Ian Rankin: doing a jigsaw is like investigating a murder

By Simon Willis

“Whose teeth are these?” asks Ian Rankin, in a state of deep concentration. It’s the kind of ghoulish question that might be asked by John Rebus, the hard-drinking Scottish detective from Rankin’s bestselling novels, as he sifts through the evidence at a grisly crime scene.

Fortunately, the disembodied teeth he is looking at are on a piece from a jigsaw, which we’re doing “together” over Zoom. The puzzle is inspired by “The Yellow Submarine”, an animated film from 1968 in which the Beatles save the underwater world of Pepperland from music-hating monsters called the Blue Meanies. The picture on the box shows the yellow submarine surrounded by psychedelic characters, from the Dreadful Flying Glove to the Fab Four themselves in loud shirts and flares. On the right is a smiling green whale. “Ah, they’re his teeth!” says Rankin as he slots the piece into place.

Hunched over a coffee table in the Edinburgh flat he uses as an office, Rankin is rake-thin with the pale, haunted look of a man with murder on his mind. At 60, he has written more than 40 books and sold more than 30m copies. Rebus, his greatest invention, stars in over half of them. A cold, cynical workaholic given to brawling and witness intimidation, Rebus will stop at nothing to solve whatever case of garrotting, stabbing, drowning or impaling has ended up on his desk.

For someone whose day job is crafting intricate plots full of interlocking clues, puzzles seem to be a natural pastime. Rankin says he has been a jigsaw fanatic since he was a child, and lockdown has hardened this habit. “I had this notion that I would learn languages and read ‘Don Quixote’, but my attention span was kinnae shot,” he says in his thick Scottish accent (“kinnae” instead of “kind of”, “mebbae” instead of “maybe”).

Rankin does not consider himself a puzzle aficionado. “They go for 5,000-piece jigsaws of paperclips,” he says. “Why would anyone do that for fun?” For him, 1,000 pieces and an appealing picture is ideal. On Twitter he has been showing off his jigsaw portraits of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. He sees himself as a “frustrated rock star” and sings in a band in his spare time. “When I saw the yellow submarine I thought, yeah, that’s a shoe-in.”

Rankin is rake-thin with the pale, haunted look of a man with murder on his mind

Rankin’s approach to assembling a jigsaw is as meticulous as a criminal investigation. First he empties all the pieces onto his coffee table. He searches for the edges, throwing everything else back in the box. Then he sorts his edges into groups of similar colours or patterns: the blue spotty bits along the top, the green stripy bits along the bottom. Only then will he begin putting them together. If his process resembles well-planned police work, mine is a botched robbery: soon my kitchen table is so messy that it looks like someone has ransacked the place.

His books are peppered with references to his favourite hobby, including the name of his main character: a rebus is a type of picture-puzzle containing a hidden word. Whether you are doing a jigsaw or investigating a murder, Rankin says, “you are bringing order to chaos.”

Rankin is just as scrupulous in his domestic life. He gives me a virtual tour of his flat and points out a vast, alphabetised record collection. His paperwork is arranged in tidy stacks. “I am kinnae anal,” he admits. “It sometimes freaks my wife out when she opens a cupboard full of tins and all the labels are facing out.”

His love of order is understandable, for Rankin knows what it feels like to live without it. He grew up in a coal-mining town in Fife in the east of Scotland. His mother worked in a factory and his father in a greengrocer’s. He remembers his parents divvying up their weekly pay cheques on a Friday night: so much for insurance, so much for the Christmas kitty, so much for the summer holiday (usually a rain-soaked week in a caravan park). Life was rough. “I would stand around on street corners with all the other tough kids, right up until the moment they went off to have a fight, at which point I would make my excuses and leave.”

Jigsaws, along with the crossword in the Sunday Post, were an antidote to that messy world. So, in time, was writing books, which Rankin began to do when he was studying at Edinburgh University in the 1980s. The city had one of the worst heroin problems of any in Europe, and high rates of HIV infection. Rankin was living in a seedy hotel. He already felt adrift when, during his first term, his mother fell ill. Her condition was never properly diagnosed – “to this day I don’t know what it was” – and she died only months later.

Rebus came to him in the shadow of her death. He intended “Knots and Crosses”, the first book in the series, published in 1987, to be a kind of gothic character study. It follows an investigation into the murders of several young girls. Rebus, a 40-year-old detective inspector, is haunted by voices and images from his past – screaming faces and violent sexual fantasies. Given his state of mind, you wonder if he could be the killer.

“I could sit down and be the controller. I could play god with the lives of my characters”

Rebus shared his creator’s grim view of the world. But he also gave Rankin a vicarious sense of control. Faced with the violent chaos of the Edinburgh underworld, it is Rebus’s job to bring resolution. At the centre of the plot is an acrostic in which the first letters of a series of names spell out the next murder victim: a puzzle whose solution is as satisfying for the reader as it must have been for the author to construct.

In Rankin’s recent novels the writing is chatty and detectives converse with a chirpy gallows humour. His prose was more allusive in the early books: Rebus was given to quoting “King Lear”. Rankin says he is now embarrassed by “Knots and Crosses”, which he reckons is “wildly overwritten”. “There are lines in there that I don't understand. ‘Manumission of dreams’: what does that mean?” At the time Rankin aspired to write literary fiction, but his publisher promoted “Knots and Crosses” as a crime novel. It didn’t sell many copies, nor did the next six Rebus books.

The first decade of Rankin’s career was a battle against penury: he wrote two books a year just to stay afloat. The pressure got to him after his first son, Jack, arrived in 1992. “I began to have panic attacks, thinking all of this is going to shit,” he says. In 1994 his second son, Kit, was born with a rare genetic condition called Angelman syndrome, which causes physical and learning difficulties.

Rankin and his wife, Miranda, had moved to France to save money and were living in a “hovel” in the middle of nowhere. “We were driving Kit to see specialists who were talking to us in medical French,” he says. “My wife has good French, but even she was struggling a wee bit. I didn’t know what they were talking about at all.”

The intricacy of Rankin’s fictional puzzles seemed to grow in proportion to the chaos in his life. “Knots and Crosses” had followed one investigation, but his breakthrough novel, “Black and Blue”, written in the aftermath of Kit’s diagnosis and published in 1997, tracked four cases simultaneously.

“It sometimes freaks my wife out when she opens a cupboard full of tins and all the labels are facing out.”

Writing was “a form of therapy”, says Rankin. “I could sit down and be the controller. I could play god with the lives of my characters. There was something very satisfying about bringing order to the page that wasn’t possible in real life.” When the doctors said Kit might never walk, Rankin wrote a novel called “The Hanging Garden”, in which Rebus’s daughter is hit by a car and ends up in a wheelchair. “I thought, well, I’m gonna give you the problem I’ve got. Let’s see how you deal with it as a way of helping me deal with it.”

Kit, now 26, lives in a care home in Edinburgh not far from his parents. Other than a brief trip at Christmas and occasional interactions over the home’s garden wall, they haven’t been able to see him since the pandemic began – although in recent weeks Rankin and his family have been allowed to visit, one-by-one, if they take a covid test and wear protective equipment. Zoom is out too: Kit struggles to understand two-dimensional space. For Rankin the experience has been “devastating”.

Jigsaws have been a source of solace – as they have for his wife and elder son, Jack, who is in a “support bubble” with them. Their dining table is occupied by a work-in-progress: “Spring” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a 19th-century Anglo-Dutch painter, which depicts a festival in ancient Rome. “That’s proving quite difficult,” he says. “It’s a lot of light grey and white, a lot of pillars and a lot of women who look almost exactly the same.”

The yellow submarine is more forgiving, with its big blocks of vibrant colour and easy-to-find Beatles. Rankin makes quick progress, and has half his edges in place before I’ve even finished one corner. “Now we’re cooking on gas,” he says, rubbing his hands together.

Rankin’s scrupulous approach to jigsaw-assembly is similar to his writing process. In his office is a file called “Ian’s big folder of ideas”. It contains hundreds of newspaper and magazine clippings, internet print-outs, brief sketches of characters or situations, stories he hears in the pub – a kind of puzzle-box of bits and pieces. Taking one of these fragments as a starting point, he writes a first draft as a frame for the story, full of holes to fill in later. When he begins he has no idea whodunnit.

In 2019 Rankin dug into this folder, looking for something that matched his feeling that “the world is going to hell in a handcart”. He found two newspaper clippings about internment camps in Britain during the second world war. “We would lock up our friends and neighbours – the people with the German surname who ran the deli, the Italian ice-cream salesman or chip-shop owner.” To Rankin these stories seemed to dovetail with contemporary xenophobia and racism. “I saw a correlation with where we might be going now.”

Whether you are doing a jigsaw or investigating a murder, Rankin says, “you are bringing order to chaos”

He began writing a novel based on these fragments just as coronavirus took hold. “A Song for the Dark Times” follows Rebus, now retired and suffering from chronic lung disease after years of smoking, as he investigates a murder at an internment camp in northern Scotland. Into this investigation Rankin slots another: the death of a rich student from Saudi Arabia.

The book “was an escape tunnel out of camp lockdown” for Rankin. “When I was writing, I wasn’t having to watch the news every five minutes thinking what the hell is going on now?” He felt particularly anxious knowing how vulnerable Kit was in his care home. “I could forget about all that for a period of time, and hang on to Rebus’s coat tails.”

As we chat, Rankin drifts off mid-sentence from time to time, distracted by the jigsaw. At one point he is talking about Edinburgh: “When you come as a tourist...OK, the bottom edge is nearly done but not quite.” I get a sense of what he's like when he's putting a novel together. “There are whole chunks of my life I barely remember,” he admits, “because my head was in a book.”

The outline of his jigsaw is mostly complete, but Rankin has a nagging worry. “I think I’m down about three pieces.” He bought his sister the same puzzle for her birthday in February, and two bits were missing. Normally this would halt all other activity. “With the Alma-Tadema puzzle I was missing one edge piece and I had to empty the entire box out to find it,” he says sheepishly. “I couldn’t do anything before I’d got it.”

As he rifles through the box for the elusive pieces he ponders his obsession with puzzles, stronger than ever in his 60s. “I don't know, man. At some point you think maybe I should grow up. All novelists are basically kids who are refusing to grow up.”■

Simon Willis is a freelance writer and former senior editor at 1843

ILLUSTRATIONS: LUIS GRAÑENA