Ian Rankin
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2006
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer Ian Rankin. Ian Rankin is an award-winning writer of crime fiction and the creator of the Scottish detective John Rebus who has featured in 17 novels to date.
Born in Fife, Rankin came from a working-class background in a coal-mining town where he says he spent most of his childhood trying to "look like he fitted in". In his bedroom he would live out a fantasy life, writing poems, stories and creating strip-cartoons. He admits there are many parallels between himself and Rebus - they lived at the same Edinburgh address, both are fond of a drink and now they even share the same taste in music, though unlike Rebus, Rankin has never smoked. However all that is about to change; Rebus has reached the age of retirement in the police force and Rankin's next novel will be the last in the series.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Solid Air by John Martyn Book: A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell Luxury: Pinball machine (traditional American one)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a novelist, He writes in the main about a Scottish policeman called |
| 0:34.5 | Reebas who he says is trying like him to make sense of the world around him. |
| 0:39.3 | The Reebas stories have made him one of Britain's best-selling writers. Set in Scotland they capture many |
| 0:43.9 | different aspects of the darker side of life there today, from Bedophilia to political |
| 0:48.8 | corruption. He wrote the first novel about Rebus when he was 25, but it wasn't until he published the |
| 0:54.2 | eighth that the world seemed to recognize he had a talent that deserved wider recognition. |
| 0:59.1 | Once an unknown writer hardly scraping a living, he's now famous, successful and popular. It seems to me that the |
| 1:06.1 | figures of the detective and the novelist are similar in some ways, he says. Both seek the truth. |
| 1:11.2 | Both are interested in human nature and motivation. |
| 1:14.0 | Both are voyeurs. |
| 1:16.0 | He is Ian Rankin. |
| 1:18.0 | Let's start with being a voyeur then, Ian. |
| 1:21.0 | Have you always been an outsider looking in? |
| 1:24.0 | I think so. I mean, when I was a small kid growing up in a coal mining town, |
| 1:29.2 | I knew I was different from the other kids. You know, I would sit in my room and try and write poetry or |
| 1:33.9 | song lyrics or whatever or strip cartoons but I had this kind of knack of |
| 1:38.3 | looking like I fitted in and they never spot that you didn't go the whole way. Not for a long time. |
| 1:43.3 | I mean, not even my parents. |
| 1:44.8 | I think the first inkling he got that I was actually sitting |
| 1:47.2 | scribbling things in my bedroom was when I came second in a portrait |
... |
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