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.

One of the wonderful things about doing research for this Writers’ Desks series is that I always stumble about something new and interesting.

I found this delightful interview in Believer Magazine with Anne Enright, the author of the 2007 Booker Prize winner for her novel The Gathering.

Do take the time to have a look at this magazine for more information on Anne Enright.

Here’s part of the interview:

BLVR: Your novels have a lot of ghosts. The characters are always bumping into the ghosts and the ghosts are bumping into the characters with no real explanation. American writers don’t do that so much.

AE: My ghosts are more like metaphors. They’re like, just words. They vary hugely in their metabolic content—how physical they are or how real they are or how visible they are in the sentence or the room. All of these things are up for grabs, really. Some of my ghosts are corpses in the room. The thing that won’t go away. Whatever it is, in whatever form. That’s the ghost.

BLVR: That headrest in Veronica’s car, in The Gathering. That was a great ghost.

AE: Yeah. He’s a ghost. I looked out the window one day and there was the car. Martin, my husband, had put the seat forward to get something out of the backseat. But when I saw it I thought something catastrophic had happened in the car. It looked like a body with its head on the dash. Suddenly I thought someone had died in the car. It was just peripheral. Just a little flicker. But then I had to check. And, of course, it wasn’t a dead body, it was just the seat.

Here’s her office with a Philippe Starck “Louis Ghost” chair.

Photographer: Eamonn McCabe

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Carol Balawyder

Tag Archives: writers’ desks

IAN RANKIN

Ian Rankin is a crime writer.

Not bad for a guy who never really set out to be a crime writer.

Anne Enright

Here’s part of the interview:

Here’s her office with a Philippe Starck “Louis Ghost” chair.

Ian Rankin is a crime writer.

Not bad for a guy who never really set out to be a crime writer.

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Here’s part of the interview:

Here’s her office with a Philippe Starck “Louis Ghost” chair.

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