Why Rebus won’t die

Our Press Officer, Steve Pratt caught up with Ian Rankin ahead of the York performances of his Rebus: A Game Called Malice UK Stage Tour.

Ian Rankin is talking about killing someone. Not surprising perhaps as his business is crime in general and murder in particular. What does come as a shock is the identity of the person he’d like to bump off – his bestselling creation detective John Rebus.

With a new Rebus play, TV series and book in the works the Scottish detective, John Rebus is very much alive and kicking.

“I have tried to bump him off or get rid of him several times,” confesses Rankin, “but he seems to want to stick around. He refuses to leave my head”.

Previous attempts to rid himself of Rebus, including the detective’s retirement, have ended in failure. “With the previous novel I thought this is the end because at the end of the book he’s in court charged with murder and in the dock waiting to be sentenced,” he explains.

“I thought ‘what a great way to finish the Rebus series’ … then fans disagreed. They said ‘we need to know what happened in court. Was he found guilty or not guilty?’

“So I’ve written this latest book to explain that and answer the question. The end of this new book is, I think, a very good end to the series. So let’s wait and see. It’s up to him, not up to me. It’s up to Rebus. He’ll tell me when he’s had enough of me.”

That latest Rebus book is published in October and Rankin will be out and about doing interviews and discussing the book. But he’s on the line today to talk about the latest Rebus stage play Rebus: A Game Called Malice in which a make-believe murder mystery game being played by dinner party guests leads to… well, you can probably guess – a real life murder. How fortunate that John Rebus is among the guests and ready to investigate.

Ian Rankin’s author biog is stuffed with the kind of statistics you expect of a very successful writer – multi-million copies sold all over the world; over 30 novels;  translated into 36 languages; adapted for radio, stage and screen. He’s the perfect interviewee: talkative, interesting, amusing and honest.

For starters, as the Rebus play is visiting Yorkshire (York Theatre Royal, 15-19 October) he offers details of his Yorkshire connections. His mum grew up in Bradford and he still has family around there and Leeds, whom he hopes will come to see the play in York.

The chat about Rebus switches to a branch line for him to enthuse about the train journey between Edinburgh and York. “I like taking the train,” he says when I suggest the production company will be chauffeuring him from Scotland to Yorkshire for his post-show appearance on 18 October during the run of Rebus: A Game Called Malice.

“It’s a joy with Durham, Newcastle and the coast. A beautiful part of the world to do by train. And you get to go into the railway station bar – The Tap isn’t it? – and have a pint.”

I tell him Theatre Royal tickets are selling well for Rebus,  all part of a public eagerness for whodunnit, detective and crime stories. “It’s a very popular genre and producers know it will put bums on seats. It’s a good night out. You’re working hard mentally in a fun way, there’s an interval when you can get a drink and discuss with your friends and family what you think is going on, what happens next. And you’re in and out of the theatre in two hours. As far as I’m concerned I want to be home and in bed by ten o’clock’.

Rebus has been a hit on stage from the start. Rankin was told by the manager of the Edinburgh theatre where the first play Rebus: Long Shadows premiered that “he’d never seen takings like it”. Rankin adds: “So they were very happy because they were selling more drinks at the interval”.

He wrote the first draft of the latest third Rebus play during lockdown, “basically to entertain myself”, he explains. “The first draft was written without anyone knowing I was doing it.

“When I read it I thought ‘it’s short but I like it’ so I showed it to Simon Reade, who is a professional playwright with whom I’d worked previously. He picked it apart and put it together again – and that’s what we’ve got.

Writing a play and a book are completely different. “You have to get in a completely different mindset. In a novel you can be inside a character’s head, you can have a huge cast of characters, you can range widely over geography and time. A play is a much more succinct entity and the actors have to speak your ideas.

“The challenge for me is in how different it is. You have to tell a story through voices in a way that I don’t when writing a novel. Very early in my writing career I was writing radio plays for the BBC. They were a lot of fun to do and I enjoyed working with the director and actors. Sometimes the actors came up with much better lines than mine. But the writer gets the credit when it’s broadcast so it’s terrific from my point of view.

“Writing a novel is not collective. You sit there in splendid isolation for six months to a year. With a play from quite early on it is collaborative, especially when the actors and director get involved. It changes shape because the intonation of each actor is different to the way I imagined the lines being spoken. The way they move around the stage is not how I imagined it might be. And every night in the theatre is, of course, subtly different from the night before.”

A number of different actors have played John Rebus both on stage and television. John Michie played him in a try-out of A Game Called Malice but couldn’t commit to a long tour this year. Gray O’Brien, known to TV viewers through Casualty, Coronation Street and Peak Practice, plays him in the current UK tour, and Rankin is confident he will do the character justice.

He’s not at all protective of Rebus. He feels each actor adds something to the role. “Every actor is going to give me a slightly different interpretation of the role. Every actor that has played him on television, on radio, on stage has brought something new to the performance and my understanding of this complex character.

“I’ve been writing about this guy Rebus since 1985 and the first book was published in 1987. I’ve spent more than half my life with him. I still don’t quite know what makes him tick. I keep writing about him to get to the core of his identity. And so each actor helps me understand the character a little bit better.”

He missed the first week’s run of the Rebus: A Game of Malice in Cambridge because of a pre-arranged holiday in Greece. He’ll be 65 next year and his wife has suggested (in that way wives do) he might consider slowing down work-wise and enable them to go travelling.

This is a big ask of a man who couldn’t resist doing some work during a recent year-long sabbatical. She has, he says, been booking lots of holidays to take him away from work. Will she be more successful at getting him to take things easy than he has been so far at killing off Rebus?

Rebus: A Game Called Malice is at York Theatre Royal, 15-19 October.

Post-show discussion with Ian Rankin and members of the company on Friday October 18.

Find out more information and book your tickets here.

Box office 01904 623568 | yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

The new Rebus book Midnight and Blue is published on 10 October.