Ian Rankin & Inspector Rebus

by Craig Cabell

  I walk through the pub door and instantly find myself at the bar. Ian Rankin turns round and smiles. ‘Hi there,’ he says. We shake hands. He is a nice guy: he buys me a drink! We go through to the back room, sit down and start our conversation:

  Does Edinburgh have a dual personality?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ Rankin begins. ‘Up until the 18th century it was a very democratic city. The rich and the poor lived cheek-by-jowl in the Old Town, which is quite a narrow area. The rich folk got fed up with this and built the New Town, which at that time was separated from the Old Town by Nor’ Loch, which is now Princes Street Gardens. There was a physical barrier between rich and poor and that was the beginning of the Jekyll and Hyde side of the city. It was a city that had a public face and a private vice.’

  ‘You’re attracted to the dark side of the city’s past, aren’t you?’ I venture.

  ‘I’m always attracted to the dark side,’ Rankin says, sipping his pint of 80 shillings. ‘That’s the way my mind works. I love all that dark stuff about Edinburgh and I could see it in the contemporary city as well. And when I was a student I would get up and walk into the middle of town, where all the libraries and the university were, and I would see the tourist Edinburgh and then in the night I would go back to the housing scheme where I lived.

  ‘The first couple of books in the series were about that side of Edinburgh. It was a bit like throwing a stone in a pond and watching the ripples spread. I thought that crime novels were a good way of talking about modern Scotland, so I started to talk about its industry, its politics, the bigotry – the religious divide – and each book tries to add a little piece of the jigsaw to that, as well as adding a little bit more of the jigsaw to – what is to me – the intriguing character of John Rebus.’

  ‘So the books are as much about Edinburgh as John Rebus?’

  ‘I started the Rebus books to try and make sense of Edinburgh and I’m still trying to make sense of it! And I can see to an outsider coming in how the city appears to be a very cold place – psychologically cold, spiritually cold. It’s very hard to try and get to know people. They’re very standoffish, very shy. It’s a very difficult city to get inside of. There are monuments everywhere, some to great writers, which I found very stifling when I first started out, because I was always under their shadow.’

  ‘You mean the shadow of great writers from Edinburgh’s past?’

  ‘Yes. I couldn’t escape from them. When you arrive in Edinburgh, you arrive at Waverley station, named after the Scott novel. Then in Princes Street Gardens there’s this massive monument and statue of Scott. You go into the Jekyll and Hyde pub: you go past the statue of Sherlock Holmes because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was Scottish too. You’ve always got these guys there, looking over your shoulder. It felt to me that everything that could be written about Edinburgh had already been written. That there was nothing left to say.

  ‘And then along came Trainspotting. And the importance of that novel was that it showed a wider public that there was more to Edinburgh than just the past. Suddenly Edinburgh didn’t have to be all statues, monuments, all twee, tartan, shortbread and bagpipes. And instead of talking about the castle and the rest of it you could talk about the poverty and unemployment, the various schemes there were to help people – the drug problems. The things that were in the town but not in that central part of it; suddenly the wider city was noticed. So the things the tourist doesn’t see when they come to Edinburgh were considered. And that’s the thing about Edinburgh; it tries to hide its true nature from you. Even during the Festival you’re not going to get a taste of the real city.’

  ‘Is there one book that sums up Edinburgh?’ I ask, fishing for Jekyll and Hyde.

  ‘There isn’t one book that sums up Edinburgh, no. You would probably have to read Trainspotting, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Heart of Midlothian by Sir Walter Scott. But if you want to get inside the psychology of Edinburgh, you have to go to a book that is not set there: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which is actually set in London but is really about Edinburgh.’

  Ah, yes. This is my cue. ‘The skyline in Stevenson’s story is the Edinburgh skyline, not the Victorian London skyline.’

  ‘Almost the cobblestoned streets, the back streets, the Scotch mist and everything else, yes, I agree. Also Jekyll is a Scottish name. There are a lot of people in Scotland called Jekyll.’

  ‘But what about the legend of the original manuscript of the novel being thrown on the fire by Stevenson? Do you think the original burnt story was set in Edinburgh and Fanny – Stevenson’s wife – told him not to do that…’

  ‘… because he’d never be able to go back there? Absolutely. Not that he ever did go back, of course … Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the most important Scottish novel of all time. It’s the one that Scottish writers keep coming back to time and time again. And the two halves of the character – Jekyll and Hyde – to me, when I live here, sum it all up. It’s the haves and have-nots. On the surface it appears very gentle and historical and cultured but under the surface there are all these seething frustrations and anger.’

  ‘That’s very interesting. I’ve never seen it as an angry novel.’

  ‘Yes, the darker instincts are there. And physically the novel summed up the Old Town and the New Town. The New Town was built for all the rich people to live, because the Old Town was where all the poor people lived. So physically and psychologically, you have it all there. And it still existed in the 1980s when I wrote the first Rebus book. I actually thought that I would re-write Jekyll and Hyde as a cop novel, which is what I did with Knots and Crosses. And nobody got it. Nobody understood what I was trying to do. So I re-wrote the book again and that became Hide and Seek, the second Rebus novel. I used ‘Hide’ in the title and quoted from Stevenson’s book throughout but still nobody got it! My Rebus books have always been about me trying to make sense of Edinburgh and the first two books was the beginning of that through the most significant book about the city.’

  ‘I did notice that you used many of the same surnames from Jekyll and Hyde in Hide and Seek, such as Poole, Enfield, Carew, Edward and Hyde, oh yes, and Utterson. I can appreciate the depth of the influence.’ (I also noted that the model made of the Wolfman (the serial killer) in Tooth and Nail was not dissimilar to the ape-like Hyde of actor Fredric March (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1932) and the Hyde depicted in the famous 1930s Bodley Head illustrated edition of Jekyll and Hyde; so maybe another Jekyll and Hyde influence there for Rankin, albeit in a film-related sense…)

  A famous quote from Stevenson’s novel come to my mind: ‘“If he be Mr Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr Seek.”’ Surely this was Rebus searching for the child-killer that hid in shadows? Yes, the killer is playing hide and seek. A children’s game and, apparently, one of Stevenson’s youth-time favourites. It was therefore intriguing to seek the devilish Mr Hyde within Stevenson’s story. There was something covert, something that truly hid inside the story, something that Louis wanted to exorcise. His wife was afraid of this exorcism, hence the explanation of the burning of the original manuscript! But wait a moment, weren’t important papers – letters – burnt towards the end of Jekyll and Hyde? ‘On the hearth there lay a pile of grey ashes, as though many papers had been burned.’ Was this an admission, by Stevenson, of the burning of the original manuscript?

  ‘Fanny didn’t like the original version,’ Rankin says. ‘She maybe found it too grotesque, or too melodramatic. Did he burn it? I’d like to think he hid it, and it’s waiting to be found. But he was in such a state, he probably did set fire to it.’

  I don’t think that Rankin is reading as much between the lines as I am, but there are secrets about Jekyll and Hyde that we could never expose; just like Edinburgh itself.

  Rankin broke through my thought processes. ‘You see, when Rebus was young he would have been told about Deacon Brodie. He was one of the main influences of the novel. Brodie by day was a member of the establishme
nt but at night was a robber and mugger and was eventually hanged on a gibbet that he had helped to make because he was also a craftsman.

  ‘The first couple of books in the Rebus series were exploring that side of Edinburgh. But then I took it further because I realised that the crime novel was a great way of talking about Scotland, about its politics (Let It Bleed), its oil industry (Black and Blue), its religious divide. So each book is a little bit of the wider jigsaw, as well as a further exploration into this intriguing character that is John Rebus.’

  ‘You mention that your first two Rebus books were about the Jekyll and Hyde aspects of Edinburgh, but were they also about the Jekyll and Hyde aspects of Rebus?’

  ‘Rebus was 40 years old in the first book and I had to give him a past. He had been married, with a kid and also he had been very close to someone else in the past. It was a Jekyll and Hyde type of thing, because the Hyde character was a person who was almost like a brother to him, but he – Hyde – grew up to hate Rebus and try to kill him.’ ‘So the whole of the first book was very consciously based upon Jekyll and Hyde?’

  ‘Yes. The other important aspect there was, was the fact that Rebus had been part of the SAS, and part of the training for that was psychological warfare, and it used to be very traumatic. So Rebus and this Hyde character were wrapped up in that: they had gone through that training together – and that’s where Hyde begins to think that he had been sold out by Rebus and tries to kill him.’

  ‘It’s interesting that you read so much into Jekyll and Hyde. What is the real pull for you with that story?’

  ‘It’s not just Jekyll and Hyde – I love some of Stevenson’s other novels, such as The Master of Ballantrae and The Weir of Hermiston, all the dark stuff really. But there’s something about Jekyll and Hyde: it’s such a simple story in a way and yet it is this transformational story that people still relate to. Everybody has a dark side to them and that’s interesting, and to take that further to look into criminals and how they are made is the next step, so there is so much within the story.’

  ‘But do you believe the story of the burning of the original manuscript, or as you suggest, maybe he didn’t burn it at all?’

  ‘Either is a nice story – a great story – to believe, but there are other great stories based around Jekyll and Hyde. I love the story that when he was a kid he [Stevenson] had a piece of furniture in his bedroom actually made by Deacon Brodie and the nurse would tell him the story of Deacon Brodie over and again as a bedtime story. No wonder he turned out with a warped and twisted imagination!

  ‘Stevenson had always suffered from nightmares. They began as a child growing up in Heriot Row, which is two streets away from where we are right now! One of Stevenson’s nightmare dreams as a child concerned a real-life wizard Major Tom Weir. A respectable preacher, Weir shocked his parishioners by confiding that he practised bestiality and incest. Weir and his sister Jean were sentenced to be strangled and burned at the stake in 1670, and Stevenson’s nanny “Cummy” used to scare him with spooky tales of Weir!’

  When I analyse the Jekyll and Hyde story I find some interesting things. The first is the amount of wine consumed or, at least poured, for the various characters! There are many references made to wine consumption, drinking in excess, such as a drunk who ‘reasons with himself upon his vice…’ But the inner secret about Jekyll and Hyde wasn’t about alcohol, was it?

  ‘I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again… swallowed the transforming draught.’ If we replace ‘draught’ with ‘drug’ and then view the ‘tortured… throes of longing’ as a form of cold turkey, we may well be unlocking a very sinister chapter within the story and, quite possibly, its author’s life!

  Dr Henry Jekyll becomes addicted to his own drug. When he first takes it he describes the extreme sensations of the transformation into Mr Hyde as something not so unpleasant as what may be initially thought: ‘There was something in my sensation, something indescribably new, and, from its novelty, incredibly sweet.’

  Any drug has this effect to begin with and Jekyll admits to the beginning of his folly: ‘… It was an ordinary secret summer that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation.’

  Could this indeed be the Hyde in Stevenson talking – the man in the velvet jacket? I think not. Well, not about himself anyway – perhaps an old university friend, a man who took the temptations of life a lot further than Stevenson, a man who would – like Henry Jekyll – confide his sins to an old school friend (Dr Lanyon in the book; Stevenson in real life?): ‘I mean from henceforth to lead a life of extreme seclusion; you must not be surprised, nor must you doubt my friendship, if my door is often shut even to you. You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of all sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that this earth contained a place for suffering and terrors so unmanning; and you can do but one thing… to lighten this destiny, and that is to respect my silence.’

  Two people share – suffer – Dr Jekyll’s terrible secret, and one of them dies through the knowledge of its facts. We know that Stevenson woke from a fever dream to write Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde at pace (30,000 words in three days apparently). Was this rush a determined push to exorcise himself from a past episode in his own life, one that he now needed to confront? Did he feel guilty that he couldn’t help a former friend who had fallen from grace? Who had to be ‘close to… drugs’ and who committed suicide – like Henry Jekyll – as redemption for something he did under that terrible influence?

  It cannot be ruled out but it cannot be proved. However, it is fascinating to speculate, isn’t it? I share my thought processes with Rankin.

  ‘I talk about Jekyll and Hyde in a BBC4 documentary and discuss the reasons why the story is set in London,’ he says. ‘Robert Louis Stevenson was thinking of a real doctor, John Hunter, who was a Scot. His home sat on Leicester Square. In the book Stevenson gives a description of Jekyll’s home and it is identical to Hunter’s. But Hunter was a dark man: he would receive corpses at the back door to examine, stuff like that.’

  Every time Rankin and I meet, we love to talk about Jekyll and Hyde. What adds extra intrigue to the legacy of the novella is the fact that two years after it was written, the theatrical production was a huge hit on the London stage during the Jack the Ripper murders. The leading man was so convincing in his role, he was even suspected of being the Ripper himself! This isn’t something Stevenson could have predicted, but it does allow us to muse if he knew the Ripper’s counterpart on the backstreets of Edinburgh’s Old Town and changed the location to Soho, London (but sadly not London’s East End) in the final novel.

  Sadly, I have gone a little too far, as Rankin shakes his head sadly. ‘No, there were no Ripper murders in Edinburgh – just Burke and Hare, about whom RLS wrote short fiction. Plenty of other grim stuff was happening though… I think another reason why Stevenson set the book in London is that he didn’t want readers equating Jekyll with the author – RLS having explored his own “dark side” when a young man on the streets of Edinburgh. And maybe Fanny saw too much of her husband in the story and the locations got swapped because of that.’

  Well, yes, maybe it was as simple as that…

  ‘Nearly a year later, in the month of 18-, London was startled by a crime of singular ferocity, and rendered all the more notable by the high position of the victim. The details were few and startling.’

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

  FURTHER READING AND COPYRIGHT NOTES

  The works of Ian Rankin (copyright Ian Rankin) quotes used by permission of the author

  Rebus’s Scotland: A Personal Journey (Orion, 2005), Ian Rankin, photographed by Tricia Malley and Ross Gillespie

  Kidnapped (Cassell & Co Limited, 1886), Robert Louis Stevenson

  Catriona (Cass
ell & Co Limited, 1893), Robert Louis Stevenson

  Ballads (Cassell & Co Limited, 1890), Robert Louis Stevenson

  Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson (Pallas Editions, 2001) used in research of this book

  The Complete Short Stories (The Centenary Edition), Robert Louis Stevenson, Edited by Ian Bell, Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd in association with The Scottish Arts Council (2 vols, 1993)

  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Macmillan, 1961), Muriel Spark

  Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Green, 1824)

  The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle (Vintage Classics, 2009) (150th Anniversary edition with an Introduction by P D James)

  Poems of Robert Burns – Selected and with an Introduction by Ian Rankin (Penguin Classics, 2008)

  IAN RANKIN INTERVIEWS CONDUCTED BY THE AUTHOR

  February 2000, 11 November 2000, 14 January 2002, March 2002, 27 August 2003, 22 September 2004, 5 November 2004, 11 August 2005, 26 July 2009, 19 August 2009, 20 August 2009, 4 September 2009.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Like Ian Rankin I believe in serendipity. While writing this book there were more happy coincidences than I could ever wish for, from the small – Rebus putting on the Rolling Stones’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus (The Hanging Garden), which I had done several hours previously – to the large – sitting next to a Scot on a London commuter train and reading the same Rebus novel and consequently getting his perception of the series and Edinburgh and forming a friendship.

  All of this would bring a smile to Rankin’s face, I’m sure. The whole of the Rebus series is about serendipity, happenstance, synchronicity, coincidence, call it what you will. It’s about the people that flow in and out of our humble lives and influence and shape it for better or worse (yes, exactly what the Rebus series embraces – although Rebus doesn’t believe in such a thing!).