IT’S a case for Rebus, Scotland’s dogged detective. JK Rowling, who launched her career with stories scribbled in an Edinburgh cafe, has been spotted back in her old haunts with a notebook in hand and crime on her mind.

The sighting, by the wife of Ian Rankin, creator of Detective Inspector John Rebus, has sparked talk among the city’s crime writers that she is planning to apply her populist talent to create the definitive Scottish crime novel.

Rowling, they say, is entering a genre dominated by some of Scotland’s greatest storytellers from Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson to modern bestselling writers including Rankin, Alexander McCall Smith, Iain Banks and Val McDermid.

Speaking to a reporter at the Edinburgh book festival, Rankin told how his wife Miranda had seen Rowling “scribbling away in a cafe recently”.

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“My wife spotted her writing her Edinburgh criminal detective novel,” he said. He declined to elaborate on how he knew about Rowling’s new direction, but conceded he had not discussed it personally with her. He added: “It is great that she has not abandoned writing or Edinburgh cafes.”

It was in Nicholson’s Cafe and the Elephant House, in Edinburgh, where as a hard-up single mother, she famously penned her first Harry Potter novel in the early 1990s.

Last month Rowling published Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final volume of the series which has helped propel her into the country’s super-rich with a fortune of £545m. She has been characteristically coy about what she planned to do after the series finished. She complained about being typecast as a children’s author and expressed a desire to move into adult fiction.

She offered fans a hint of a change in direction, saying on her website that she wanted to write something “completely different”, adding: “I can take my time. And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for a while is just bliss.”

Edinburgh is a favoured setting for crime writers because its cobbled, twisting wynds and dark, gothic buildings are an ideal setting for murder and intrigue. It has a history steeped in the macabre with infamous residents such as Burke and Hare, the 19th-century grave-robbers who inspired the pen of Stevenson.

Rankin, who lives close to Rowling in the Merchiston area of the city - which is also home to McCall Smith - said her experience of writing fantasy adventure would help with crime fiction. “Her process is classic crime writing - the set-up, the red herrings, the characters who change as they are revealed, the twists and turns, and finally the big lineup at the end.”

He said it was ironic that her decision to take up crime writing coincided with the final volume of his Rebus series which had dominated the past 20 years of his life.

“It is a chronological coincidence that JK Rowling had planned seven books and the way they were published meant this was the last year.

“I envisaged Rebus having a natural lifespan. He was 40 in 1987 so obviously he is 60 in 2007. And when I learnt that in the police in Scotland, 60 is the retirement age, I thought, ‘Well he has to go’. Those two things came together without either of us really thinking about it too much.”

PD James, 87, creator of the Adam Dalgleish mysteries, said she saw no reason why Rowling should not become a successful crime writer. “She certainly has all the skills,” James said. “She is immensely popular with adults and children. She has done a great service to literature by encouraging children to read on that scale. It is a huge achievement to get children queuing for books in the numbers they do.”

Christopher Little, Rowling’s literary agent, refused to comment. A spokeswoman for the author said: “We do not have a definite plan of what her next project is yet.”

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