Article: Detective John Rebus was born...

Detective John Rebus was born on the evening of 19 March 1985, in the ground-floor apartment I shared with two other students in Arden Street, Edinburgh, Scotland. The day had already been momentous. Instead of concentrating on my postgraduate studies, I had spent the past few months trying to get publishers interested in my first novel, 'The Flood'. At last, one had taken the bait, and that day I'd been to the office of the small, independent publishing house to sign a contract. Back in the apartment, I sat in my room, only inches from the flames of the gas fire — it was another cold evening in Edinburgh, spring a long way off. As I stared into the fire, I began to play with words in my head, and got the idea for a pun involving 'noughts' and 'knots'. Someone was being sent cryptic messages in what would turn out to be a revenge thriller. I decided the recipient would be a cop, even though I knew nothing about the police. His name, I decided, would itself be a pun — a rebus being a type of pictorial puzzle.

I couldn't know that, twenty-some years later, Rebus would have stuck around.

Aged twenty-four, I had created a character who was already forty; unmarried myself, I had decided that Rebus would be divorced and have a daughter. He's a smoker, while I have never indulged. It was going to take some time for the pair of us to get to know one another, which is why he evolves over the course of the series, not only ageing in real time but also learning from his mistakes, haunted by victims and unresolved cases. You could say we've grown up together.

In the first few novels, Rebus listens to jazz — it's what I thought loner cops would play late at night in their whisky-fumed apartments. But a few books in, I decided to give him my own musical taste, so he starts to listen to the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, and John Martyn. I also decided that I had over-fictionalised Edinburgh — setting him to work in a fictitious police station on a fictitious street, and taking him into fictitious bars in fictitious areas of town. So, at the end of 'Strip Jack', I burned down his police station and moved him into a real one — St Leonard's. I also got him drinking at the same pub as me, the Oxford Bar, and decided to name the street he lives in — Arden Street.

Twenty years on (the first Rebus novel was published in 1987) I find myself still fascinated by him, learning from him as well as about him. The city he polices is fascinating, too, and seems to provide endless stories for both of us. Often I'm not sure where I end and he begins, he's become such an integral part of me. When I see the world through his eyes, it becomes both scarier and more exciting.

Thanks for the ride, John.

Ian Rankin