RankinWatch ™ revived

Over the course of this blog’s history, I’ve linked to many an article about the UK’s bestselling crime writer. How can I not when weird and bizarre things keep happening to him? Like being invited to a real crime scene around the corner of his house. Or being mistakenly recruited for police work.  Naturally, all those strange events are faithfully documented by his home papers, and this recent incident is no exception:

IT WAS the kind of scene which best-selling Scots crime writer Ian Rankin might have written for his famous gritty detective.
 

But it was Rankin, not his fictional Edinburgh policeman Inspector
Rebus, who found himself confronting a gang of intruders after they
sneaked into the garden of the author’s city home at night-time.
 

Rankin only discovered the six-strong gang after he glanced out of an
upstairs window at his house and noticed suspicious shadows below.
 

Fearing for the safety of his two young sons, one of whom is in a
wheelchair and both of whom were in the house at the time, Rankin began
to give chase.
 

But while Rebus would undoubtedly have apprehended the gang, Rankin
found himself simply watching the troublemakers as they argued with a
neighbour further down the street before they fled once more into the
darkness.

Unfortunately, Rankin believes he wouldn’t have fared nearly as well as his fictional creation had the youths actually entered the premises:

“Would I, in fact, have done anything other than, in a manner of speaking, ‘play dead’? Rebus would be ashamed of me.”
 

Confessing to feeling “queasy” after the incident, he explained: “In my
life, when confronted by violence I’ve tended to play dead. The one
fight I got into at high school, the moment my adversary landed a Doc
Marten toe-cap on my chin, I fell to the ground, eyes closed,
pretending he’d knocked me out.
 

“Later, as a student in Edinburgh, when two friends and I were attacked
from behind on a darkened street, I feigned being hurt in the first
wave, so I would be excused the full brawl which followed (one of my
friends was a nightclub bouncer: best leave these things to the
professionals). On both occasions, that same queasy feeling followed.
 

“I’ve always played the spectator: it’s what novelists do. In Muriel
Spark’s phrase, we ‘loiter with intent’, the intent being to use the
experience later in our work.”

I can’t say that attitude is anything to be ashamed of; someone breaks into your house when you least expect it, your first instinct may not be to beat the crap out of them or fight. The unpredictability of human nature means that one really doesn’t know how he or she would react in a seeming life-or-death situation. And if you’re a crime writer facing a real-life crime, the results can be markedly different from how you actually write about them in books.