Ian Rankin (ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards) Interview
Running up to the glittering ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards will be six weeks of the greatest of crime dramas. Each week will begin with a specially commissioned documentary profiling the six best crime writers working today. The six authors who have been chosen are Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, PD James, Lynda La Plante, Val McDermid and Ruth Rendell. Viewers of ITV3 will then be able to vote between these authors to select the author who will win the first ITV3 Award for Classic TV Crime Drama.
"It’s really terrific to be nominated for this award, but it is odd as well as I have no real association with the TV adaptations of my work. I don’t write the scripts or get involved with the production in any way. So I’m coming at it from the point of view of someone who writes the original books. I mean, it’s great to be nominated for anything. But it’s especially good to have a nomination which brings in the large group of people who have been involved with making the TV series a success as well.
I think the group of six authors nominated is interesting because there are some pretty essential differences between us. I mean Lynda La Plante is essentially much better known to people as a writer of TV drama than as a novelist. Whereas the other five of us started our careers as novelists and then became successful and later saw our work transferred to television. Lynda is the one person who has written specifically and directly for that format.
There is still a perception that a successful TV cop show in Britain must be set in a village full of eccentrics with some cops from outside coming in and solving the crime. But some of the work that has been short listed is, I think, a lot darker than the Miss Marples of this world - largely because the writers have been influenced by American crime fiction. So you’ve got a combination of the fairly sedate Oxford of Colin Dexter, where crime really comes as a surprise, right through to the much darker world that Val McDermid writes about - a very urban, gritty, big city where crime is really the norm. Also, the crimes in her work can be a lot darker than you might find in Morse and Lewis’ Oxford.
If I could have come up with one character that one of the other authors did then I suppose, particularly in terms of television, I would love to have come up with Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. That really did break a lot of the rules and conventions of the TV cop drama. I remember watching it for the first time and being thrown out of my seat when the guy I thought was going to be the hero of the piece, was dead within the first five minutes. Prime Suspect was real event television before we even had the term event television.
My new book is coming out in September, and is based on a serial I wrote last year for The New York Times, which they ran over 15 weeks in their Sunday magazine. What they wanted was a heist story – something like Ocean’s Eleven but in Scotland. It’s an art heist, and it’s all about a group of gifted amateurs in Edinburgh deciding to rip off the National Gallery. My publishers in the UK read the serial and quite liked it, and asked if there was any way I could beef it up into a novel. It’s still set in Edinburgh and it is still crime, but there is no Rebus. In fact, he is mentioned in passing as having just retired, but it is all about a younger generation of Edinburgh cops who are trying to solve this crime. It’s mostly about the gentleman thief, the Raffles character, who puts the gang together – he’s the focus of the book and is a really intriguing character. I might not be surprised if he pops up again in some form or another in something else I write."
