YouSaid · the spoken record

Ian Rankin

lines on the record: 44
first: 2006-07-16
most recent: 2006-07-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Can it have to be one of the old fashioned ones because I wouldn't have anything to do, I couldn't plug it in, so it couldn't be one of these new whistles and bells. It would have to be a really old traditional, nice American pinball machine.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've given us a lot of thought and I think it's got to be something I haven't played for years pinball. I'm going to have a pinball machine because at university I played pinball and when we moved to France the local bar had a pinball machine and I never quite mastered it.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can do that. I just love that life is a dance to the music of time. Characters come and go. We see people. We meet them. We get to know them. They disappear. They come back into our lives again. There's that wonderful flow that you get in that book that hopefully you get.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure it exists. If dance to the music of time by Anthony Pole exists in a one volume set, I'd be allowed it, wouldn't I?”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I had trouble whitliness down from 35 to 8, so whitlin it down from 8 to 1 is tragic, but I think it would have to be the John Martin.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, one of the pleasures of later success is that, you know, as a frustrated rock star myself, I got to meet people in the industry who were fans of the books, and amongst them was a Scottish singer-songwriter called Jackie Levin. And we started working together and we took a show on the road. It was a long, short story of mine, which I would sort of read out, and he would play songs that were thematically relevant. We grew up in the same part of Fife at much the same time, from much the same background. And so I've chosen a song, it's not a typical Jackie Leavin song, but it's about where we grew up, and it's about the fifties and the sixties, and so it's evocative, and it'll take me back sitting in a desert island to my early life. So the eternal triangle will have come full circle, to put it squarely. It's called Linseed Oil.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I won't know that until I try. No, no, I mean, I think I'm young enough to be able to sort of throw off the shackles or to get his voice out of my head, as it were. And there are other kinds of books that I would like to try and write. I don't think I would stray too far from the thriller or the crime genre. Maybe I would. I remember when I was a teenager in my late teens, I tried writing a Millson Boon book. I mean, who knows?”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's a tough, resilient conservative working class Scot. And there's something of the Old Testament about him. He sees the world in black and white, good guys and bad guys. And my job in the books is often to try and change his mind about this and show him that there are elements of grey.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or whether there are elements of em I don't like. In fact, it's not that, it's that he wouldn't like me if we met. He would find me, you know, a sort of wishy washy liberal who's never had to do a hard day's work in his life.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you ask me today, I'll say no, I couldn't possibly kill him off. I've spoken to Colin Dexter about this because Colin Dexter famously did kill off Morse. And he said the reason he did it was that fans would keep besieging him if he'd just given them a happy goodbye and I'm out of here. They would have said, well, bring him back, please.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got to put an end to him. What I do with them is still, I still haven't decided. I've only got one more book to write, and that will be the book when he hits 16. 60 is as old as you can go in the Scottish CID.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because they're good. And Belle and Sebastian, that his fantastic breakthrough album, I think, the boy with the Arab strap, and again trying to sneak extras into my desert island, this was also the theme tune to the Channel 4 series Teachers, which I was a great fan of, especially in its early years. And so as I listened to Bell and Sebastian playing the boy with the Arab strap, I shall be thinking of one of my favourite TV shows.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I still get panic attacks, usually when I'm writing a book. I suddenly jump out of bed with the adrenaline rushing, but not as nearly as many as I used to get.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, because a writer's only as good as the last book, and you never know if your next book's going to be any good.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I mean, two years ago we moved into a nice big house in a part of Edinburgh that I didn't know. And after we bought the house, realised that two doors away from us was Alexander McCall Smith, author of the number one ladies detective agency, and at the top of the road was JK Rowling. Some Wag wrote into the newspaper in Edinburgh and said, we must now start calling this writer's block.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet, including sadly, the lifetime achievement prize from the Kremrat as a diamond dagger last year. They gave it to me at 45. I thought, did they want me to go away now and stop or what? You mentioned it.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would assume maybe 10 or 20,000 paperback. And now it's about half a million in the UK translated into 28 languages, I think, which is half JK Rowling, but it's not bad.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing, I think, even if writers say it isn't, writing is therapeutic, there's no doubt about it. It's cathartic, it's exercising your demons, which is why a lot of crime writers are such well-balanced individuals in real life, is because we get all the dark stuff out on the page. It's the romance writers you've got to watch out for”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, halfway through, or three quarters of the way through black and blue, he ends up, Rebus ends up having a fight with his best friend in the middle of the night, in the middle of Edinburgh, and he's suddenly on his hands and knees with tears and snot coming out of his nose. It's not very pleasant. That is his lowest ebb in the entire series. I mean, that's the lowest point he reaches in the entire series. And that was probably when I was at one of the low points. I mean, maybe not the lowest point in my life, but certainly a low point. Probably written before we'd got a proper diagnosis with Kit. And so it was just all questions, all rage, why us and why me and what's going on here. And channeling it. I mean, I do think.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's one of those things that I'll never know if the books would have been different without Kit coming along. It's an interesting little conundrum. But yeah, you can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is the Rolling Stones. I have nicked stuff from the stones throughout my writing career, mostly titles for books black and blue as a Rolling Stones album. The younger are my two sisters, Linda, one of her boyfriends was a big Stones fan, and when I was ten or eleven he introduced me to this album, and I hated it because I was a T-Rex fan at the time. And then when I grew up a bit, I thought it's one of the greatest rock albums of all time. So it's from Let It Bleed, another Rolling Stones title I've stolen, and this is you can't always get what you want.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“infant under 12 months I would think maybe so he still plays with baby toys but he has such a fun time and you know the other irony of course is that he helped to books to become better and they became more successful and suddenly I've got money and that money goes back into helping kit we buy and care for him so he's always got people around him who are taking him out swimming or taking him for a walk and stuff and he's never going to know poverty he's never going to know war or unemployment or anger or jealousy he's going to have a childlike existence for the rest of his life”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's nearly 12. He's nearly 12 and he's still not walking, he crawls and he pulls himself up onto the furniture. He can't communicate. He's got very, very limited sign language that they see at school, but we don't seem to see it at home.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think that was part of the breakthrough. That was a large part of the breakthrough. It's a terrible iron. It's an irony. I'm not sure it's a terrible irony. I mean, Kit is a fun Yeah, but on the other hand, he's a lovely kid.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The frustration, the why me, all those big questions that you get. Randomness. And in fact, I took it to extremes because in the very next book I actually had Rebus' daughter be involved in an accident, a hit and run, and be in a wheelchair. And this was at a time when we were learning that Kip might not walk. He wouldn't talk. Injuries kids, most of them can't communicate except through maybe some sign language, limited sign language. So we're finding all these things out. It was a very frustrating time in some ways. But on the other hand, you know, the silver lining to the extent is that it made the book a better book. It made it a huge, angry book.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but it just comes out of the blue. It just happens. It's just a lucky draw, as it were. But we would be driving fifty kilometres, 35 miles to the hospital. My French wasn't brilliant. Miranda's is pretty good, but even so, dealing with doctors who are talking to you in jargonese, and at the same time you're trying to read between the lines of what they're trying to tell you without actually spelling it out, I found incredibly frustrating, especially someone who makes their living from language. And so I would drive back home and I would climb the steps my office was in the attic, and there was a kind of rickety ladder up. I would climb the rickety ladder into the attic, draw it up after me, shut the trapdoor, and suddenly there was me and a computer, and I would dump all this stuff on Rebus. I reread black and blue recently and I can just see the point at which I started doing it.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is, I was writing black and blue or certainly plotting it when Kit was born, but fairly soon after he was born we noticed that he wasn't making much progress in some areas. You're quite sanguine with your second kid. You know, he's not rolling over or doing anything. I'll give it a month or two, it'll be fine. But then we started to get a bit worried and went to the local GP and eventually after much to-ing and fro-ing he was diagnosed with, I think, called Angelman syndrome, which slows down progress in lots of areas. He hasn't just got Angelman's, he's got visual problems as well, which a lot of Angelmen's kids don't have.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is actually going back to any panic attack started in London and I was advised to take some time off, so I jumped on a train, got as far as York, got off, looked at the notice board, saw Scarborough, and thought I'll go to Scarborough, and I walked up and down the beach in out of season Scarborough, listening to lots of Van Morrison, and he was a great balm and healer, so I've chosen a track from that time snow in San Anselmo.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, that got worse in France to a certain extent. We had a two CV, you know, the old snail mobile. I would drive out into the country of my two CV and just scream and scream and scream at the top of my voice and felt a hell of a lot better as a result. What the neighbours thought of it, God knows.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fear of failure. It's just a surge of adrenaline, and I think it is fear. It's just generalized fear that you're not in control of your life or you're not in control of your destiny.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terrifying. I was having to write two books a year just to get by, and the publishers didn't want two Rebus novels a year, so I had to write thrillers under a pseudonym, Jack Harvey. I wrote three thrillers in three years. And money was always tight, and I started them panicking. Well, I'd actually start to have panic attacks in London. I remember getting on a train at Victoria to get down to Crystal Palace and suddenly thinking I was having a heart attack and jumping off the train and going back to Tottenham and asking my doctor and he said, well, it's panic attacks. People get them. Of course you think it's unique when it happens to you. You think you're the only person in the world.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, how'd you do that in beautiful southwest? How did we ever think about it? I don't know. I mean, the problem was that we'd given up two jobs, gone to France, got this rabshackle farmhouse which we had to rewire and clad and all the rest of it, you know, we'd fall off ladders and nearly cut through my leg with a chainsaw.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, after we left university Miranda and I had gone to France for six months and picked grapes and such like, and so we knew we liked France. And she persuaded me that if I wanted to be a full time writer, we'd have to move to southwest France.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We lived in Tottenham in North London and I worked in Crystal Palace, which is completely mad, which is as far south as you can go before you hit Croydon. So I had a ninety minute commute each way each day. I mean, I was working in a hi fi magazine, reviewing Hi Fi equipment and albums and going to concerts. That was great fun. But if you've not got much money and we didn't, London can suck a lot more life out of you than you get back from it. It is a tough place to live”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was more that I couldn't survive in the real commercial world just loved being at university and so I pleaded with them to let me go back and I'd specialised in American literature at a professor at Edinburgh University said to me you won't get money from the government to come to a Scottish university to study in American writer he said tri-Murial Spark and I went who's she and And so he went, Miss Jim Brody, and I went, oh, of course. And so I spent a happy three years at Edinburgh being funded by the taxpayer, supposedly doing a thesis on Muriel Spark, but in reality sitting in the National Library writing my own books. And then eventually the money ran out, and luckily I was getting married at the So I moved down to London.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is going to take us back to those days. I was a huge Joy Division fan. They were very dark, very gloomy. Their lead singer committed suicide. I was appearing on stage with my own punk band when we heard the news. But very beautiful music, and I never got to see them live. I've still got my ticket because they were coming to Edinburgh, but the lead singer committed suicide before they got to Edinburgh. So it's one of the great miseries of my life is that I never did see them live. This is Joy Division with Atmosphere.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that humped me out. My dad died, actually my dad did it with my mum as well. Dad came upstairs I was sleeping, it was the middle of the night and he said, your mum's gone and he took me downstairs to the bed in the living room and he said touch her forehead with your finger because then you'll never fear death. And then a few years later I found myself doing the same thing with my dad, touching his forehead. But it was quite devastating. I mean, you know, I was supposed to be going to university in Hoffness Fantastic Life of undergraduate recklessness, which I did to a certain extent. And I was writing very dark, morbid poetry, and joined a dark, morbid punk band. I felt I was these separate characters. And that came across later on when I started writing novels.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They said she had a stroke, and then he said it was multiple sclerosis, but I've got a feeling on the death certificate that said some kind of cancer, so I'm not sure that she was ever properly diagnosed.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“somewhere between the two, or maybe both at the same time. Well, it was an odd time for me because I arrived October 78, aged 18, I arrived at university. A month later my mum took ill. So I'd been at university a month, and my parents were preparing for retirement. My dad was in his 60s and she was nearing 60. And here was the last child having left a nest. She took ill. And for my first year at university, she just got worse and worse. So there was a year when she just, I would be at university during the week studying Milton and Wordsworth and things like that and Shakespeare. And then I would go home at weekends and my mum would be in the bed in the living room downstairs because my dad couldn't get her up and down the stairs.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was studying American literature at university. The author peeking through the books is still a source of some embarrassment to me in the early ones.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go to university for four years to study something just for the money at the end of it. No. So I had to break the awful truth to them that I would study English. At track number three takes me back to my teenage years at high school I was introduced to the music of John Martin by a mate of mine, Jock Scott, and after all these years I'm still listening to it and I'm still listening to what I think is his best album Solid Air and this is the title track.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the office down the dockyard. No, they were. English was always my favourite subject at school. I loved writing essays. I loved reading books. The local library was my haunt in Cardenden. They couldn't really understand that. They took a book on holiday with them in the summer and that was about as far as their reading went. And I think when I decided, I mean the decision that I would actually go to university and study English literature, they thought, what are you going to do with that? And the only thing I could say to them was teach, I suppose. They had this idea that you went to university. I was the first member of my family to go to university. You went there to get a professional career to become a doctor or a lawyer, an accountant. And in fact, accountancy was what I was going to do because I had an uncle down in Bradford who owned his own house and had a car and was always tanned from foreign holidays. And he was a chartered accountant. So we thought, well, that's obviously the game to be in. But I wasn't much good at it and didn't much like it. And I suddenly realized, don't want to...”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, when I was three or four or five I would get into bed with my parents on a Sunday morning with a cup of tea and a ginger nuts and the Sunday post and my dad would tell stories. He had a running character called Johnny Morey. And he would basically extrapolate from his own memories of childhood. So he was telling me these stories that I thought were fiction but were actually based on kids that he ran around with, a dog that he'd had when he was a kid. And that was a lot of fun.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A dead live extraordinary fantasy life inside my head, and I used to try and make comic books like the sort of victor or the hotspa or dandy Urbino and show them to my mum, and I would put free gifts on the front, little badges and things. And I think she was a bit bemused by this. I mean, my parents, you know, solidly working class, my mum worked in a factory, my dad worked for years in a grocery shop, and then latterly at a dockyard. Neither had been to college or university. I don't think they could understand. But your dad.”
2006-07-16 · Desert Island Discs · Ian Rankin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source