You get a lot more work done, and you’re spared the endless flying that comes with being a hot property on the global book-fest circuit. Local fans will be disappointed, but Rankin admits that COVID-related lockdowns have some advantages, if you’re a writer. He’s appearing at Edinburgh International Book Festival this week and was also due to headline the WORD festival in Christchurch this coming Saturday.Ī digital hook-up was planned so Rankin’s face, still surprisingly boyish at 61, could loom up on a mighty screen while he blathered books with New Zealand crime writer Vanda Symon, author of the Detective Sam Shephard series.īut our latest lockdown has forced the Christchurch event to be postponed. These days, Rankin himself is a major drawcard at book festivals around the globe. I gave him a book to sign, and he wrote ‘Good luck with the Edinburgh Laidlaw’.”
“I went up to him when he was appearing at Edinburgh Book Festival and said, you know, I'm writing a book that’s a bit like your Laidlaw novels but set in Edinburgh, not Glasgow. The two men first met in 1985, when Rankin had yet to be published. And McIlvanney was his greatest early inspiration.
Rankin is Scotland’s most celebrated living crime writer, best known for a series of 21 books set in his home city, featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus. There’s a feeling of a torch being passed. * Word Christchurch book festival postponed to later this year due to lockdown It’s a prequel, set in the early 1970s, completed by Rankin after a slender sheaf of hand-written notes and character sketches was discovered in a desk drawer by McIlvanney’s widow. Now there’s a fourth Laidlaw book, The Dark Remains, due out over the next month or so, Covid permitting. He left behind a considerable body of work, including three tersely poetic crime novels set in Glasgow and featuring Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw. Lauded as “the father of Tartan Noir” and “Scotland's Camus”, William McIlvanney died in 2015, aged 79. When I took the project on, it was clear that I could not f… it up.” “Willie was a beacon to me as a young writer, showing what could be done, and his books are very important to people here in Scotland. “It was terrifying, to be honest” Rankin tells me from his Edinburgh home.
William McIlvanney at the Edinburgh Book festival in 2011.