The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives

I

“Male hero (a policeman?)”

That was my first note to myself, dated March 15, 1985, about the character who would eventually become Detective Inspector John Rebus. I was twenty-four years old and a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh. I was living in a shared apartment with two other (female) postgrads in Arden Street. I’d been in the city six and a half years, and still I couldn’t fathom the place. My doctoral thesis was concentrating on the novelist Muriel Spark, and through her I was beginning to investigate the Edinburgh of the imagination. In Spark’s most celebrated work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Brodie is a descendant of William Brodie, a real historical character. Brodie was a deacon of the city, a councillor, cabinetmaker, and a man who lived a double life. Respectable and industrious by day, he led a masked gang into the homes of his victims by night, robbing them of their valuables. Brodie was trying to fund his lavish lifestyle (including a couple of demanding mistresses), and had diversified into lock-fitting, meaning he had little trouble gaining unlawful entry. When caught and found guilty, he was hanged on a scaffold he had helped to modernize as part of his day job.

Deacon Brodie provided the template for another great character from Scottish literature, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Henry Jekyll. Muriel Spark was a huge fan of Stevenson, and my research took me to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The idea of the doppelgänger had been explored before, however, in James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, so I had to read that book too. At the same time, I was becoming fascinated by contemporary literary theory, enjoying the “game-playing” aspect of storytelling. Eventually, I would name my own fictional detective after a type of picture-puzzle, and the mystery in his first adventure would be solved with the help of a professor of semiotics.

That’s the problem with Knots and Crosses (and one reason I find it hard to read the book these days)-it is so obviously written by a literature student. Rebus reads too many books and even quotes from Walt Whitman (a writer whose works he really shouldn’t have known). He is overly literate, perhaps because I didn’t quite know him. I was twenty-four and knew little enough of life outside the confines of academia. I certainly didn’t know what it would be like to work as a cop. The plot of Knots and Crosses demanded that Rebus be a seasoned pro, so I made him forty years old. He’s separated from his wife and has a young daughter. Really, this guy was unlike me in so many ways, and our one resemblance-that love of literature-made him less than realistic.

It seems to me now that I wasn’t interested in Rebus as a person. He was a way of telling a story about Edinburgh, and of updating the doppelgänger tradition. Knots and Crosses was self-consciously based on Jekyll and Hyde, just as a later Rebus novel, The Black Book, would use Justified Sinner as its starting point. The thing is, I’d always been a bit of an outsider, always tried to present several faces to the world. I’d grown up in a fairly tough neighborhood-in a town of seven thousand inhabitants-which had existed only as a hamlet and a couple of farms until coal was discovered at the start of the twentieth century. That’s when my grandfather shifted the family east from the Lanarkshire coalfields. Homes were constructed quickly (and cheaply) to house the new labor force. There wasn’t even time to think up names for the streets, so they just got numbers instead. My dad (the youngest of seven) didn’t work down in the mines, but all his brothers did. By the time I came along, however, the coal was running out. The klaxon that signaled the start of each new shift fell silent one day, and that was that. Not that I took much of this in, being too busy living a completely separate life inside my own head.

There was another world in there-a fantastical world filled with spaceships and soldiers and constant thrilling adventure. In winter, I’d pretend that my bed was an Arctic encampment-which wasn’t so far from the truth. There was heating only in the living room downstairs, and in the winter months I’d wake up to a thin film of ice on the insides of my windows. But even that ice seemed strange and wonderful to my young imagination. I’d be under the thick blankets with a flashlight and a good supply of comic books-British and American. Soon I was even making my own versions, folding sheets of paper and slitting the edges to make little eight-page booklets that I would cover with doodles and drawings-more spaceships, more soldiers. I think I remember showing one of my creations to my mum, who seemed bemused. Maybe she’d spotted something I hadn’t: an absolute lack of artistic ability.

Not that this mattered, because by the age of twelve I was moving from comic books to music. I’d started buying chart singles and reading pop magazines. I was decorating the walls of my room with posters. A friend’s older brother opened my ears to Frank Zappa, Jethro Tull, and Led Zeppelin. My mother agreed to buy me a Hendrix album for my birthday, although this meant a terrifying sortie to the “hippie” record shop in nearby Kirkcaldy. As with comic books, however, I wasn’t interested in being a mere bystander-I wanted a band of my own, and created on paper what was impossible in real life. My alter ego was vocalist Ian Kaput, and he was joined by guitarist Blue Lightning and bassist Zed “Killer” Macintosh (plus a drummer with a double-barreled name, but I forget now what it was). The group was called the Amoebas. They started off playing three-minute pop hits but eventually graduated to progressive rock-their masterpiece lasted twenty-six minutes and was called “Continuous Repercussions”-and I was with them all the way, writing their lyrics, designing their record sleeves, planning their world tours and TV appearances. I’d make up a top ten (albums and singles) each week, which entailed the creation of another nine groups, and so it went.

I’m conscious now that what I was doing was “playing God,” re-imagining my world and making it more exciting and evocative than the reality. It’s what all writers do, and already I was starting to feel like a writer. My parents weren’t great readers, and there were few books in the house, but I was drawn to stories. I would haunt the town’s library and soon started borrowing “adult” titles, meaning books whose films I wasn’t old enough to see at the cinema. At age thirteen, I was reading Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. By fourteen it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I also came across Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft books (and would eventually give Rebus the forename John as a nod to “black private dick” John Shaft). I checked the TV schedules to see if there were any programs about books and would watch them, deciding that I really needed to read this guy Solzhenitsyn (I ended up struggling through volume two of The Gulag Archipelago). Later on I would fail to finish Dante’s Inferno but be thrilled by Ian McEwan’s first book of short stories.

My best subject in high school was English. I always enjoyed writing essays (which were in effect short stories). One was called “Paradox” and concerned a man who seemed to be president of the United States but turned out to be an inmate in an insane asylum. My teacher liked it but wondered why I’d chosen that particular title. It was the name of a Hawkwind song, I told him, and I just liked the sound and look of the word.

“And no, sir, I’ve no idea what it means.”

For another essay, we were given the phrase “Dark they were and golden-eyed” and told to use it as our starting point. I wrote about two parents searching a house filled with drug addicts, seeking their errant son.

Words were a passion of mine. I would do crosswords and flick through the dictionary, noting interesting words (including, after the exchange noted above, paradox). And those song lyrics for the Amoebas had become poems, one of which I entered for a national competition. It was called “Euthanasia” (another of those great-sounding words) and was runner-up. When my success was noted in the local newspaper, my parents learned for the first time that I was writing poetry. I hadn’t dared tell anyone until then. (Later, I would learn that Muriel Spark’s first publication had also been a prize-winning school poem.)

I’d always been a successful chameleon, playing the part of fitting in. I played soccer (badly) and had a bicycle. I hung around the street corners with the tough kids. But when a rumble started, I’d be on the periphery of the action, taking it all in without getting involved. When I went home, I’d head for my bedroom and write poems about the fights, the booze, the first sexual fumblings, and then my notebook would go back underneath my bed, hidden from view.

II

Okay, so I’m seventeen now, and I want nothing more than to be an accountant.

See, nobody in my family has been to university, but it seems I’m brainy and it’s expected I’ll go. And if you’re working-class, you go to university to escape your roots-to get a good career: doctor, lawyer, dentist, architect…

I had an uncle in England, and he owned his own house (unlike my parents) and had a flash car (neither of my parents could even drive). Our summer holidays were spent at seaside resorts in Scotland and England, or in a cramped trailer twenty miles north of my hometown. My uncle always seemed to have a tan from foreign holidays. He was the most successful man I knew, and I wanted the same for myself.

Problem was, I wasn’t very good at math. And I was growing to be ever more in thrall to books and to writing. I’d cranked out a couple of “novels” (probably twenty pages long, scribbled on jotters stolen from my school). The first was about a teenager who feels misunderstood so runs away from home and ends up in London, where he is ground down by life before eventually committing suicide. The second was a retelling of Lord of the Flies, set in my high school. It was starting to dawn on me: why the hell was I thinking of going to university to study a subject I had no real interest in? I broke the news to my parents and watched their shoulders sag. They were in their late fifties by this point, not too far from retirement. What, they asked, would I do with a degree in English? It was a fair question.

“Teach” was all I could think to reply.

I started looking at possible universities. St. Andrews was the closest, but I liked reading modern American and British novels, and “modern” at St. Andrews meant John Milton. I knew this because I’d asked. Edinburgh, however, had a course in “American literature,” so I applied there and was eventually accepted. How well did I know the city? Hardly at all. I’d lived all my life about twenty miles north, but the family seldom ventured that far. I remember being taken there to see a stage version of Peter Pan, and my mother once took me to the castle and a children’s museum. In my last couple of years at high school, I’d made occasional Saturday-afternoon forays with friends. But we would always stick to the same route, taking in all the available record shops, one radical bookshop (where porn, under the guise of “art books,” could be perused), and a couple of pubs where the bar staff had decided we weren’t underage enough to pose a problem.

Arriving in the city in October 1978 as a student was terrifying and exciting. The university had been unable to provide me with accommodation, so I was sharing a room with a school pal in a motel on the outskirts. I was quick to join the poetry and film societies; quick, too, to discover new pubs, live-music venues, and strip bars. I also joined a punk group (as singer and lyricist), so found a new outlet for my stanzas. And I was on the receiving end of a slew of rejection letters from magazines and newspapers.

The poetry society held weekly meetings. Hormonally charged young men (all the poets seemed to be male, the audience fifty-fifty) would recite odes of love lost, love unrequited, love from afar. My poems were a bit different. A typical opening might be:

Mutated machine-guns patrolling the subways

While glue-sniffing kids hang themselves in lift-shafts…

I had another poem called “Strappado” (a form of torture) and yet another telling the moving story of a husband who strangles his young wife on their honeymoon. Where was this stuff coming from? Why was I writing lyrics about addicts and killers and crucifixion? I can’t find anything in my early life to justify this apparent interest in the bizarre and the demonic. I even had an alter ego, a drifter called Kejan, who cropped up in several poems and who would usually be drinking absinthe in Paris or traversing the stews of Alexandria:

A foreign body in the bloodstream of Berne,

Kejan tips the remnants of tobacco

From the pack onto the paper,

His breath scattering the flakes

Onto the floor

To lie wriggling in the draught.

Kejan needs some air…

None of this, it goes without saying, was helping me get laid.

But I did get to meet a lot of “real” writers for the first time in my life. The poetry society had funding to bring one professional poet to do a reading each week, and afterward we would all go for a drink or nine, during which time the poets would attempt to sell us copies of their books and pamphlets while we’d be asking questions such as “How do I get published?” I soon learned that most poets don’t make a living writing but have to supplement their income with other work. I wondered if the same was true of fiction writers.

My poems were far from the Wordsworthian ideal of “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” They were narratives. My characters went places and did things, or things happened to them. (There were always consequences.) I started writing short stories, influenced by Ian McEwan, Jayne Anne Phillips, and anyone else I happened to be reading at the time. I was trying to find out two things: what I wanted to write about, and how to do the actual writing. It took me a while to realize that the thing I really wanted to write about was enveloping me and embracing me every step of the way and with each and every breath I took.

It was Edinburgh itself.

III

This is a haunted city. For centuries it was haunted by the memory that it had once been a thriving capital before signing that status away to London. It’s a city rife with ghost tours. Its cemeteries teem, and there are myriad streets, tunnels, and caves just below ground level. It’s a city that hides itself away from the world. In the past, whenever invaders called, the denizens would scurry underground, emerging once the triumphant armies had tired of taking possession of what appeared to be a ghost town. The city the tourist sees, even today, is far from the whole story. Edinburgh is also home to a bloodstained history. Burke and Hare were serial killers who posed as grave robbers, slaughtering at least seventeen victims before being brought to justice (after which Burke’s skin was crafted into a series of gruesome souvenirs, some of which can be viewed in the city’s museums).

There were stories of well-respected citizens who had confessed to devil worship, of a coach driven by a headless horseman, of covenanters executed and witches burned. By night, the teenage Robert Louis Stevenson used to creep from his home to consort with harlots, poets, and ruffians in the seediest bars he could find.

The more I looked at Edinburgh, the more I learned. The city is geographically divided-the mazy Old Town to the south of Princes Street, the rational and elegant New Town to the north. The journey the young Stevenson took from one to the other was the journey of Dr. Jekyll toward Mr. Hyde. But was that particular Edinburgh a city of the past? Not really. In October 1977, a year before I’d arrived as a student, two teenage girls had vanished after a night out. Their last sighting was in a bar called the World’s End. Their bodies were found the next morning. For more than two decades, their killers went undetected. Edinburgh ’s students knew that there really was a “bogeyman” out there; we didn’t need the frisson provided by ghost tours and the like.

Contemporary Edinburgh and the city of the past collided in my imagination. I was living in the 1980s but reading about Miss Jean Brodie (set in the Depression years of the 1930s), Jekyll and Hyde, and the Justified Sinner. The Edinburgh I walked through by night seemed to have changed very little. There was a heroin problem, a housing crisis, and HIV was on the horizon. There was bitter rivalry between the city’s two soccer teams, spilling over into weekend violence. Go-go bars would eventually be replaced by lap bars; we all knew that Leith had the red-light district but that the saunas were also more than they seemed. I’d started listening to a lot of music that would later be classified as “goth”: Throbbing Gristle and Joy Division and the Cure. My imagination was darkening all the time. I was sleeping till noon and staying up until four a.m. I was writing, reading, writing, reading, and then writing some more. My short stories had titles like “The Suffering,” “Confession,” “The Violation of Mr Paton,” “Pig,” and “Isolation.” I’d finished my degree but applied to do a PhD with Muriel Spark as the subject. Her stories were filled with supernatural elements, gothic settings, harsh satire, and devilry. But she was such an elegant, subtle, and concise writer that often critics chose not to notice the darkness lying just below the shimmering surface of her prose. I was learning from her too.

One day, I got a letter telling me I’d won second prize in a short-story contest run by the Scotsman newspaper. They would print the story and give me some cash. It was called “The Game” and concerned the last day in the life of a shipbuilding yard. (I’ve no idea where that came from either.) Around the same time, another story was accepted for publication by New Edinburgh Review magazine. Two more were taken by the BBC to be broadcast on radio. A story about a cop patrolling a soccer game was going to appear in a collection called New Writing Scotland. In August 1984, I won a story contest organized by a local radio station. Peter Ustinov presented me with my prize.

Bloody hell, I thought. It could only be a matter of time before my first novel found a publisher.

Ahh, my first novel. It was called Summer Rites and was a black comedy about a hotel in the Scottish Highlands. It never did find a publisher, but I was already busy with my next book, The Flood. Taking to heart the adage “write what you know,” I set this new book in a (thinly disguised) version of my hometown. It did find a publisher, a small press in Edinburgh that printed a couple hundred hardback copies and maybe seven hundred paperbacks, many of which went unsold and were pulped.

The same week I signed the contract for The Flood, I got the idea for yet another novel, set in Edinburgh this time, the gothic Edinburgh I’d been reading about at university, but very much in the present and featuring:

“Male hero (a policeman?)”

On March 19, 1985, I recorded in my diary that “I’ve not written any of it yet, but it’s all there in my head from page 1 to circa page 250.” On March 24, I wrote the first four pages and decided to give it the working title Knots and Crosses. By July 4, the first draft was finished, but for some reason I didn’t start the second draft until September 18. I’d typed out the first couple of revised pages when, again according to my diary, my flatmate at the time, Jon Curt, suggested a trip to the pub where he worked. The pub was called the Oxford Bar: “splendidly uncontrived and open until 2:00 a.m.” It would be a few years before the Oxford Bar appeared in a Rebus novel (I thought bars, streets, etc., had to be fictional in a work of fiction), but I was glad to have made its acquaintance.

From the above, it seems I’ve been guilty of a protracted lie. For years I’ve been telling people that I wrote Knots and Crosses in that apartment in Arden Street, right across the road from where Rebus still lives. But I vacated Arden Street in the summer of 1985 and moved in with two undergraduate students (Jon being one of them) in a place way over on the other side of the city. This means that Knots is even closer to Jekyll and Hyde than I’d guessed, having been written partly to the south of Princes Street and partly to the north.

Because my novel The Flood had been accepted for publication, an agent had come to ask if I was working on anything else. She decided that we should send copies of Knots and Crosses to five London-based publishers: Bodley Head, Collins, Century-Hutchinson, Andre Deutsch, and William Heinemann. Eventually, we’d get the thumbs-up from only one-Bodley Head. But that was all we needed, and I was especially thrilled that I would have the same publisher as Muriel Spark-at least for a short while.

My final diary entry for 1985 ends: “Year after year, there’s improvement.”

When the book was finally published, however, on March 19, 1987, I noted that it seemed to receive less publicity than its predecessor. Working with a publicity budget of zero, Bodley Head ran no advertisements and secured no interviews with newspapers or magazines. The book came and went without anyone really paying it any attention at all. It failed to make the short list for the Crime Writers’ Association’s first-novel award (won that year by Denis Kilcommons), though the CWA asked me if I wanted to join them anyway. It was at this point that I realized the awful truth: while trying to write “the Great Scottish Neo-Gothic Novel” I had somehow become a crime writer. Not that this gave me too many sleepless nights. I had said farewell to the character called Rebus and was moving on to a spy novel called Watchman. It would be another year or two before my editor cleared his throat and asked me what had happened to John Rebus.

“I liked him, and I think there’s more you can do with his…”

I think his clearing of the throat was a way of telling me that he didn’t expect Watchman to do any better than Knots and Crosses, but that maybe the crime genre was worth another try.

This editorial musing was, in retrospect, invaluable, but the gods also seemed to be looking favorably upon Rebus. A TV producer had shown some interest in that first novel. He had formed a new company with an actor (known for his role in a popular soap) and was looking for a promising project. If successful, the action of Knots and Crosses would have been moved to London (to accommodate the actor’s English accent), and that might have been the end of my creation. However, my agent disappeared halfway through negotiations, and the deal fizzled out. (Don’t worry, she reappeared some years later.)

Hide and Seek gave me a second bite at Rebus’s cherry, if you’ll pardon the expression. The name Hyde is implicit in the title-in fact, the book’s working title was Hyde and Seek. I followed it up with a novel in which I dragged Rebus to London (where I was living at the time) so he could hate it as much as I did. By then the damage was done: three books down, I had produced a series. And for as long as Inspector Rebus proved a satisfactory vehicle for my investigations into contemporary Scotland, that series would continue. I just hoped a readership would eventually follow.

IV

So where did Rebus come from? Well, from my subconscious, obviously, from a young man’s brain, filled with stories and strategies. But also from the books I’d been reading, the city I’d made my home, and the blood that had soaked into its pavements and roadways. Yet it still seems to me that he appeared as a bolt from the blue. I’ve looked at photos of myself in my student room in Arden Street, and have pored over my diaries from the time, seeking clues. The notes I jotted down prior to starting the novel shed very little light. I saw the book as “a metaphysical thriller” but spent very little time delineating Rebus’s character. I wanted the story to contain lots of “puzzles and wordplay,” wanted it to be “a very visual piece,” and decided it should be written in the third person: “Don’t need to go too far inside the main character’s head.” Rebus was to be a cipher rather than a three-dimensional human being. From a rereading of Knots and Crosses, I think it’s true to say that the reader feels more distanced from Rebus in that book than in any of the others that followed. There was a good reason for this: I wanted Rebus himself to exist as a potential suspect in people’s minds. Hence the momentary flashbacks, the hints of something awful in his past, and the “locked room” in his apartment. He also at one point almost strangles a woman who has invited him into her bed.

Nice.

Through sheer force of will, however, Rebus stuck around and grew into someone more fully formed, to the point where fans are now worried about his health and find when they meet me that I fall disappointingly short of Rebus himself. I’m just not as damaged as he is, as complex, or as dangerous to be around. I’m only the bloke who commits his stories to paper. What became obvious to me early on was that a detective makes for a terrific commentator on the world around him. He has access to the highest in the land and the lowest, the politicians and oligarchs, as well as the junkies and petty thieves. In writing books about Edinburgh, I could examine the city (and the nation of which it is capital once more) from top to bottom through Rebus’s eyes. I was lucky too-there was no tradition of the crime novel in Scotland, so I could make my own path. And back then there were no crime novels set in contemporary Edinburgh, meaning that for a little while I had no competition.

I’ve been lucky also in that Edinburgh and Scotland continue to change in interesting ways, giving me plenty of plots while delivering up their secrets and mysteries only very slowly. I’ve been living in this city now for almost thirty years, on and off, and it continues to surprise me. Underground streets and chambers are still being discovered. Archaeological digs at the castle bring new truths to the surface. Exhibits long forgotten in the various museums turn out to have their own tales worth telling. As a subject, the city seems inexhaustible. This is, after all, a city of words. Where else in the world would you find the main railway station named after a novel (Waverley) and a vast edifice in the city center celebrating that work’s author (the Scott Monument)? Robert Louis Stevenson brought his own imagination to bear on his hometown. Arthur Conan Doyle was born here. Muriel Spark grew up here. Robert Burns made his name here. James M. Barrie was a student here. Not to mention the likes of Carlyle and Hume. Right up to J. K. Rowling, Irvine Welsh, and Alexander McCall Smith in the present day.

Rebus, too, is composed of words-millions of them-so you might think that by now I’d have got to the heart of what makes him tick, but he continues to surprise me, which is perhaps only fitting for a man whose name means “puzzle.” For twenty years now, he’s been living inside my head, but sometimes it feels as though I’m the one living in his. When a psychoanalyst interviewed me at a book festival a while back, he wondered if Rebus represented the brother I never had, or maybe the life of adventure I was never going to allow myself to lead. Both my parents served in World War II (my father in the Far East). One of my two sisters married a Royal Air Force engineer and spent much of her life thereafter traveling the world. As a kid, I once wrote to the army asking for information on joining up. But I was resolutely bookish, and all my adventures took place inside my head.

Maybe the psychoanalyst had a point; maybe Rebus really is an extension of my own personality-doing all the dangerous stuff I’d be too scared to do, breaking rules and conventions, getting into fights and scrapes, and even coming up against the occasional deadly force. Some commentators have decided that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a book about the creative process and the division between our rational mind and the darker fantasies we keep hidden from view. In which case, Rebus would be my Hyde, acting as a force of nature, saying the unsayable, doing things I could never bring myself to do-even though I could (and can) all too readily imagine myself doing them.

Sir Winston Churchill once called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” I’ve found the same to be true of Scotland and Edinburgh.

And of Detective Inspector John Rebus.