HOWZAT

For a fantasist, Rankin is a realist and a creature of habit. “I lead a very schizoid life,” he says. One minute he can be introducing JK Rowling to Margaret Atwood over lunch, the next dealing with Kit’s medical problems. Yet even he sometimes struggles to discern where fiction ends and reality begins. Does he miss Rebus?

“Not at all,” he says. “I haven’t had time. The minute I finished Exit Music I was on to Doors Open. As soon as I finished that I wrote an opera for Scottish Opera. As soon as that was finished I was writing a comic book. The minute I finished the comic book I was doing a literacy novella for people who have difficulty reading. I finished that the day before I went to the States. Now I’m doing all the reading for Cheltenham. I’m exhausted all the time.”

He denies that he enjoys being busy or that he is gregarious. “I like my own company better than anybody else’s,” he says. “I have very few friends. I can count them on the fingers of two hands. What I like is being lazy. I like spending two hours over breakfast, doing the crossword and drinking coffee. I like reading a novel and listening to music for a couple of hours.”

Rankin could while away the rest of his life like this. He admits that the scale of his success means he doesn’t have to work again. In the past Kit’s disability — he needs 24-hour care — and the imperative of providing for him has fuelled his output. But there is now a trust fund for the boys.

“Kit’s doing fine,” says Rankin. “He’s a big, bouncy 14-year-old. He still stays at home and goes to school during the day. His carer, Jonathon, helps to look after him in the afternoons and early evenings.”

Rankin and his wife Miranda have established an anonymous trust, and donate much of their money to charity. His own needs are simple and luxuries don’t extend beyond buying the occasional painting or rare vinyl record. He would love a holiday home on the Black Isle but knows he will never acquire one. “It’s like fast cars. I think about them but I’ll never buy one.”

It’s hard to discern which demons are driving him to work at this punishing pace. “You could be dead at 50,” he says. “You’ve got to leave a body of work behind.” It seems an odd perspective for a middle-class, Edinburgh-based, post baby-boomer. Statistically, Rankin can expect to enjoy a ripe old age. But both his parents had been widowed when they met and his half-sisters are much older than him. He has been aware of his own mortality since he was 17.

“I was a pretty morbid kid,” he says. “There was a lot of death around. I had uncles and aunties starting to die when I was not even a teenager. None of my grandparents was alive when I was born. My mum died when I was 19. She was 57. I am 48 now. That’s less than a decade away.”

But the real reason for his prodigious output is that he has still not written the book he wants to write. “The reason writers keep writing books is because they haven’t written the perfect book.”

Despite the way it may affect his own wealth, the credit crunch, he says, is “manna from heaven” for a writer. “It’s all just sitting in cash in the bank,” he says of his fortune, while making a note on a napkin to e-mail his accountant to ask if action needs to be taken.

The interface of politics and finance was something he was already considering as a subject for his next novel. He is fascinated by the political implications of the financial chaos for Scotland. “What would Scotland have done if it had been an independent country? Could we have bailed out the Royal Bank of Scotland? The answer is there is no way we could have done that. If the Scottish Government had to go to a foreign power — England — for a bailout it would be humiliating in the extreme.”

It rankles that crime fiction is not considered literary enough to be short-listed for The Man Booker prize. Despite his many awards — last week he was named Author of The Year in the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards — the big prize eludes him.

He has, however, done more than most crime novelists to improve the literary reputation of the genre. He must be delighted that his alma mater, Edinburgh University, is using his texts in its literature courses. “I worry that they are dumbing down,” he says, fingering yet another flaw in the silver lining of his life.

He frets that like many successful authors, he might not recognise when he has run out of steam. It seems unlikely. He is his own harshest critic.

It doesn’t look like he will run out of material any time soon. Despite having set a score of novels in the city, he still doesn’t feel he understands what makes Edinburgh tick. “It’s an invisible city,” he says. “It’s made its money from invisibles – the law, the church, banking, accountancy and insurance. It’s never made tangible things like Glasgow, with its shipbuilding and its heavy industry. So much of Edinburgh is hidden from view.”

In many ways the Rebus novels were a reaction to the work of his literary heroine Dame Muriel Spark, whose oeuvre he studied for a PhD. While she highlighted the genteel side of the city, Rankin focuses on its underbelly. “There are a variety of Edinburgh’s in fiction,” he says. “Right now you can read Sandy McCall Smith’s Edinburgh, which is different from Kate Atkinson’s Edinburgh. Many cities have just one character but for its size, Edinburgh is surprisingly complex.”

Despite his stated desire to retire at 51, it seems unlikely that he will give up writing. Growing up with middle-class interests in a working class family in Cardenden in Fife, Rankin wrote to make sense of his world. Nothing much has changed.

“I was always writing,” he says. “That was my hobby. I’m still that kid inside. I’m trying to make sense of the world and I can do that by writing. The lovely thing about being a writer is that you are a kid who never grows up.”

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