Ian Rankin: 'The crime fiction I'm interested in is political'

Sir Ian Rankin has published a new novel about the super-rich — his first mystery to leave Edinburgh for London — and the bestselling writer says the genre he cares about is fundamentally political.

"The crime fiction I'm interested in is political," Rankin told the Guardian in an interview at his Edinburgh apartment, where he discussed the new book and the future of his most famous creation, Detective Inspector John Rebus.

Where does Rankin write?

The setting is unglamorous. Rankin's computer sits on a plain, compact trestle-table desk he bought on London's Charing Cross Road in 1987 and carried back to his Tottenham flat on the tube. The machine has had its screen and hard drive replaced, and grooves are worn into the keys.

Both desk and computer have travelled with him from London to rural Dordogne in southwest France — where he lived with his wife, Miranda, for several years in the 1990s — and back to Edinburgh, where the couple and their two sons have lived ever since.

The apartment holds no television. Rankin rarely watches it. Instead he listens to music and constructs elaborate Lego models: all four Beatles, their Yellow Submarine, and once a 6ft version of the Eiffel Tower.

Did he watch the new Rebus on screen?

Rankin has seen the most recent television incarnation of Detective Inspector John Rebus, played by Richard Rankin — no relation — following earlier performances by Ken Stott and John Hannah.

"I did," he concedes. "They gave me them on DVD, so I could play them on my computer."

The interview ranges over what the future holds for Rebus, the detective who has anchored Rankin's reputation as a bestselling writer, and over the shift of the new mystery's setting from Edinburgh to London and its turn toward the super-rich as subject matter.

With a new novel targeting wealth and power, Rankin signals that his long-running project — crime fiction as political inquiry — continues.