A beer with Ian Rankin

The main conversation is about beer, but pubs, politics and pies lubricate Alastair Gilmour's 'pint of lunch' with celebrated crime writer Ian Rankin

Inspector John Rebus is a cryptic character. He’s complex and hung-up yet straightforward and unpretentious. He’s dour but witty and phlegmatic though intense. The clue’s in the name – Rebus is Latin for ‘picture puzzle’ – and his creator Ian Rankin enjoys his closeness in the same way as he keeps him at arms’ length.

Rebus spends his off-duty hours in pubs and Ian takes pleasure in decent beer. It would seem they were made for each other. He was barely six years into drinking legally when he described a scene in a typical 1970s pub with the uncanny accuracy of a more mature, beenthere- seen-it observer. The pub, he recognised even then, is a retreat, a haven from drudgery and a bolt hole for quiet reflection. In Knots & Crosses he writes: “Old men sat with their half-pint glasses, staring emptily towards the front door. Were they wondering what was outside? Or were they just scared that whatever was out there would one day force its way in.”

Perhaps unwittingly he had already taken on the persona of Inspector Rebus, his badly-bitten-by-life Edinburgh detective whose career has lurched from injury by chair legs, bruising from pessimism and battering through failed relationships. This year, Rebus is celebrating 20 years of exposure; two decades that have planted Ian Rankin in the top handful of the world’s crime writers.

“We’re just not the same person, never were,” he says above the ambient drone of lunchtime conversation in Edinburgh’s Oxford Bar. It’s one of Ian’s prefe.....

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By Ian Rankin

Section : Beer Celebrities

Page number : 54