Riding across London in the back of a taxi a few years ago, Ian Rankin passed a gleaming tower of luxury apartments. “It was the dead of night but there were no lights on,” he recalls. “I saw a concierge sitting in the reception area, and it looked to me like it was a completely empty building, apart from the concierge. I thought “What it this all about? Who is buying these apartments? And how does he feel about being a concierge in an empty building?”
That moment “got the motor running” on his new novel The Heights. His first standalone book in 20 years is set in London, around the murder of a night concierge at a posh high-rise that looms over Hyde Park. The story was a way for Rankin to explore inequality. “It’s always been there in London: the huge gulf between the haves and have-nots,” he says. “It’s physically evident in gated communities. You walk through some of the shopping streets, and you see opulence and capitalism on a grand scale, but then you also have the dispossessed people who have been pushed to the periphery by all these new buildings: communities being split up, and kids who can’t afford to buy a home in the area of London where their parents grew up.”
Unlike the real world, where wealth and privilege often exempt people from accountability, fictional detectives are loved for their ability to bring powerful individuals down a peg or two. “The detective novel for me is a social novel,” Rankin tells me. “You take a fairly ordinary hero and you can inject them into a setting where they can disrupt people’s lives, especially the rich and gilded, who are used to getting things their way. I like my cops to be agitators and anarchists.”
Rankin, who was knighted for services to literature and charity in 2023, could probably afford a top-floor penthouse or two himself. His novels about Inspector John Rebus have sold more than 35m copies globally, and it has been estimated that they make up 10 per cent of all crime books sold in the UK. But Rankin didn’t come from money.
Born in 1960 in Cardenden, Fife, the Rankins lived in a council house. His father owned a grocer’s shop, while his mother worked in school and factory canteens. The first of his family to go to university, Rankin started writing novels while studying English at Edinburgh.
His first Rebus book, Knots & Crosses, came out in 1987, five years after graduating. “I thought he was only going to be around for one book,” admits Rankin, talking from his office at home in the Scottish capital.
Nearly 40 years later and having recently started drawing a pension, Rankin has no plans to put down the pen. “Writers do retire,” he says. “My contemporary, Lee Child, has just retired from writing Jack Reacher novels, and has passed the baton on to his brother, who, fortuitously, happens to be a thriller writer. Sadly, I’ve got no one in my immediate vicinity who would like to carry on the Rebus novels on my behalf.”
In a few years’ time, Rankin may be deprived of the chance to pass the baton. Although he sees healthy signs in the publishing industry, including “huge gains in audio book sales” and communities on TikTok “bringing younger people back to reading physical books”, he is, like many creative people, anxious about artificial intelligence. “I’m part of a class action lawsuit against [AI company] Anthropic, who scraped over 20 of my novels to train their AI,” he explains.
If AI can produce a good enough story, he believes, “it’s not going to bother [readers] if it’s written by a computer or a human being. But the traditional publishing industry is starting to fight back. There’s a campaign to get wording on the cover of every book to say ‘This has been made by a human.’”
That would seem a strange situation. “Yes, it’s kind of weird,” he admits. “But, then, we live in weird times.”
The Heights by Ian Rankin is published by Orion Fiction
