Face it, book snobs, crime fiction is real literature - and Ian Rankin proves it

In joining the Scottish establishment, the writer of Rebus and Malcolm Fox shows his genre is not a ghetto

Ian Rankin Photo: REX FEATURES

By Allan Massie

I first met Ian Rankin in 1983 when I held a fellowship in creative writing at Edinburgh University. He was working on a PhD thesis on Muriel Spark and supporting himself with a part-time job as a clerk in the Inland Revenue. He used to bring short stories for me to read, criticise and advise on. They were sensitive and perceptive stories mostly about childhood in the old mining communities of Fife. Some years later, he turned, sensibly, to crime, and after he had published one novel, I recommended him to my then editor, Euan Cameron at the Bodley Head.

Euan took him on, and Ian has never looked back. He became the most successful crime novelist Scotland has ever produced. He made respectable Edinburgh dangerous, beautiful Edinburgh sinister. There are more than 20 novels featuring his policeman John Rebus. They have been adapted for television and a tourist industry has grown up around them
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