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.