she's still with us. My other sister, Maureen, sadly no longer is. So the pair of us were in the house.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  So the widow and the widower, they get married. What age are they when they get married?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Well, my, I mean, when I came along, my mom was in her late 30s and my dad was in his early 40s. So I was very aware when I started school that all my friends' parents were much younger than mine.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  You described your dad as if he came into the room. What did your mother look like? And what impact would she make if she came into the room?

• 8:47Speaker 04

  Uh, she was very small. I mean, my dad would be about five ten, but he seemed very tall to me. My mum was four nine, four ten.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  And my sister Linda is much the same, petite, um, small, bustling, always busy. Despite having the job, uh, all doing all the cooking, most of the shopping, the ironing, the hoovering, the washing. Um, you know, my dad would come in from work and dinner would be ready, or tea as we called it.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Your first home then, what, what do you remember of your first home, your bedroom?

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Well, I was, I was there. I, I was born in a prefab, um, a little pre, prefabricated bungalow.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  You were actually born at home?

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I didn't make it to the hospital, born at home. Uh, but soon after I was born, we moved into a brand new. S S H A, the Scottish Special Housing Association, the equivalent of a council house in a cul-de-sac. With lots of other families all moving in at the same time, most with young children. So it was again, it was like a, a tribe. It was a very, you knew, you knew everybody and you could knock on anybody's door and walk in. Um, so it was a nice house, uh, never had central heating, never had double glazing. I mean, the old stories you often hear, oh, it was hard. We had, you know, frost on the inside of the windows in winter. And dad would get up and put the coal fire on before anybody else got up, because otherwise the place was freezing.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  And you depended on the, on the coal fire for your hot water. Uh, yeah. But it was, you know, it was, it was uh, fun. It was a fun place to live.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  What was your bedroom like?

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Tiny. It was my first bedroom, because my sister Linda was still at home, my first bedroom was at the back. Uh, and was approximately seven feet by six, I would say.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  Uh, there was a single bed.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Smaller than a prison cell.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  Really, a single bed and eventually a little kind of desk, uh, and a sort of airing cupboard. Um, and that was it.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Can you remember the first book that you looked at? Picture book or story book?

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Well, there weren't many books in the house. My parents weren't really readers, but, um, the local library. The Carnegie Library was terrific and my mum would take me down to the library. Once or twice a week to renew books. So a lot of books came from there.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Once or twice a week?

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  That's a lot.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it was, you could take out three books and I would take them out and look at the, mostly look at the pictures, you know? I wouldn't do a lot of actual reading. I remember getting Rupert Anio and I would sort of look at the pictures, but I would never read the extended text. That was too much.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  The illustrations are brilliant, aren't they?

• 11:13Speaker 04

  Comics was the thing.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  It wasn't really books, it was comics. D C Thompson, God bless him, and Dundee were the purveyors of literacy. To generations of working class kids in Scotland and beyond. And I went from the kind of really bimbo was the one I remember getting first when I was very young, the bimbo pre-five. Then you moved on to the Beano and the, uh, Dandy. And then as you got a little bit older, you moved on to the Boys Adventure Comics, Hotspur and the Victor. And the Lion and the Tiger, and then American Comics from that.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Wonderful thing, D C Thompson.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was affordable literacy and it was a rung of the ladder. So when you asked me about books, I would often, if my mum had to go to Kirkcaldy, which was our local. Big town for shopping, um, I would be allowed to buy a, a Lady Bird book. They were cheap and they were good. Lots of good illustrations.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  And to term what room did you live in? Your bedroom's very small. Was there a sitting room or a kitchen that you were mostly in?

• 12:08Speaker 04

  Downstairs was a, there was just a living room with what we in Scotland call a bolly hole. A bolly hole is a serving hatch through to the kitchen. Um, so as a kid, you could crawl through that. It was a lot of fun. As long as your mum didn't catch you doing it, it was a lot of fun and hide under the pulley, which was full of clothes hanging up.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  And what were your parents like together? Picture them together as, as a couple.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Well, I don't remember physical intimacy, hugs and kisses and things. I don't remember that at all. They were, their relationship was a, was, was a working relationship. They made it work. They would, I remember vividly them sitting down at the kitchen table on a Friday evening, which was payday. Getting their pay packets open and dividing up what needed to be, so, so much for the rent, so much for electricity. So much for summer holiday, so much for insurance and so much for Christmas.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Are you making it seem like a working partnership rather than a, a great romance?

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Well, I don't think that, I mean, the, you know, the, where I grew up, when I grew up. I don't remember anybody being kind of touchy feely. I mean, the working class in Scotland weren't really, they just got on with stuff. My mum and dad went out, they went out to dances and parties and I do have photographic evidence of that. Not many, but they did go out. But they tended not to go out together. My dad would go with his mates on a Friday night to the pub and my mum would. I don't know. I don't remember my mum really going out with friends at all.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  But you think they were happy together?

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think they were. I think.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Happy or contented or settled?

• 13:41Speaker 04

  No, I mean, I think they'd been through a lot. I mean, you know, my mum had lost a husband young and had brought up a young daughter. My dad had lost his wife young and brought up a young daughter. He'd been through the war, she'd served in the war. Um, you know, they'd met in the late fifties. Um, it was a hard time. And as I say, they never owned their own home, they never owned a car. When my dad died, uh, his entire estate, because my mum pre-deceased him. When he died and I went back to the family home, which he was still in, the home I grew up in. Uh, his, his entire estate was four hundred pounds divided between three of us.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  And what age were they when they both died?

• 14:21Speaker 04

  My mum was very young. Um, I went off to university aged eighteen. And she took ill literally a week after I started university and she died when I was nineteen. So she would have been, um.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  I mean, she wasn't even sixty. I know the pair of them were starting to think about retirement. They were starting to consider retirement. Their last child had left home. Uh, and it was like her body just switched off as soon as the last child had left.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  And how did that affect you? How were you rocked by her death when you were only nineteen?

• 14:54Speaker 04

  It was terrible. Um, I mean, from eighteen to nineteen, here I am, I've, I've left home, first member of my family to go to university. Came to Edinburgh University, um, studying, you know, on the surface having a great time. But having to phone home to check with my dad, how my mum's doing, and then going home at weekends. To see her and watch her decline slowly but surely over the course of about ten months. Um, it was hellish.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  And how did your dad cope?

• 15:23Speaker 04

  I mean, not, not brilliantly, I wouldn't say. I mean, he was, he, you know, he looked after her, but because I wasn't there, I really don't know. How he coped. I think it was tough. It was very, very hard. Um.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Did you and he talk about it or did you just sort of got on with life?

• 15:39Speaker 04

  I, you know, we didn't really talk about it that much. We didn't. We weren't, it wasn't a very open, you know. Uh, even with my sister, I didn't really talk about it. I mean, I had my other life. I was like a Jekyll and Hyde character. You know, I was studying Shakespeare midweek and then going back to this little working class enclave and watching my mum die. It was an ex, you know, really weird time.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  And how soon?

• 16:00Speaker 04

  And I started writing very dark poetry. I remember that. Yeah. My poetry got very dark.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Was it any good?

• 16:06Speaker 04

  No. It did, it was cathartic.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  It did what, you know, you use writing for a lot of the time, which is therapy and catharsis.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  And how soon after did your dad die?

• 16:18Speaker 04

  Oh, he stuck around. Yeah. Another woman came in tow. Uh, he had, yes, largely he had yet another, uh, lovely woman acquaintance that he hung out with.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  And did you like her? Was that okay?

• 16:27Speaker 04

  She was great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was very pleased for him because it, you know, it gave him a boost. Uh, he died when he was seventy-two and he died in his sleep. And that was a bit of a shock. I was in London by this stage, married. Living in London and the phone call came and it was out of the blue because I, he had high blood pressure, but he didn't have anything else. He didn't smoke. My wife, mum and dad had both given up smoking when I was in my early teens, uh, thankfully. And, uh, I thought he was generally fairly fit.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  What did your parents give to you that you've got in you now?

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Uh, there's a good Scots word I like, thráin, T H R A W N. It means to be stubborn. Just to keep pushing ahead, not to give up, not to get downhearted, to take adversity, uh, on the chin and keep going. All of that, I think I got from my parents. Um, and I think they were very bemused but proud. That I was clever and had got the grades that meant I could go to university. But yeah, I took all of that from them and, and, you know, family, hopefully. It's kind of weird because the job I do means that a lot of the time I'm physically present, but psychologically not.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  Because my head is in the book somewhere and I'm trying to balance that can be difficult sometimes.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Go back to your childhood and this small but happy home. I can picture your parents perfectly now. And I can picture you with your comics disappearing into the world of the dandy and the Beano and the rest.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  What, describe yourself as a little boy, as a small boy. What did you look like? How did you behave? What were the games you played?

• 18:10Speaker 04

  Terrible, terrible homemade haircut. Um, you know, I've, there's a photograph of me somewhere wearing this little clip on tartan bow tie. Uh, that I wore at weddings. Um, I did it very occasionally when I was small, wear a kilt.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Were you a cheerful child?

• 18:25Speaker 04

  Um, I don't know. I was very self-contained, very self-contained. I did try, because the place where I grew up was quite tribal. I tried to look like I fitted in. So when the time came, you're too young to remember this, around about seventy-one, seventy-two, the boot boys arrived, the bolver boys, the skinheads all rested. And like everybody else, I got my Doc Martens, uh, and I would wear a Harrington jacket and hang around the street corners looking tough.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  And what inspired you to do that?

• 18:52Speaker 04

  The fact that you didn't want to stick out from, from everybody around you.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  To be like everybody else.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  Everybody around me was doing that, so I had to do it too. Otherwise they would think Ian's a bit weird and different. But in your. You didn't want to be different. You didn't want to be seen to be different.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Though in your head, you felt you were different.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  In my head I was. And whenever they said, right, we're heading off to Loch Gellie to have a battle with the local Loch Gellie hoodlums. I would say, sorry guys, I've got to go home and I would go back to my bedroom, get a, a notebook and write about it. I would imagine what that would have been like, that experience.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  What made you a loner? Why do you think you were like this?

• 19:26Speaker 04

  Uh, I don't know. Is it genetics? What is it? Uh, just a predisposition. I'm much, I, I really enjoyed.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Being creative. So I liked playing with soldiers and cowboys and Indians and toy cars. And I would create these adventures for all my toys that I played with. Um, and sometimes I would try and draw comics and write comic strips and stuff.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Did you have a best friend outside of home?

• 19:52Speaker 04

  I had a lot of friends. I would go and play with, play football with and go for long walks with. And we were allowed off the leash, you know, we could disappear for ten hours at a stretch and our parents wouldn't worry about us. No phones in those days. I mean, those are the days when you would walk two miles to your friend's house, knock on the door and ask if he was home. And if he wasn't, you'd just walk home again, you know, uh, so it was, it was, it was, yeah, it was pretty good. And all the friends I've still got, actually, most of the friends I've still got, aged sixty-six, are friends from school days. And I still keep up with a fair number of them.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  And what is childhood friendship? What happens in childhood friendship?

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Well, back then, it was socialization. You were learning skills. You were learning to be brave. I remember vividly there was a, a pipe, a big metal pipe that went over the river in my village. I think it carried wastewater from the mines, coal mines, I can't remember. And I was terrified of crossing it because I thought I would fall in. But because everybody else was crossing it, you had to cross it too. And so you're learning, you're learning to be brave, you're learning skills, you're learning how to socialize. Um, and you're, you're having a great time.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Were you a good boy? Were you naughty?

• 21:08Speaker 04

  I was a very good boy. I didn't get, the only times I got the belt really were for talking.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  You got the belt? This is at school or at home?

• 21:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, at school. My parent, I never, I remember my mum hitting me once and my dad never hit me at all. Um, no, it's school. You get the belt for talking and it was always.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Was this primary school or secondary school?

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Primary school, secondary, secondary school.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  You say the belt, you mean?

• 21:27Speaker 04

  The TAWSE, we call it, T A W S E, made in Loch Llei.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  This was actually an instrument?

• 21:32Speaker 04

  A leather belt with notched into two or three little straps at the end.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Provided by a school supplier? This is.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  I, I think teachers had to buy their own.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Gosh.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  And they were thick leather. You can still buy them. They're mostly used for S and M, Giles, you might be interested to know that. You're not allowed to have them in schools anymore, but you're allowed to have them in S and M clubs. And so they're still made, I think, in Loch Llei, uh, which is two miles, three miles away from where I grew up. Um, and yeah, teachers got, some teachers were very good at giving a belt. Oh, yeah. They wrapped it around your wrist. They produced welts. They could make you bleed. Um, they would put one palm on top of the other palm. So when you hit one hand, it went through to the other. So you were, it stung both your palms and then you would cross them back over and do the other hand. So you were getting double measures, really.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  And what did you think of this at the time? What age were you?

• 22:20Speaker 04

  Well, this is from the age of five onwards. Um, you just took it as this is what happens. I, I think the belt was outlawed round about nineteen seventy-six or seventy-seven, so I would have been about sixteen. And I do remember getting the belt up into senior high school, so I would have been sixteen, seventeen.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  And this was for cheek, basically, talking?

• 22:37Speaker 04

  Talking out of turns, a very occasional, I mean, one time we cheated on a cross-country run, we hid. Uh, and one time, you know, we just took a half day off school and we got the belt for that. But most of the time it was for talking out of turn.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  So what is your happiest memory of school? Give us a good recollection of either of your schools, primary or secondary.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  Well, I, it's a succession of very good teachers, very, very competent teachers. And in fact, that's what I was going to do. My, my parents were horrified when I said I was going to go to university to study English literature. Because they thought working class kids went to college to get a job, to get a trade. So they were thinking accountancy. So they were trying to push me into the, I had one successful uncle. He lived in Bradford. He was married to my mum's sister, uh, and he was an accountant. And they owned their own house and he owned a car.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  But that's a good ambition. I mean, in a sense, accountancy is a good profession.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, my parents were hoping I would keep them in a lifestyle to which they would become accustomed in old age. And then I turned around and said, no, I'm going to study English. And I went, well, what kind of job will you get with that? And I said, well, I'll come back to Fife and teach. Because all the teachers at my school had all grown up locally and gone off to college and come back. Um, uh, and my English teachers were terrific. There was one especially in high school. Um, Mr. Gillespie, Ron Gillespie, hopefully still with us. Uh, and he was very young, seemed very young to us, but he, he was working class, very Glaswegian. But passionate about Elliot and Greek history and everything else.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  And we used to love, we used to go to the pub after school to continue the conversation. That would not be allowed these days.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Of course not. But there was a Jekyll and Hyde inside you as well, because part of you is dressing up to be part of the gang, part of the tribe and being this boy. Except when it gets frightening or dangerous and you protect yourself by disappearing. And part of you is this loner who is creating his own world, eventually writing poetry. Um, and were you comfortable that these two sides of your personality, that you were managing it well during your teens?

• 24:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, teens and before, you know, I was drawing these comics and writing, drawing cartoons and only showing my parents, in fact, probably only showing my mum, um, these productions. And then writing song lyrics for bands that only existed inside my head. But I went further. I would, I would have a top ten every week, which meant I had to invent nine other bands and the songs they were playing. And I was creating this world.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  And did you write it down?

• 25:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, all written down, sadly no longer with us. I don't know what happened to it all. It was in little ledger books. My dad gave me lots of ledger books from his grocery shop and I would use those for my creative writing and drawing.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  And was this happening up in your bedroom?

• 25:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, up in my teeny tiny bedroom.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  At your little desk?

• 25:28Speaker 04

  And, well, yeah, it was an old bureau that belonged to an uncle of mine. It was a very old fashioned bureau. I used to pretend I had a secret drawer, but I never found a secret drawer. Um, but I would sit there and, and write. Uh, and, and, you know, so I had this extraordinary interior world. In fact, you know, one of the blithe things I said until recently as a writer was every child is creative. They all have this extraordinary interior world where they're making stuff up, having role-playing games and adventures inside their heads. And I met a teacher once recently who said, no, it's just not true. She teaches primary school in East London. She said, the kids who come to my class have no interior life.

• 26:08Speaker 04

  They, they are, they are not creative. Everything is given to them. Everything is, is produced for them and they've become mere consumers. And that just saddened me so much.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  There were girls at the school?

• 26:18Speaker 04

  Hmm?

• 26:19Speaker 03

  There were girls at your school?

• 26:20Speaker 04

  Of course, good old comprehensive Scottish school, lots of girls I lusted after.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Tell me, well.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Well, I couldn't talk to them, so I just would write poetry about them.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Did you ever give the poems?

• 26:29Speaker 04

  No, no, no.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  And what kind of poetry was it?

• 26:32Speaker 04

  I did, I was a stalker once. I remember being a stalker once. There was a new girl arrived at school and she lived up the hill from me. And I just, I walked after school, I walked up past her house and I just kept walking past, hoping she would see me. And she didn't. So then I went home again and never did that again. Um, but yeah, this kind of unrequited thing, I was just very, very shy. I mean, people were trying to introduce me to girls. I'd go to parties and be introduced to girls who I would hang out with. But nothing, nothing ever, I had one girlfriend when I was in fifth years, I'd be seventeen, Janice. And then she, uh, paired up with a guy in the year above us. And they're still married. They're still happily married.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  That's something. But I mean, with Janice, did you hold hands? Did you kiss?

• 27:14Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, we kissed, we held hands, we snogged. You'd go to these parties and you would all sit around somebody's parent's living room. Uh, while they were out and you would drink and you would play records and you would snog.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Did you think about saying the words, I love you for the first time in the context of?

• 27:31Speaker 04

  No, I didn't say, I don't think I said I love you till I met my wife, uh, when I was twenty-one.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  Gosh.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's probably the first time. I certainly never remember saying it to my parents.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  Um, I think the only, the, the, the biggest memory I have of a tactile experience with my dad was putting my arm around him as we were leaving the crematorium after my mum's funeral. And I put my arm around him. And before that, I remember him taking me to a, a tailor's to get a suit for the funeral. Um, and just making sure that I was going to look the part. I mean, that was, that was about as close as we ever got, I think.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  So at school, and you're a teenager, you're clearly clever, you do O levels or GCSEs or whatever they are by then. And you think, I'm actually, I'm not going to be an accountant, I'm going to go to university. There's a must be a teacher who says, good idea, Ian, you can make it. Or do they call you Rankin? What do they call you?

• 28:24Speaker 04

  Oh, no, no, they would call you Ian. Uh, no, there was none of that. You've obviously gotten a very different kind of school from me, Giles.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Oh, that certainly did.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  We had, we had, we had teachers dating pupils at my school. It was very like Gregory's Girl. I mean, when I, I watched Gregory's Girl every year or so and I go, God, that is my school. That is my experience of growing up in the seventies. Um, yeah, so, uh, let me think. What we ask, what was the question again? Oh, a teacher. Well, I mean, Mr. Gillespie was terrific as an English teacher and I think he would have said, yes, go, go and study English. But I don't remember ever really consulting with my teachers or anybody. I do remember one extraordinary thing, which is the, the way education was back then, uh, in, in uh, non-fee paying schools in Scotland. At the age of, so you'd done two years at junior high. And if your results were good enough, you were then marched into the headmaster's office.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  And the headmaster said, your results are good enough, you can go to the senior high school. Now, the junior high school would only teach you to sixteen and you would leave and get a trade. The senior high school would teach you to eighteen and you would be going to college or university. And, and I remember there was one kid who was much cleverer than me. And there was no parents there, no teachers there, just you and the head teacher. This one kid went in to see the head and he was cleverer than me. And he said, well, I don't want to go because I would lose all my friends and I'd have to get up early. I'd have to get a bus to this other school and I'd have to wear a uniform. So I'm not going to go. And he was cleverer than me and ended up leaving school at sixteen. So what, what would his life have been like?

• 29:56Speaker 04

  At that moment, when a fourteen-year-old has to decide their future with no input from anybody else, I just thought that was an extraordinary thing.

• 30:14Speaker 05

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• 31:12Speaker 06

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• 31:31Speaker 02

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• 31:36Speaker 07

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• 32:15Speaker 03

  But Mr. Gillespie encouraged you to apply for university?

• 32:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, you know.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  And had he been to Edinburgh University as well?

• 32:21Speaker 04

  No, he'd been to Glasgow, I think. He went to Glasgow University and Edinburgh was my first choice, I think, because I thought it was posh. My second choice was Stirling, which is where my best friend, Jock, was going. And he was trying to persuade me, he said, Ian, all you have to do is fail German. If you fail the German exam, you can't go to Edinburgh. You needed a language to go to Edinburgh University. He said, just sit in the exam and don't do anything. Just stare at the blank sheet and then you can come to Stirling with me. And I sat in that exam hall, I couldn't do it.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  No, of course you couldn't.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  So I scraped a C pass, I scraped a pass in German, which meant I could apply, I could be accepted at Edinburgh. I wouldn't be accepted at Edinburgh now with the grades I got. You're saying I was clever? I wasn't that clever. I was good at English, but I wasn't great at anything else.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  So you came to Edinburgh. Was this the first time you lived away from home?

• 33:12Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  What was that like?

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Well, I said, I filled in all the forms to stay in halls of residence. And they said, oh, there's a housing shortage for students in Edinburgh, so we can't give you any accommodation. You're going to have to travel from home. I mean, I don't want to travel from home. You're going to have to get a train every morning and get a train back. I want to be in Edinburgh. So a friend of mine, George, who I still know, who was coming to the Edinburgh College of Art, the pair of us came through to Edinburgh a few times and just got the evening newspaper and looked up boarding houses and eventually got a room in a motel on the outskirts of the city. And we paired, we shared a room in this motel for the first few, probably first term.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  And by then, we'd got a few friends together and we then rented a flat. So we were able to go and live in a flat in the center of town. I still sharing a room. So for the first two or three years of uni life, I was sharing a bedroom with my friend George.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Gosh.

• 34:12Speaker 04

  Didn't make a love life very easy.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  Oh, was love life burgeoning back then?

• 34:16Speaker 04

  Well, I didn't, I didn't have one, but he did.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  And him and his girlfriend, it was not made easy for them, him sharing a room with me.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  No, but, but did you have to, I mean, you stayed in the room. You didn't kindly go and sleep in the bath?

• 34:28Speaker 04

  I would sleep on the sofa. There were nights I slept on the sofa, yeah. And I think there were nights he sneaked her into the room when I was asleep.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Oh, my.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  Let's not go there, George.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Well, no, well, he went there, we don't need to. So these years, this is changing, your life has completely changed now.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the important thing for me, the most important thing for me was not the English classes that I was studying, it was the extracurricular activities. It was the poetry society and suddenly being able to say, yes, I'm a poet, I write poetry. And being surrounded by people who didn't think that was weird or wanted to beat me up as a consequence.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Because that was the kind of writer you were at that stage, you were a poet?

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Poet, it was poetry and lyrics, yeah, mostly poetry.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  And poetry, you were writing a poem a day? I mean, you were writing all the time?

• 35:12Speaker 04

  Easily, easily writing a poem a day.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  And the themes were mainly what?

• 35:15Speaker 04

  That's a good question. All kinds of things. The very first poem I had any success with at all was when I was still at high school. And it was a poem called euthanasia. And my Aunt Jenny thought it was about her. It was about, it was about an old man sitting on a park bench, twiddling his thumbs and waiting to die. Anyway, it won, it won a prize, it won a second prize in some poetry competition.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  Well done. Well, you put it in for the poetry competition, you're clearly ambitious.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  I did.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Because at school, you had edited a school magazine?

• 35:44Speaker 04

  I worked on a school magazine called Men Lines, yeah. I was the music correspondent, so I got to write album reviews, that was great.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  What was the magazine at school that the headmaster didn't like?

• 35:54Speaker 04

  That was Men Lines.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  That was Men Lines.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  Well, because we had a pub correspondent.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  A pub correspondent?

• 35:58Speaker 04

  So you'd be selling the magazine to these 14 and 15-year-olds, telling them the best pubs in Cowdenbeef are. You'll get served in here, lads. We used to take off our blazers and go into pubs at lunchtime and then come on.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  So you come alive at Edinburgh University?

• 36:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, oh, what I was going to say to you was, it was a time of punk. And what punk said was, it doesn't matter what your background is, it doesn't matter if you've got any ability. If you want to try and do something, just have a go. And that was, so, you know, so I was trying to.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  This is really good. You're the first person ever to explain to me what punk was.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was the ethos, ethos, do it yourself.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  Do it yourself and do what you want.

• 36:33Speaker 04

  Because before that, we had grown up in a world of progressive rock and synthesizers. Nobody could afford to buy a synthesizer unless they'd gone to private school or had parents with money. Nobody could afford all the stage equipment you needed to be in a progressive rock band, but everybody could afford a Woolies electric guitar and just thrash.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  So you formed your first real band, as most of the fantasy bands you'd had in your top ten?

• 36:57Speaker 04

  I was in a band for a year or so at uni, yes.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Called?

• 37:01Speaker 04

  Called The Dancing Pigs.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  I like it.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  Was it quite successful?

• 37:05Speaker 04

  I came up with that name, I was very happy with that. Quite successful? No, I think we played six gigs.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Can you remember any of the lyrics from any of the numbers?

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Mutated machine guns patrolling the subways while glue-sniffing kids hang themselves in lift shafts? Was the opening couplet of one number?

• 37:25Speaker 03

  We get the flavor.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  This is strong punk.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was me just writing rubbish down and the band being happy. We did go into a recording studio twice and we recorded five tracks, which I still have a cassette with the five tracks on. That's also going into my casket.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  Oh, with your diaries?

• 37:44Speaker 04

  With my childhood diaries.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  You've been keeping a diary?

• 37:47Speaker 04

  I used to keep a page-a-day diary from the age of 12 till I was about 32.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  And how confessional was it? What?

• 37:53Speaker 04

  Very, which is why it's going into the casket.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  But a real writer like you now, one of the world's bestsellers, this should be going to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas to go into their huge archive.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  It's interesting you should mention that because of course I was offered money for my archive from several universities, mostly in the States, and instead of which I gifted it to the National Library of Scotland. So they've got all the early jottings and writings, my very first novel unpublished. They've got, I did not give them the diaries.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  We'll work on that, Ian. So Ian, we will work on that together privately at a later date because I think we want to see those in the fullness of time when you've gone and when Miranda has gone as well, because she must feature.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  She's never seen them, she's never seen my diary.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  Has she asked about them?

• 38:41Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, well, yeah, I mean, she was aware that I write this diary because we met when I was 21 and I wrote the diary till I was 32.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Tell us about the moment you met, describe the moment of meeting Miranda.

• 38:51Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh, let me think, we were, we were at university together. She was a year above me and our two years would sometimes meet up for tutorials if you were doing the same sort of specialisms. And we were both doing American literature as our specialism. So she just seemed an exotic creature, an exotic creature. She was wearing clothes I'd never seen young women of my acquaintance wear before, tweeds and things and long socks. And she had very long hair and very pale face, very sharp eyes. She knew a heck of a lot about everything, she was very worldly. When she left school, she took a gap year and went to work in Shakespeare and Company in Paris and then hitchhiked to Morocco.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  The bookshop.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  The bookshop, Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, which she introduced me to years later. We worked her for a short time and got bedbugs together because she slept there as well. And no, so every adventure I then had in life was because Miranda instigated it.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  And how quickly did you become friends and then lovers?

• 39:54Speaker 04

  Well, she teases me that we were in the pub one night and she was lunging across me to snog the guy next to me, but fell short. And that was it.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Good line to take.

• 40:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  But we know the truth.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Although I vaguely knew her, I remember I was in my flat, Morrison Street in Edinburgh, and she lived just along the road. And I happened to be looking out the window one day and there was Miranda walking past. And so I opened the window and shouted to her and she came up for a cup of tea. And that was pretty much the start.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Can you, well, you've almost described it there, the first sort of physical looking into her face and thinking, yes.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  They often say, don't they, that you're attracted to people who resemble your parents in some way. I think she had my mother's eyes, I think the same color eyes as my mom. And, and the physical, I mean, the physical resemblance probably ends there. But there was that, I think, was there.

• 40:52Speaker 04

  You know, just could he, I don't know, she looked like she's someone should be painting her. You know, pale face and long brown hair. And although she grew up in Belfast, very English, very English accent. The important thing for me, speaking as a, as a skint working class Scot, was that I could borrow her books. I didn't have to buy any textbooks after that.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  And she had every book you could want.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  She had all the books and then she would be furious at me because of course I would write in the margins. Are you a margin writer?

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm proud I am.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  I'm a margin writer.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  But not in other people's books, except that's part of the ownership of the relationship.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  I mean, sometimes our son borrows a book from me and he says, why did you underline that passage? And I go, I've got no idea. Why have you written Yowza in the margin? I don't know.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  So how quickly did you realise this is going to be it? We are going to be together.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  Oh, I think it took us a while. I think it took us a little while.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Did you drift off? Did you have other girlfriends around the period?

• 41:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, she went, she went to work in Belfast when, when she finished. I mean, she was a year above me, so she finished university a year before me. And she got a series of jobs which took her away from Edinburgh and would come back fleetingly or I'd meet her in Belfast and.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  She, no, I mean, she never had another guy in her life and I never had another woman, but she, but we did sort of drift a little bit. But the, the thing that really cemented our relationship was when I finished uni in nine, summer of nineteen eighty two. She'd been working in a bookshop in Edinburgh and she'd met someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew this vineyard come commune in southwest France and she said, let's go there. And so we went to work in this vineyard for six months. With a bunch of other hippies and reprobates. You didn't get paid, you just got all your meals and you got a very funny experience.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  And that was great because we were overseas together, we had to rely on each other. We went travelling, we went hitchhiking around France, southern France and northern Italy. So that bonded us.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  And then when you got married, you lived in France for a while.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Well, we lived in, we lived in London. Yeah, we got married and then we moved, lived in London for four years.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  And when you got married, everyone knew this was the right thing to do, your, all your parents, her parents, your parents, everyone was happy.

• 43:02Speaker 04

  I mean, her, you know, her mum was at the wedding, my dad was at the wedding. Yeah, I think so. We, we sadly, we had to act as translators between our two families. Because my, I'm speaking as near to RP English as I can for you today.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 43:17Speaker 04

  But when I get back to Fife and I'm with my family, you would find me very hard to understand.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  I need the subtitles up, would I?

• 43:23Speaker 04

  Exactly. So Miranda's mum would be looking at my dad going, what did he just say?

• 43:28Speaker 03

  How do you tell me off for something? If, if, if I'd been your boy, how at home would you have heard me being told off?

• 43:34Speaker 04

  You'd be saying things like, oh, you're absolutely numpty. You know, what are you doing? What are you doing? Get Ben a scullery, talk to your ma.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  I think I've got the flavour of that. I'm a numpty and I'm going to the scullery to talk to my mother.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, we never had a kitchen with a scullery. It was called a scullery.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Very good.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  So, yeah, there was quite a lot of translation going on, although we were all speaking English.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Did you feel you'd achieved above your league?

• 43:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, very much so. Come on.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Do you still feel that?

• 43:59Speaker 04

  Marrying into a family of, of English professors.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Indeed. And also this beautiful exotic creature.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  Yep, no, no.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  You should be so lucky.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  I, yeah, I did feel lucky. I think our family went, who is this guy?

• 44:11Speaker 03

  And what did she see in you? What, what worked for her?

• 44:14Speaker 04

  That's a very good question.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  What do you think worked for her? What, what cards did you play in the early days?

• 44:21Speaker 04

  I mean, maybe she liked that I was trying to be a writer.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:24Speaker 04

  You know, I mean, coming from a family who had studied literature and taught literature. Here's someone who's actually going out to try and make literature in some form or another.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  And when did you start, go beyond the poetry? When did that begin?

• 44:38Speaker 04

  Postgraduate, Edinburgh, I, I did a postgraduate degree and a, well, PhD and I was studying Muriel Spark. And trying to write a thesis, falling short of writing a thesis. And I, I wrote a short story for a competition and it won second prize. And then I wrote a short story for another competition and it won first prize and it was published in the Scotsman newspaper. And I thought, okay, this is what I meant to do. I'm not meant to write lyrical poetry. I'm meant to write prose. Prose is my thing. And then some of the short stories just raged out of control and got so long that I could never publish them as short stories. And one of those became an unpublished novel. And then one after that became a published novel.

• 45:21Speaker 04

  And so I was twenty five, so I was still at uni, I was still studying my, for my PhD when the flood came out. And that was February eighty six, the money ran out for the PhD in May eighty six. And I got married in July eighty six and moved to London where my wife was working as a civil servant.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  Gosh.

• 45:41Speaker 04

  And we lived in Tottenham.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  And you lived off her?

• 45:43Speaker 04

  I lived off her.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  While you went on writing, she supported you.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  She did.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  And then, how quickly did you have the children?

• 45:51Speaker 04

  Well, after four years in, in London, we hated it. You know, London's a tough place to be when you're working and not making a lot of money. We were living in Tottenham, she was working in Victoria Street. I eventually was working in Crystal Palace, which was a ninety minute each way commute.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  And what were you doing in Crystal Palace?

• 46:07Speaker 04

  I was a journalist on a hi-fi magazine reviewing hi-fi equipment. It's a great job, but it was three hours a day of my life was just travelling to and from work. She said, we've got to get out of this place. And we still had very fond memories of France from our time living on the vineyard. So we started looking for a place and eventually found somewhere in the Perigord, which was a ramshackle farmhouse that an English guy was trying to get rid of.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  And he said, we said, look, we can't afford to buy it. And he said, well, let's do a deal, pay me rent. And after four years, if you're still keen, pay me the residual that it would have cost to buy. So that was, that became the arrangement. And then panic stations, Miranda didn't have a job and I was the breadwinner. From writing books. And then the kids came along. So we moved to France in nineteen ninety, first son was born ninety two, second son born ninety four. That was a tough time.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  Was that the toughest time of your life?

• 47:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, especially when the younger, younger of our two sons was born with severe special needs.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  And what does that mean? What are the special needs?

• 47:14Speaker 04

  He's got a thing called Angelman syndrome. Angelman syndrome, no, it's a, it's a micro deletion of chromosome fifteen, I believe. So.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  Angel, say it again.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Angelman.

• 47:23Speaker 03

  Angelman.

• 47:23Speaker 04

  Named after a guy called Harry Angelman, Harry Angelman.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Who'd refined it.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It used to be called happy puppet syndrome in early days, very rare. Anyway, Kit is now thirty two, can't walk, can't talk, can't feed himself, can't dress himself. Very happy in an extraordinary care situation in Edinburgh, twenty minutes walk from where we live. Very well looked after, very busy. They just took him to Legoland Windsor recently for a, for a holiday.

• 47:54Speaker 04

  But yeah, non-verbal, non-everything.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  And has Kit defined your life?

• 48:01Speaker 04

  Well, I, he led to lots of things. Number one, he led to us moving back to the UK. Because when, even though Miranda spoke very good French, I should have said, when we moved to France, I could not speak French.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  And we knew you could speak German, not very well.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  I could speak a little bit of German, ambition, ambition mine hair. But I could pronounce it, I could do that.

• 48:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, wir sprechen Deutsch, I could do all that. But yeah, vocabulary, no, but French, no, Miranda was the French speaker. So we got into hospitals to talk to specialists in a specialist medical jargon. In a country you don't know, in a language you don't know, that got very tough, very quickly. And we said, we've got to go, we've got to go back. So we came back to Edinburgh in nineteen ninety six. And so because I was back in the UK, my publishers could suddenly promote me in a way that hadn't been possible. They were very frustrated all the time I was in France, they could not. I couldn't go and do stuff for the BBC, I couldn't do stuff for Gyles Brandreth, I couldn't go to libraries, bookshops. So suddenly things clicked.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  And actually, the books, because of Kit, I think ironically, the books got darker and angrier and more complex. And more successful.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  Explain darker, angrier, more complex in relation to Kit, how you responded, why it made the books like that?

• 49:21Speaker 04

  Well, writing for me has always been therapy, it's always been a way of exploring the world, making sense of the world, asking big questions about the world and hopefully maybe getting some answers. So I vividly remember the first, when Kit was being diagnosed, the first book, the book I was writing at the time was called The Hanging Garden. And in it, Rebus's daughter is hit by a car and put in a wheelchair. Because we had learned that Kit probably would never walk. I think, okay, if my son's not walking, your daughter's not walking, pal. So I just channeled all that to him as a way of dealing with it.

• 49:55Speaker 03

  But you said that, pal, in the way that you're expressing anger, rather than saying this is going to be a learning curve for me. You felt anger.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, the universe, you feel anger, of course you do, you always think, why us?

• 50:07Speaker 03

  Did your family have any faith as the children?

• 50:09Speaker 04

  My mum and my sister Linda went to, went to church, my sister still goes to church every Sunday. I vividly remember I was about twelve and my mum sat me down and said, okay, and you're twelve years old now, you're going to high school. You need to decide if you want to keep coming to church with us or stay home with dad. And I said, oh, I think I'll have the extra half hour in bed, please. Thank you very much. And that was the end of my church going days.

• 50:32Speaker 03

  So there wasn't faith to fall back on?

• 50:34Speaker 04

  No.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  There was anger, there was Miranda.

• 50:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:40Speaker 04

  Well, they were just getting on with it, actually.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  Going back to what your Scottish word, tell us again that your father, your parents.

• 50:46Speaker 04

  Thrown, to be thrown, to be stubborn, just to keep getting on, plough on, plough on. So I met extraordinary people, parents of, of children with very severe needs, I mean, even more severe than my son's. Who were doing just amazing things that they didn't know they could do. You know, raising money for wheelchairs. If you needed an electric wheelchair, there'd be a raffle at the local pub. Trying to go on holidays, trying to find care, trying to go through the bureaucratic systems for getting the help you needed. I mean, these people were, were working themselves into the ground to make sure their kids got what they needed.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  And how did you keep the balance right so that your other child did not feel that everything's about Kit? Oh, this world, Kit is now the world.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 04

  I don't know, we just tried to involve Kit in everything. And I think we were lucky in a way, when I was growing up, when I was young, if you'd, if it was someone with special needs, someone disabled, you never saw them. They were hidden away by their families, or they were put in a home somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Now, we're much more used to seeing disabled people, young and old, on the streets around us as part of the community. And so Kit, we would take him everywhere. We would take him to the shops and never, never look to see if people were looking at us weirdly. Take him on holiday without, without blinking an eye. So Jack, our other son, just got used to Kit being Kit.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Describe, if you can, the worst moment during those early years, a specific worst moment that you remember, what comes into your head?

• 52:18Speaker 04

  I mean, the diagnosis was terrible.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  Were you in a room? Who was in the room with him?

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, the main diagnosis came when we got back to Edinburgh and we went to the Children's Hospital in Edinburgh and spoke to a specialist who talked us through and said, you know, Kit is at the bottom of the, the curve for ability. I mean, there's plenty of Angelman's people out there who can communicate. Some even are a little bit verbal. A lot of them can walk and they can feed themselves. Kit's at the bottom of the curve, so he can't do any of these things. That was tough. That was tough. I remember one day changing his, changing him on the floor and my back went. And I thought, and I was in pain for weeks after that.

• 53:08Speaker 04

  I remember thinking, Ian, one day you're going to be too old for this. You're, you know, and now he's 32 years old, I can't pick him up. I can't physically pick him up. So that's tough. That, that first science, sense of mortality came to me quite young. Cause I thought, there's going to come a time, Ian, when you aren't able to give him what he needs.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  And did this bring you more close to Miranda? Or were there times when it was very difficult between the two of you?

• 53:36Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, there, there was a lot of emotion, a lot of emotional moments.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  And how are you in emotional moments?

• 53:44Speaker 04

  Not great, you know, very, very working class Scottish male.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  And what does that mean?

• 53:47Speaker 04

  It just means you block everything off if you can, or you, you don't show emotion. To show emotion is to show weakness. So you try not to do it. So.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  So you become silent and strong and just carry on?

• 53:59Speaker 04

  I don't know if you're strong or not, but on the surface, you're just, yeah, you're just hiding stuff from the world. But Miranda's the opposite. She's, we, we work, I think that's why we work so well together is in many ways, she's so different from me. So she'll be emotional, I'll be unemotional. She'll start things and I'll finish them. Uh, you know, she'll start painting a room and then give up. And I'm the one who's got to finish it for her. Uh, so we get, yeah, so that balancing act, that Jekyll and Hyde, that kind of two sides of the same character. I think that's very complimentary.

• 54:43Speaker 00

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• 56:29Speaker 03

  Is Kit one of the reasons that you are still together? Because you could never be apart? Because, because of Kit and your obligation to Kit?

• 56:37Speaker 04

  Well, you know what? It's actually sadly quite the opposite. A lot of relationships with people with special needs kids break up. Because one partner or the other, and it's usually the man, can't take it anymore. And they leave. So there's quite a few people we know, families of special needs, adults and children that are one parent families. Which makes it even tougher, you know? Never, it was never going to be the case with us. Never going to be the case with us. But we got lucky that Kit got the care that he needed. So that our family wasn't as broken apart as some families do get.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  And you got lucky because you became a success as a writer?

• 57:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, what you did?

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Well, I did, I did, and that was, that was.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  Quite quickly too, wasn't it?

• 57:26Speaker 04

  No, no, it wasn't at all quickly. I mean, you might think it's quickly. I mean, the first book, I got 200 quid and it sold about 50 copies. Um, the first Rebus novel, I think I got 500 quid and it sold probably 50 copies. The Rebus books didn't take off until book number, financially, until book number 10 or 11.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Not, was that Notson?

• 57:46Speaker 04

  Notson Crosses was the first one. And Black and Blue was the one that won the big prizes and got me noticed. And a couple of books after that, suddenly I was making money.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  And the breakout, the, when, when the real money came in? Cause we're talking now about 35 million books sold around the world, dozens of translations, the TV versions to, to. I mean, it's extraordinary.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  It is extraordinary. And next year we celebrate 40 years of Rebus. I mean, I would never have dreamed when I invented this character as a student, sitting in my digs in Edinburgh.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  You were a student when you thought of the idea?

• 58:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  And did you write notes? Did you describe in a piece of paper?

• 58:21Speaker 04

  Oh, there was the very first sheet of A4 paper, lined A4 paper that just says, main character may be a cop. Yeah, I've still got that. That was the, the start of Notson Crosses.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  And is the Rebus?

• 58:32Speaker 04

  I wasn't a fan of detective fiction. I didn't really read detective fiction. Miranda had read Agatha Christie growing up, but I couldn't get on with Agatha Christie. My sister Linda read Agatha Christie. I tried, I went, this is, this world means nothing to me. I can't relate to this world at all.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  And the Rebus comes, because you and your dad did crossword puzzles together.

• 58:49Speaker 04

  Oh, I did crosswords and he would help me out. We'd have a little mini dictionary, we'd do the courier, the Dundee Courier Quick Crossword. It wasn't quick when I started doing it, I'll tell you. Yeah, never cryptics. I moved on to cryptics when I was a student and I really got into cryptics and I still do a cryptic every day.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  And that's how the name Rebus came about?

• 59:09Speaker 04

  Rebus is a picture puzzle. Yeah. So that's how, I think that's how Rebus came about. It was Inspector Morse, you know, a code. Now we've got Rebus, a puzzle.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  And now you're, you're going on doing it? I mean, this, the.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  Uh, who knows? I mean, I'm a pensioner now, a state pensioner. And it's not getting any easier.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  What is your routine? I mean, when you're doing a book?

• 59:29Speaker 04

  Well, I used to contain a whole book in my head. So I'd sit down and think, this is what the book's going to be and just start writing. And now I can't keep a whole book in my head anymore. Um, my routine is, I get an idea, I get a theme, I want to explore, I find a plot. And then I do the research, but I do, I do minimal research to start with. I do most of the research after the first draft is finished. Cause by then I know what I need to know. Not what mine might need to know, but what I really do need to know.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  So you write your story first and then come up with the factual detail that you may need? And the factual detail is important?

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  Well, if you're writing about Edinburgh.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Speaker 04

  Oh, when I make a mistake about Edinburgh, I get, as we say, pelters, which means complaints.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  Why is it Edinburgh? Why?

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  Why? I mean, it's a fascinating city. I mean, it's, it's tiny, it's like a tardis. It's small on the outside, huge on the inside. You could spend your whole life exploring it. You could walk around it in a day, but spend your whole life exploring it.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  And it is Jekyll and Hyde.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  And it is Jekyll and Hyde. It's a city of great wealth and privilege and it's, and elitism. And it's also a place of huge social problems. Um, and it's structurally that way. The new town which represents order and the old town represents chaos. But also detective fiction allows me to explore, you know, themes of masculinity and.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  How do you do that? I mean, you're conscious of doing that?

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  Well, partly, I mean, think about the kinds of books that I'm writing. I'm writing about a, a male detective of a certain age who's grown up in a certain way. I mean, he grew up in the same back, with the same background as me, working class, a bit chippy, a chip on the shoulder. Thinks he should have gone to college and been cleverer, but he wasn't, he didn't get the breaks. Uh, he's investigating crimes which often involve male on male violence, gangs, running drugs, that kind of stuff. The way he used, the way policing used to operate is no longer viable. Um, I mean, I, I hang out with a lot of retired cops and I hear some stories that would make your hair stand and end. Sexism, racism, you name it.

• 1:01:33Speaker 04

  Partly horrible, partly a way of dealing with a job. You know, you've got to joke about it or you would just go mad. So a lot of very off color jokes that can only really be told by cops to other cops. The, the, you know, the public would not stand for it. But it's a way of dealing with the, with the job and with the stuff that I'm going to look at and, and the people that I'm going to meet every single day. So Rebus is that world, but that world is changing very, very rapidly. So he's almost, he's a dinosaur and he represents the old ways. And I surround him with younger, college educated cops who've got a very different take on the world.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  And why are we drawn to him? Why are we drawn to your particular kind of novel?

• 1:02:15Speaker 04

  I don't know. I mean, I think, um, I think he's charismatic. I think he's brooding and he's slightly dangerous, or he was when he was younger. I think he's, you know, weirdly attractive to women. I know that because there are lots of women fans. I mean, I can't see what the attraction is, but obviously it's there.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  Well, this is how we feel about you. You can't see what the attraction is, but even I can.

• 1:02:38Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  Oh, thank you very much. Um, I'll buy you a coffee later.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, more than coffee I'm after.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  But are you putting yourself into it is what I'm really trying to say.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  No, I don't.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  You obviously, to an extent you are.

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  Hmm, not much. I mean, although we've got very similar backgrounds, he's very different. I mean, I'm more like the younger, college-educated cops who are a bit wishy-washer and liberal and trying to teach them that the world doesn't operate like that anymore. So a lot of the conversations I have with him in my head are me trying to tell him, "Look, the world has changed. Your way of doing things doesn't work anymore." Um, and then he'll, he'll fight back and say, "Well, actually, the way I work, works perfectly well. I get results."

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  And The Heights, the new one, is a rebus.

• 1:03:20Speaker 04

  It's not.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  No, my next book, The Heights, is, uh, is set in London.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  And it's dark money and oligarchs and Chinese tech bros.

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  And it's this huge, shiny London that is lived in, or not lived in, by people who are basically just salting away their money. It'll go on or otherwise. So it's a huge, big, um, apartment block. Uh, in central London, there's only about fifteen people live there. All the other apartments are vacant. Um, it's a motley crew who live there and the night security guard is found dead. And so the police interrupt this very cosy, privileged existence.

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  And has the success of your writing changed you? Are you a different person now?

• 1:04:04Speaker 04

  Oh, totally different. I mean, I still drink in the same pub. I still wear the same clothes. I still buy the same music. I still have the same haircut. But I can afford better cars. I can afford better holidays. I can afford care for my son.

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the big one.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is a big one. Not only he'll be looked after financially.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  That's fantastic.

• 1:04:21Speaker 04

  It's a big deal for us.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  I mean, you can actually die.

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  Well, it means you've got to get your wills in place. It means we've got trusts. It means we've got this, we've got that. It means you have to deal with lawyers a lot. But everything hopefully is in place.

• 1:04:31Speaker 03

  But has it changed your way of being with Miranda, with other people?

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  Um, I don't think so. I mean, I think of, you know, I don't think I'm so different psychologically from the person I was back in the eighties. I mean, we all feel young, right? I mean.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  It's alarming.

• 1:04:49Speaker 04

  Aches and pains, yes. I mean, as, as Leonard Cohen once said, "I ache in the places where I used to play."

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  But I still feel nineteen.

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:04:57Speaker 04

  You know?

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  You know Oscar Wilde's great line?

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  Go on.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  "The trouble with being old is not the one who's old, but the one who's young."

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. I get that. I get that. So I sometimes look and go, "Sixty-six? How did I get to sixty-six?"

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  Ah, what's the worst of you? What's the worst of Ian Rankin?

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  Uh, I, I think, I think there's a lot of jealousy hiding away in there. I mean, writers are always very jealous of other writers' success. You know, I mean, again, Dorothy Parker, "It's not enough that you, that you succeed, but your friends must fail." Uh, so you're always looking at the big deals that are being done and thinking, "Why not me?" Or young writers getting lots of money and thinking, "Oh, I wish I'd got lots of money when I was young. I would have had that helicopter that I always wanted." And gold-plated pinball machines in every room. Thank God I didn't get success young. Uh, I was well into my forties before I was making decent money. Uh, in fact, that's a moment I remember really well. I was on tour in America

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  in some seedy motel in the middle of the Midwest. And I was phoning home and Miranda said, "Your, your six-month royalty statement that's coming has been a mistake. It's six figures." And I went, "Oh, yeah, they've made, they've cocked it up." So I phoned my agent and said, "Look, my royalty statement is coming for my backlist sales, all my old books. There's obviously been a mistake." And he went, "No, no. This is, this is everybody who's bought your latest book and likes your character, who now introduced to you are now going back and reading them from book one." And I went, "Whoa, Miranda, we can move out of that small flat and get ourselves a house." And that was in, that would have been nineteen ninety-seven, ninety-eight, yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  Congratulations.

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  Good fun.

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  And also congratulations, if I may say so, on all the philanthropy there has been, which you don't need to talk about, but I've read about in doing the homework for this. And you've done good things with your money, not just for your own family and for Kit, but for other people, which is a brilliant thing to do and I imagine satisfying.

• 1:06:59Speaker 04

  It's hugely satisfying. I mean, we've made a few missteps along the way. We decided that giving huge chunks of money to big, well-known charities, it kind of disappears into the maw of the big charity. Giving a small amount to a local charity, doing something very specific, can make a huge difference. So we tend to give a, this, we do about, we do it three times a year. We get together and we decide which charities are going to get how much money. And it's about thirty, thirty or forty charities each time get a chunk of money.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Well done.

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  So, yeah, it's, you're right. It's good. I mean, it's, you know, you've got too much money. What are you going to do?

• 1:07:33Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:07:34Speaker 04

  You know?

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  We're getting to the end now. Three quick questions. I want whatever comes first into your head, immediately into your head. Can't think about it, just got to say it.

• 1:07:43Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  A moment of joy, particularly from your earlier years, a moment of joy. Wow.

• 1:07:49Speaker 04

  Oh, uh, record shops. Going to the record shop and getting the new album from your favourite band.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  And what was your favourite band?

• 1:07:57Speaker 04

  Uh, the sensational Alex Harvey Band in my very early teens. Haven't seen them on the old grape whistle test. So probably going down to Bruce's record shop in Kirkcaldy and walking in and there's the new Alex Harvey album. And you go home on the bus excitedly because you can't wait to get it on and, and read the lyrics while you listen to the music.

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  That's a lovely moment of joy. A moment now of sadness.

• 1:08:21Speaker 04

  Uh, well, I mean, my mum's funeral when I was nineteen. Nineteen is very young to lose a parent, I think. Um, and thinking, "Well, that, that's, that's childhood gone now." You know, childhood is gone. Um, and thinking I didn't really know enough about her. I didn't know a lot about her early life. She didn't have mu- much family from her early years. She was very much estranged from her dad. He was long dead by this stage. Um, so, yeah, not known enough about my mum while I was watching her coffin disappear.

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  If she was coming into the room now, is there something you would say to her now?

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say, "I love you."

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  Which you didn't really.

• 1:09:00Speaker 04

  Which I never did.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:09:01Speaker 04

  Never did. I think I might have said it to her when she was, you know, when she was very ill and we moved the, her, the bed from the upstairs bedroom to the living room because she couldn't manage stairs. Um, I mean, she, I mean, she actually did once say to me, I mean, she was very far gone by this stage. She said, "I just want to die."

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  "I just wish I could die now." And I, I, I was trying to find something reassuring to say to her. I was eighteen years old. Trying to find something reassuring to say to her and there was nothing. There was nothing.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  But in a way you didn't need to say anything, did you? Because she knew you loved her.

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I thought, hopefully, yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  I'm sure.

• 1:09:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  Okay. What's Ian Rankin? This extraordinary life you've led and are leading, uh, what has life taught you?

• 1:09:50Speaker 04

  Oh, um, I mean, lot, lots to do with just, you know, I mean, cliches like, take, you know, take every opportunity. Don't let stuff pass you by. Um, be aware that you only get, I think it's, um, what's his name? Uh, Anthony Bourdain said, you know, "You, it's, you only get one go on this rollercoaster." You know, "This ride doesn't last for long, so just enjoy it." Uh, and there's something to be said for that. He was an extraordinary character. I met him a few times. Um, uh, yeah. Um, it's plenty. I mean, people always ask me, you know, how, what's your writing tips? And I go, "Just write lots, read lots, get lucky, stay lucky."

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Hmm. Your books are full of darkness. Give me to end with a beautiful moment, either from your life or a beautiful line of poetry that you've written or that you love. From the darkness of your world, that when you're writing, there must be a lot of darkness going on because of some of the things that happen in the stories. Give me a little moment of beauty for us to finish with.

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  A moment of beauty. A moment of beauty. Jeez. You know, you've caught me. You've caught me. I, you know, I, I, if you give me long enough, I'm thinking the Van Morrison lyric perhaps, something, maybe John Martin actually. John Martin, a terrific, complex singer-songwriter with a very dark life, um, but producing beautiful music. Um, and he had a song about a friend that has, a song's called "Solid Air." I'm not going to remember the lyrics, but I would say to everybody, "Just go and listen to that song." And that is a few minutes of absolute musical beauty.

• 1:11:35Speaker 03

  Very good. Sir Ian Rankin, thank you very much.

• 1:11:40Speaker 04

  Giles, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  Well, I love that conversation with Ian Rankin. It was the last of our conversations recorded in Edinburgh. I'm sure we'll be back in Edinburgh, I'm sure we'll be back in New York. There's talk of us going to LA soon, and I can't wait to get to Australia because having met the actor Geoffrey Rush, he mentioned lots of interesting Australian people that we must go and have conversations with. If you enjoyed hearing Ian Rankin or want to drop us a line, the address is simply hello at rosebudpodcast.com. I found the conversation with Ian Rankin really quite moving, as you could tell, and when he talked about his mother's funeral, I immediately into my head came my father's

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  funeral and the moment that my mother passed my father's coffin and touched the side of it. And that picture of my mother touching the side of my dad's coffin often comes into my head. Anyway, here is an email, and I don't know whether Harriet Jane, our producer, chose this deliberately because it's about a funeral or not, but it's an interesting email and it comes from Charlotte Sheehan. "My name is Charlotte," she writes, "I'm thirty-three, and my very first memory is of Princess Diana's passing. I would have been around four and a half when I threw a rose onto Princess Diana's

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  hearse from a bridge in St Albans along the M1. It was the first time someone explained to me that we don't all live forever. I remember asking my mum, 'Where is the princess going?' Mum told me, 'She's being driven to heaven.' I remember the police motorbikes, the sea of people walking along the motorway, and the strange absence of cars. There were so many people, and yet everyone was completely silent. But what I remember most vividly is the hearse. I remember the deep, rich colours of the large Royal Standard draped over it, and thinking to myself, 'I can't believe that lovely blonde lady is inside. She really is in there.'

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  It's such a tiny snapshot from when I was four, but somehow it has stayed with me all these years, a little girl witnessing a huge moment in history, without really understanding its enormity, but knowing that something incredibly sad had happened." Well, I have to say, I think, Charlotte, that's a very evocative memory. And, well, interestingly enough, I re-watched our conversation, our Rosebud conversation, with Charles Spencer, Diana's brother, the other day, because following on from that conversation, my publisher, Dan Bunyard, got in touch with Charles Spencer and said, "Let's, please, do you want to put some of this into a book, your recollections of your

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

  sister Diana?" And he's done so. So that's going to be one of this autumn's books, I think. So if you haven't seen the episode with Charles Spencer, really do, it's completely fascinating. And it's obviously not all about Diana, it's about Charles Spencer, his life, his family, particularly the hardships of his childhood. I think you'll find it very intriguing. There are now hundreds of interviews in our backlist. You can find them by going to our website, which is simply rosebudpodcast.co.uk, and there are about fifty of them, I think, now on YouTube. And if you go to YouTube, you can find a whole range of conversations, including maybe the one with Charles Spencer, there and you can actually see them. I find actually watching them is a bit different from listening to them, so, you know, do

• 1:15:26Speaker 03

  one or the other or both. Anyway, I hope you continue to enjoy Rosebud. If you've enjoyed an episode, if there's an opportunity to leave a comment, we love that, we like to spread the word, because we know that word of mouth is the way that something like Rosebud has grown into what it is now, a podcast that is listened to around the world with millions of downloads. We are very proud of that, but we know it wouldn't happen if it weren't for you listening and for people like Ian Rankin, who doesn't need the publicity. He's sold thirty-five million books. He doesn't need the coverage. That he has come in today to chat to me about his life, I find, well, I'm very grateful. So my thanks to Sir Ian, and indeed to Charles Spencer, and all the other people who've

• 1:16:09Speaker 03

  contributed to Rosebud over the past three years or so, and thank you most of all for listening. My thanks also to Alec Cadell, who does the editing often, and to our producer and the co-creator of Rosebud, my friend Harriet Jane. From me and Plain Jane Productions, this is Rosebud for this week. We'll be back on Tuesday, and if you belong to the family, you might even listen to us on Sunday. Bye for now, and cue the music.

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

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