The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories (Rebus Collection) (61 page)

A foreign body in the bloodstream of Berne,

Kejan tips the remnants of tobacco

From the pack onto the paper,

His breath scattering the flakes

Onto the floor

To lie wriggling in the draught.

None of this, it goes without saying, was helping me get laid.

But I did get to meet a lot of ‘real’ writers – for the first time in my life. The Poetry Society had funding to bring one professional poet to do a reading each week, and afterwards we would all go for a drink or nine, during which time the poets would attempt to sell us copies of their books and pamphlets while we’d be asking questions such as ‘How do I get published?’ I soon learned that most poets don’t ‘make a living’ but have to supplement their income with other work. I wondered if the same was true of fiction-writers
…

My poems were far from the Wordsworthian ideal of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. They were narratives. My characters went places, and did things or things happened to them. There were always consequences. I started writing short stories, influenced by Ian McEwan, Jayne Anne Phillips, and anyone else I happened to be reading at the time. I was trying to find out two things: what I wanted to write about; and how to do the actual writing. It took me a while to realise that the thing I really wanted to write about was enveloping me and embracing me every step of the way and with each and every breath I took.

It was Edinburgh itself.

III

This is a haunted city. For centuries it was haunted by the memory that it had once been a thriving capital, before signing that status away to London. It’s a city rife with ghost tours. Its cemeteries teem, and there are myriad streets, tunnels and caves just below ground level. It’s a city that hides itself away from the world. In the past, whenever invaders called, the denizens would scurry underground, emerging once the triumphant armies had tired of taking possession of what appeared to be a ghost town. The city the tourist sees, even today, is far from the whole story. Edinburgh is also home to a bloodstained history. Burke and Hare were serial killers who posed as grave robbers, slaughtering at least seventeen victims before being brought to justice (after which Burke’s skin was crafted into a series of gruesome souvenirs, some of which can be viewed in the city’s museums).

There were stories of well-respected citizens who had confessed to devil worship, of a coach driven by a headless horseman, of Covenanters executed and witches burnt. By night, the teenage Robert Louis Stevenson would creep from his home to consort with harlots, poets and ruffians in the seediest bars he could find
…

The more I looked at Edinburgh, the more I learned. The city is geographically divided – the mazey Old Town to the south of Princes Street, the rational and elegant New Town to the north. The journey the young Stevenson took from one to the other was the journeying of Jekyll towards Mr Hyde. But was that particular Edinburgh a city of the past? Not really. In October 1977, a year before I’d arrived as a student, two teenage girls had vanished after a night out. Their last sighting was in a bar called The World’s End. Their bodies were found the next morning. For more than two decades, their killers went undetected. Edinburgh’s students knew that there really was a ‘bogey man’ out there; we didn’t need the frisson provided by ghost tours and the like.

Contemporary Edinburgh and the city of the past collided in my imagination. I was living in the 1980s but reading about Miss Jean Brodie (set in the Depression years of the 1930s), Jekyll and Hyde, and the Justified Sinner. The Edinburgh I walked through by night seemed to have changed very little. There was a heroin problem, a housing crisis, and
HIV
was on the horizon. There was bitter rivalry between the city’s two soccer teams, spilling over into weekend violence. Go-go bars would eventually be replaced by lap-bars; we all knew that Leith had the red-light district, but that the saunas were also something more than they seemed. I’d started listening to a lot of music which would later be classified as ‘goth’ – Throbbing Gristle and Joy Division and The Cure. My imagination was darkening all the time. I was sleeping till noon and staying up until four a.m. I was writing, reading, writing, reading and then writing some more. My short stories had titles like ‘The Suffering’, ‘Confession’, ‘The Violation of Mr Paton’, ‘Pig’ and ‘Isolation’. I’d finished my degree but applied to do a PhD with Muriel Spark as the subject. Her stories were filled with supernatural elements, gothic settings, harsh satire and devilry. But she was such an elegant, subtle and concise writer that often critics chose not to notice the darkness lying just below the shimmering surface of her prose. I was learning from her, too
…

One day I got a letter telling me I’d won second prize in a short-story contest run by the
Scotsman
newspaper. They would print the story and give me some cash. It was called ‘The Game’ and concerned the last day in the life of a shipbuilding yard. (I’ve no idea where
that
came from either.) Around the same time, another story was accepted for publication by
New Edinburgh Review
magazine. Two more were taken by the BBC to be broadcast on radio. A story about a cop patrolling a soccer game was going to appear in a collection called
New Writing Scotland
. In August 1984 I won a story contest organised by a local radio station. Peter Ustinov presented me with my prize.

Bloody hell, I thought. It could only be a matter of time before my first novel found a publisher
…

Ahh, my first novel. It was called
Summer Rites
and was a black comedy about a hotel in the Scottish Highlands. It never did find a publisher, but I was already busy with my next book,
The Flood
. Taking to heart the adage ‘write what you know’ I was setting this new book in a (thinly disguised) version of my hometown. It did find a publisher, a small press in Edinburgh which printed a couple of hundred hardback copies and maybe seven hundred paperbacks, many of which went unsold and were pulped.

The same week I signed the contract for
The Flood
, I got the idea for yet another novel – set in Edinburgh this time, the gothic Edinburgh I’d been reading about at university, but set very much in the present and featuring:

‘Male hero (a policeman?)’

On 19 March 1985 I recorded in my diary that ‘I’ve not written any of it yet, but it’s all there in my head from page 1 to
circa
page 250’. On 24 March I wrote the first four pages and decided to give it the working title
Knots and Crosses
. By 4 July the first draft was finished, but for some reason I didn’t start the second draft until 18 September. I’d typed out the first couple of revised pages when, again according to my diary, my flatmate at the time, Jon Curt, suggested a trip to the pub where he worked. The pub was called the Oxford Bar: ‘splendidly uncontrived and open until two a.m.’ It would be a few years before the Oxford Bar appeared in a Rebus novel (I thought bars, streets, etc. had to be fictional in a work of fiction), but I was glad to have made its acquaintance.

From the above, it seems I’ve been guilty of a protracted lie. For years I’ve been telling people that I wrote
Knots and Crosses
in that apartment in Arden Street, right across the road from where Rebus still lives. But I vacated Arden Street in the summer of 1985 and moved in with two undergraduate students (Jon being one of them) in a place way over the other side of the city. This means that
Knots
is even closer to
Jekyll and Hyde
than I’d guessed, having been written partly to the south of Princes Street and partly to the north
…

Because my novel
The Flood
had been accepted for publication, an agent had come to ask if I was working on anything else. She decided that we should send copies of
Knots and Crosses
to five London-based publishers: Bodley Head, Collins, Century Hutchinson, Andr
é
Deutsch and William Heinemann. Eventually, we’d get the thumbs-up from only one – Bodley Head. But that was all we needed, and I was especially thrilled that I would have the same publisher as Muriel Spark . . . at least for a short while.

My final diary entry for 1985 ends: ‘year after year, there’s improvement’
…

When the book was finally published, however, on 19 March 1987, I noted that it seemed to receive less publicity than its predecessor. Working with a publicity budget of zero, Bodley Head ran no advertisements and secured no interviews with newspapers or magazines. The book came and went without anyone really paying it any attention at all. It failed to make the shortlist for the Crime Writers’ Association’s First Novel Award (won that year by Denis Kilcommons), though the CWA asked me if I wanted to join them anyway. It was at this point that I realised the awful truth: while trying to write ‘the Great Scottish Neo-Gothic Novel’ I had somehow become a crime writer. Not that this gave me too many sleepless nights. I had said farewell to the character called Rebus and was moving on to a spy novel called
Watchman
. It would be a further year or two before my editor cleared his throat and asked me what had happened to John Rebus:

‘I liked him, and I think there’s more you can do with him
…
’

I think his clearing of the throat was a way of telling me that he didn’t expect
Watchman
to do any better than
Knots and Crosses
, but that maybe the crime genre was worth another try.

This editorial musing was, in retrospect, invaluable, but the gods also seemed to be looking favourably upon Rebus. A TV producer had shown some interest in that first novel. He had formed a new company with an actor (known for his role in a popular soap) and was looking for a promising project. If successful, the action of
Knots and Crosses
would have been moved to London (to accommodate the actor’s English accent), and that might have been the end of my creation. However, my agent disappeared halfway through negotiations, and the deal fizzled out. (Don’t worry, she reappeared some years later.)

Hide and Seek
gave me a second bite at Rebus’s cherry, if you’ll pardon the expression. The name Hyde is implicit in the title – in fact, the book’s working title was
Hyde and Seek
. I followed it up with a novel in which I dragged Rebus to London – where I was living at the time – so he could hate it as much as I did. And by then the damage was done: three books down, I had produced a series. And for as long as Inspector Rebus proved a satisfactory vehicle for my investigations into contemporary Scotland, that series would continue. I just hoped a readership would eventually follow.

IV

So where did Rebus come from? Well, from my subconscious, obviously, from a young man’s brain, filled with stories and strategies. But also from the books I’d been reading, the city I’d made my home, and the blood that had soaked into its pavements and roadways. Yet it still seems to me that he appeared as a bolt from the blue. I’ve looked at photos of myself in my student room in Arden Street, and have pored over my diaries from the time, seeking clues. The notes I jotted down prior to starting the novel shed very little light. I saw the book as ‘a metaphysical thriller’, but spent very little time delineating Rebus’s character. I wanted the story to contain lots of ‘puzzles and word-play’, wanted it to be ‘a very visual piece’, and decided it should be written in the third person: ‘don’t need to go too far inside the main character’s head’. Rebus was to be a cipher rather than a three-dimensional human being. From a rereading of
Knots and Crosses
I think it’s true to say that the reader feels more distanced from Rebus in that book than in any of the others which followed. There was a good reason for this: I wanted Rebus himself to exist as a potential suspect in people’s minds. Hence the momentary flashbacks, the hints of something awful in his past, and the ‘locked room’ in his apartment. He also at one point almost strangles a woman who has invited him into her bed.

Nice.

Through sheer force of will, however, he stuck around and grew into someone more fully formed, to the point where fans are now worried about his health, and find when they meet me that I fall disappointingly short of Rebus himself – I’m just not as damaged as him, as complex as him, or as dangerous to be around. I’m only the bloke who commits his stories to paper. What
did
become obvious to me early on was that a detective makes for a terrific commentator on the world around him. He has access to the highest in the land and the lowest, the politicians and oligarchs, as well as the junkies and petty thieves. In writing books about Edinburgh, I could examine the city (and the nation of which it is capital once more) from top to bottom through Rebus’s eyes. I was lucky, too – there’s no tradition of the crime novel in Scotland, so I could make my own path. And, back then, there were no crime novels set in contemporary Edinburgh, meaning that for a little while I had no competition. I’ve been lucky also in that Edinburgh and Scotland continue to change in interesting ways, giving me plenty of plots, while delivering up their secrets and mysteries only very slowly. I’ve been living in this city now for almost thirty years – on and off – and it continues to surprise me. Underground streets and chambers are still being discovered. Archaeological digs at the castle bring new truths to the surface. Exhibits long forgotten in the various museums turn out to have their own tales worth telling. As a subject, the city seems inexhaustible. This is, after all, a city of words. Where else in the world would you find the main railway station named after a novel (Waverley) and a vast edifice in the city centre celebrating that work’s author (the Scott Monument)? Robert Louis Stevenson brought his own imagination to his hometown. Arthur Conan Doyle was born here. Muriel Spark grew up here. Robert Burns made his name here. J.M. Barrie was a student here. Not to mention the likes of Carlyle and Hume . . . Right up to J.K. Rowling, Irvine Welsh and Alexander McCall Smith in the present day.