Ian Rankin is a crime writer.
I am mostly interested in what the crime tells us about ourselves and the society we live in. So it’s not a game I’m playing with the reader; I’m approaching things as a straight novelist…For me a good crime novel shows the world in a way which makes me think about it as I’ve not thought about it before. in Mail Online.
Rankin has created two series. The inspector Malcolm Fox series of which there are two novels: The Complaints and The Impossible Dead.
Of The Detective inspector Rubus series there are too many books to mention. To date almost twenty books. He’s also written a non-fiction on Rubus’s Scotland, short stories, other novels and three mystery books under the pen name Jack Harvey.
Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005. In 2004, Ian won America’s celebrated Edgar Award for‘Resurrection Men’. He has also been shortlisted for the Edgar and Anthony Awards in the USA, and won Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz Prize, the French Grand Prix du Roman Noir and the Deutscher Krimipreis.
Not bad for a guy who never really set out to be a crime writer.
I have an office of sorts in my house. There will be music on the hi-fi, and I’ll sit on the sofa (if mulling), or at one desk (if writing longhand notes) or the other (if typing on to my laptop). My writing computer isn’t exactly state of the art – it can’t even access the internet – but I’ve written my last seven or eight novels on it, and it seems to work fine.
Photographer: Eamonn McCabe
Carol Balawyder 