For Ian Rankin, it was never enough to know who killed whom and why. Not even when he was 11.
The best-selling crime fiction writer does little to hide his disdain for the "Agatha Christie-style puzzle stories". "The world that she wrote about seems so alien to me. This pastoral, idealized vision of England, where there is this very big house in a quiet village. Someone is found poisoned in the snooker room or the library...."
A world in which the police never solve the crime.
"Some amateur detective, a little old lady or a gentleman, comes along to do that. At the end, everything is explained, and status quo returns."
Rankin, who was in India last month, admits he tried reading these stories when he was an adolescent. "But I grew up in a solidly working-class coal mining town... and that world meant nothing to me."
I gingerly point out that Agatha Christie continues to be one of the most-read authors in India. And we still relish movies based on her books (Rituparno Ghosh`s 2003 Shubho Mahurat, for instance)
"I can see why those books are successful," Rankin shoots back. "It offers this idea that human beings can solve all problems. That the world goes back to being a nice place when the killer is caught. Life ain`t like that."
Rankin`s own iconic character, Inspector Reebus, often ruminates that crime never goes away. "The one realization that Reebus has is that it doesn`t matter how many criminals he catches and puts in jail, there is never a vacuum. More criminals emerge. The society we created creates crime, imbalance, and injustice. People will always be jealous and people will commit crime. A sense of grievance will always remain."
He thinks it`s too far-fetched to imagine an amateur can solve a crime. "When was the last time in real life that the little lady solved the crime that the police couldn`t solve?" He believes instead that a majority of current crime fiction readers want professionals -- pathologists or lawyers or cops -- to be solving the crime.
Rankin should know.
He continues to be UK`s number 1 crime author. He has also won a series of awards for his works: Two Crime Writers` Association (CWA) Dagger prizes for short stories, the CWA Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction for Black and Blue, the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for a lifetime`s achievement in crime writing and the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Author of the Year, for Exit Music.
Rankin recollects that when he started writing stories woven around crime, as a student at Edinburgh University, he had no role models to fall back on.
"There is no tradition of the crime novel in Scotland. So, I didn`t think I was writing in the tradition of Miss Marple or in the tradition of Raymond Chandler. I was writing dark, Gothic psychological novels."
Inspiration came from a rather unusual source.
"My template when I began the first Reebus book was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, written by the most famous of all Edinburgh writers - Robert Louis Stevenson. I wanted to update the theme of Jekyll and Hyde to contemporary Edinburgh. And I thought a cop was a good way of doing that."
It`s not just in his firm refusal to compartmentalize the world into good guys and the bad that Rankin differs from traditional British crime writers. He often uses real crimes as the starting point. "Readers in the UK knew that a serial killer called Bible John really existed in the 1960s. So when I introduced him as a character in Black and Blue -- That was quite shocking and surprising because he was a real person."
His detective, Reebus, ages in real time. When we first meet Reebus in 1987, he is 40. When we see him finally in 2007, he is 60 and has to retire. "Most detectives seem to exist in a vacuum. They don`t age. The world around them changes, but they don`t change. I felt it very useful that Reebus would change. He would be altered by the cases he worked on; he would be haunted by the victims. And he would allow me to investigate the changes taking place in Scottish society."
Rankin believes the gap between literature and crime fiction is closing. "A crime novel can tell stories about the real contemporary world, deal with big moral questions, big philosophical questions, moral debates. If you want to write about politics, economics, or environmental issues, a crime thriller is a very good way of doing it."
"If I wanted to get inside the mind of a terrorist, I would truly reach for a good thriller writer to tell me, than reach for a literary novel. Young readers - in Britain, I`ve got readers from 12 years old onwards - are being attracted to crime fiction because they like a fast, pacy story."
And he himself reaches out to crime fiction for a sense of place. "I just read My Friend Sancho (written by Amit Varma) and it told me so much about contemporary Mumbai. If I wanted to know more about Chennai, I would go looking for a crime novel."
His brief visit to India was packed with one literary do after another, and with non-stop interviews (among those who interviewed Rankin was Prakash Karat, general secretary of the CPM. Rankin, however, did find time to scan the papers and check out the flavor of local crime. "In Indian society, you have murders because of marriages going wrong or dowry not being paid. But what I think is shocking is the number of young people killing themselves. What does that say about this particular society? The pressure on young people to do well gets too much. Instead of just walking away, they find it easier to just die."
This is where he believes a good crime writer can step in. "A really good crime author can make people question: Why do we continue to allow this to happen? Is there anything we can do to stop this from happening?"
"Crime fiction is entertaining, and it can be fun to solve the puzzle. But it can also raise these very big questions... of the way society is changing and the way the changes in society are impacting the next generation of people," concludes Rankin.
First published in sify.com in January 2010
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