Why would a priest want to read about murder?

Two great crime writers of our time — Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith — talk about the terrible allure of bad deeds and the dark side of Edinburgh

AMS: Let’s talk about Edinburgh first of all. We both write about the same place, but in different ways. John Rebus’s Edinburgh is a relatively bleak, dark place. Why do you focus on that side to the city?

IR: I think of Edinburgh being a Jekyll-and-Hyde place — with an elegant, beautiful, rational new town and a higgledy-piggledy, slightly chaotic, half-buried old town. It’s an absolutely brilliant setting for a crime novel because it almost seems as if there’s a dark side to the geography, not just to the criminals’ characters. Edinburgh has a blood-soaked history, after all: grave-robbers and body-snatchers and serial killers and cannibals and warlords and witches, and I suppose in writing about crime here I was also reacting against the Miss Jean Brodie stereotype of Edinburgh.

AMS: I wouldn’t entirely disagree, but I wonder if Edinburgh’s really so unique in that regard. What city doesn’t have poverty, degradation and pockets of criminality sitting alongside a respectable quarter? There’s this sort of division in any city, built into the civic mind. Don’t you think that Edinburgh is basically pretty petty bourgeois? A fifth of the population in Edinburgh is engaged in professional occupations, much higher than any other British city. So the ‘real’ Edinburgh is a respectable, white-collar, law-abiding place.

IR: But the point I’m trying to make is more about how Edinburgh sees itself. Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde, for instance, based on a real-life Edinburgh character, Deacon Brody, who was a gentleman by day and a burglar by night. Not every city had that character exemplifying a split personality.

AMS: Or maybe it’s just you who brings out the dark side of the city, Ian.