CRIME writer Ian Rankin, whose latest book Dead Souls, was published by Orion this week, could be found lowering pints of Guinness in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel and planning a pub crawl on Wednesday night. The Scot put it down to nerves, admitting his stomach was churning at the prospect of doing a reading in Belfast on Thursday. His mother-in-law and cronies would be there and he would have to subject her, an English professor, to extracts from a mere detective novel.
Growing up in a dying mining village, Cardenden, a village in Fife, compelled Rankin to write, he says. "The only way I survived was by immortalising it in print," newly christening its smoking slag heap Krakatoa.
Writing was easy when he started out and it reminded him of stripping down an engine before putting it back together again. His first book in the Rebus series, Knots and Crosses, took just six weeks but he then felt a little guilty for dreaming up, rather than researching, the material. So, attempting to be thorough, he started researching a novel about children being abducted in Edinburgh and went to a London police station asking how such an investigation would be conducted. Unaware that children had indeed been abducted in Edinburgh, the police decided he might be the perpetrator and put him on the suspect list.
His fourth book, Mortal Causes, invited the ire of the UDA, which made threatening phonecalls. The novel dealt with the funding of loyalist paramilitaries, and Rankin received hate mail saying he should have died in Warrington.
The top six books in Scotland's current bestseller list bear Rankin's name but he warns this success doesn't rake in a six figure salary - the real money, he believes, is to be made in non-fiction. The self-help category is proving particularily lucrative, and he is constantly amazed by what sells, saying he recently came across a book called Feng Shui For Hamsters.
Rankin's ties with Ireland are strong - he holidays regularly with his wife and children in Belfast, and particularly likes taking off for the south-west.