Although I have covered the main points Rankin made to me during that interview in the text of this book, there is a validity in transcribing this segment of the interview tape so fans can hear it straight from the author himself. When I went back over the tape in my research for this book, I was pleased to find that the angle I had chosen had
been, in a way, predicted by our interview seven years previous and, therefore, as an Annex, this interview reinforces the suppositions I have made and also lets Rankin have the last say on the matter.
Slainte!
‘Absolutely. I went to Edinburgh aged 18 to go to university. I was born and brought up in a coal-mining
town 30 miles north of Edinburgh. I went there as a student and I was living on the outskirts in this quite rough area, because Edinburgh is ringed by these places. But the centre of town isn’t allowed to change. Tourists go there and they see Greyfriars Bobby, the Scott Monument, the castle; then hear some bagpipe music, buy some shortbread and go home, right? And in the late ’70s, early
’80s, there was this other Edinburgh where some of the housing estates were so bad Oxfam were running aid convoys in. No joke. It had the worst Aids, HIV and heroin injection problem in Western Europe per capita. A huge problem. And nobody was writing about it, nobody was talking about it. The Edinburgh people were talking about was the Edinburgh of Miss Jean Brodie, and Jekyll and Hyde and Walter
Scott, so I wanted to tackle the unseen Edinburgh.
‘I have always been fascinated by the Armed Forces. My family for example: my two sisters married into the RAF. One husband was in the RAF from the age of 15 to 50 and served all over the globe and I used to get great holidays as a consequence. I went to places
such as Cyprus and Malta, and I’d always been fascinated by it. When I was ten years old I wrote away for all the Army career information, and I got all the packs and career stuff back.
‘The area I lived in in Fife was quite rough, and when I left school a lot of the guys joined the Police Force or the Armed Forces, because they were the only opportunities open to them. Rosyth naval dockyard
was nearby, so it did make sense. And in that way Rebus was a bit of an alter ego: he was a bit like me if I hadn’t gone to university, [the] things I might have done with myself if I hadn’t taken that leap – because I was the first person in my family to go to university. I might well have joined the police, or the Army or the RAF. Actually I wouldn’t have joined the RAF, I’m scared of heights!’
‘I had a fascination for books. I was just fascinated by them, and writing. From the age of four or five I was trying to write comic books, song lyrics later on for a band that didn’t exist, except inside my head. So I did English at uni because it meant I could just sit around and read books and get paid for it! I had a student grant to sit around all day and
read the books I would have sat around and read anyway. So I was quite fixed from an early age really, as far as what I wanted to be. I had seen my sister and the life she had married into in the Armed Forces. She was a year or two here and a year or two there and they never owned their own home. It was always Armed Forces commissions and carpets and everybody on the camp had the same house. And
I saw all of this as a kid and I thought, I don’t want that. I want stability. For the kind of writer I wanted to be, I wanted stability in my life.
‘They [my sister and her husband] have had a great life. They’ve travelled the world and now both of their sons have gone into the RAF, so both of my nephews have followed that path. And so, with Rebus, I wanted to give him an interesting background,
and I wanted to make him older than me. I was 22 or 23; he was going to be in his forties. In the first book he is 40. And he’d been married and all that kind of stuff, and I just wanted to give him a past, and there came the Jekyll and Hyde thing. There was this Hyde character that was really close to him but who eventually grows to hate him and tries to kill him. And the book was very consciously
based upon Jekyll and Hyde to that extent, so I thought if he’d been through the Army training and the SAS training – and I had been reading books about the SAS – then part of it was the psychological warfare, where they try to break you and that can be fairly traumatic. I thought that that would be a great way to have this guy crack up [the Hyde character] and so they went from being brothers-in-arms
to having some great divide between them. Hyde believes that he was sold out by Rebus and comes to hate him.
‘So it all just clicked together like that and meant that he wasn’t just a dyed-in-the wool cop. He [Rebus] went through the SAS Parachute Regiment, cracked up under it, had a breakdown and decided to join the police – or was pushed into joining the police to keep him out of trouble –
but he wasn’t part of the police machinery, so it was a nice way of making him an outsider as well, but making sure that he was fit enough and tough enough to take on the modern-day drug dealer and gangster.
‘I still have no idea what he looks like!’
R
ebus
was the title of the detective drama based on the Inspector Rebus novels and was produced by STV Productions (previously known as SMG Productions) for the ITV Network. The show lasted just shy of eight years, spread over four series, being cancelled in February 2008 after Ken Stott announced that he didn’t want to play the part any more.
The first series starred
John Hannah and was made for STV by his own production company, Clerkenwell Films. A new cast featuring Ken Stott as DI Rebus was introduced in the second series (which went into production in 2005 and was made in-house by STV).
For me, and although each episode of the show was nicely made with quality actors, the storylines were pale counterparts to Rankin’s novels. Clearly you can’t put into
a TV show the fine detail of a novel, but in the case of
Rebus
there was a distinct lack of depth to certain stories. In this Annex you will find the basic production history of the show preceded by a short observation regarding each episode, not necessarily a review of the action, which has little regard for Rankin’s original novels. All of this serves as a basic reference for anyone wanting
to know more about the show.
74
The show is not without its critics, especially episodes such as
Fleshmarket Close, The Hanging Garden
and
The Falls
, where the stories seemed rushed and lacked any tension. The fact that two actors played Rebus in such a short time implies that the series’ makers never really found the right formula for the show. The fact that there is little description of Rebus
in the novels gives the reader the freedom to picture the Inspector any way they wish, which probably means that whoever plays him on screen won’t come up to every fan’s individual expectation.
Many fans of the books got confused or disillusioned by the series. Due to this lack of enthusiasm for the show, I open this Annex with a short interview with Rankin about his perception of the TV series.
‘Well, they pulled my anti-terrorist story from the screen because of 9/11, which is strange because I thought that was one of the more old-fashioned stories in the series (
Mortal Causes
), in as much as things have changed so much in Northern Ireland. The situations have changed, the gangs have changed and the book was written and set in the
1990s, even though they changed it quite a bit for TV! I had a walk-on part in it and it was eventually shown in 2004.’
‘I walked past John Hannah (Rebus) in the street! Of the first three stories of the original series, I watched the first one
Black and Blue
at the time and liked it, but I didn’t watch the other three.’
‘I think I was worried that if I let
the TV series get too much under my skin it would change the way I wrote the books.
‘Before the stuff went on TV I spoke to a few crime writers who had been on the box [TV] and the general consensus was to try and stay away from it. Keep away from the filming of it, don’t get too involved, because of necessity TV will change your characters to fit its own parameters. And they end up not being
your characters.’
‘A lot of the Rebus books take place inside Rebus’s head and I didn’t want to start hearing an actor’s voice and seeing an actor in front of me and that worried me a lot. John Hannah [the first screen Rebus] was so different from my idea of Rebus in terms of age; it wasn’t a big problem for me in that respect. My Rebus
was 55 at the time of the first series and John Hannah was 39. So it was kind of watching a young Rebus, not the person I was writing about.’
‘Yes, but some writers can’t. There was a terrible case where the writer of the Anna Lee mysteries – Liza Cody – found the screen character far too pretty. And because the actress
was nothing like the character, Liza couldn’t write about her any more. She let her go and invented somebody else.’
‘Yes, just a wee bit. I certainly didn’t want anyone to change my ideas, and I always imagined a TV series as living in a parallel universe anyway. It’s another interpretation. Everyone has another interpretation
of what Rebus was like, and the TV series was exactly that.’
‘The Rebus books were first picked up by the BBC. They were the first to cast it and I went down to London from Edinburgh to see the big cheeses for a casting meeting, and they asked me who I thought should play
Rebus. I told them that I had absolutely no idea what he looked like. However, his background was SAS and he was a bit tough and they said that they were thinking of Robbie Coltrane. And I smiled a bit, thinking that the flashbacks to Rebus’s SAS training would be brilliant – the assault course with Private Robbie Coltrane running over it!’
Black and Blue
26 April 2000
The Hanging Garden
6 September 2000
Dead Souls
13 September 2001
Mortal Causes
1 November 2004 (this episode was postponed from 20 September 2001 due to the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001).
Detective Inspector John Rebus: John Hannah
Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke: Gayanne Potter
Detective Chief Inspector Gill Templer: Sara Stewart
Detective Inspector Jack Morton: Ewan Stewart
Morris Gerald
Cafferty: James Cosmo
The Falls
2 January 2006
Fleshmarket Close
6 March 2006
The Black Book
8 September 2006
A Question of Blood
15 September 2006
Strip Jack
22 September 2006
Let it Bleed
29 September 2006
Resurrection Men
5 October 2007
The First Stone
12 October 2007
The Naming of the Dead
26 October 2007
Knots and Crosses
7 December 2007
Detective Inspector John Rebus: Ken Stott
Detective Chief Inspector Gill Templer: Jennifer Black
Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke: Claire Price
The story starts with a man being tied to a chair by two thugs, tools being taken from a bag and the victim escaping by throwing himself out of the window while still tied to the chair. He plunges several floors.
Rebus
has labelled a serial killer as a ‘copycat’ of ’60s murderer Bible John. He gathers his leads in the case while drinking heavily and overcoming his inner demons. Sitting in his living room, looking through his netless window at the Edinburgh night sky, there is a feeling as if the city is willing him to drink himself to an early grave, but the telephone rings as if the living are telling him that
he’s still needed.
The scenes of darkness, rain and disquiet make this an entertaining, atmospheric and pacy episode, albeit a shadow of its original story.
A fictionalised version of The Dancing Pigs – the punk band Rankin sang for – appears briefly in this episode. The title refers to the Rolling Stones album
Black and Blue
, which is briefly seen in the story. Over all, an entertaining show.
DI John Rebus
John Hannah,
Ryan Slocum (The Preacher)
Jim Norton,
DI Morton
Ewan Stewart,
DCI Templer
Sara Stewart,
Eve Kendall
Joanna Roth,
D Supt McCaskill
Stuart Hepburn,
DS Clarke
Gayanne Potter,
Angie Riddell
Clare McCaron,
Lawson Geddes
David Lyon,
Lenny Spaven
Robert McIntosh,
DI Ormond
Lewis Howden,
Barry Judd
Fish,
Joanne McKenzie
Jenny Foulds,
Paul Martin (The Disciple)
Stevie Hannon,
D Supt Grogan
David Gallacher,
DI Lumsden
Gilbert Martin,
WPC Logan
Jenny Ryan,
Stanley Toal
Stephen McCole,
Joe Toal
Michael Carter,
Alan Mitchison
Russell Anderson,
Mark Jenkins
Graeme Mearns,
Tony Kane
Andrew McCulloch,
Mental Minto
Anthony Donaldson,
Kenny Lynch
Malcolm Shields,
Rico Briggs
Tam White,
William ‘Craw’ Crawford
Billy Barclay,
DC McLean
Andrew John Tait,
TV Presenter
Nicola Burnett
Smith,
Taxi Driver
Richard Callum,
Hotel Owner
Alistair Ritchie,
Customs Officer
Paul Pirie,
Gerry the Waiter
John Leith,
Undertaker
Colin Scott-Moncrieff,
Ronnie Singh
Faroque Khan,
Venessa
Molly Innes,
TV Journalist
Ian Sexon,
Immigration Officer
Ian Cairns.