Ian Rankin sells novels by the crateload and is riding the wave of television stardom thanks to Gregory Burke’s hard-hitting Rebus adaptation. The Edinburgh author, however, also has a soft spot for the theatre. You might imagine a man who can count small-screen audiences in the tens of millions to have little interest in the intimacy of the stage, but not so. He seems as excited by the autumn tour of Rebus: A Game Called Malice as he would the publication of any of his 25 novels.
“It’s a very different thing when you’re sitting in a room with an audience,” he says when we meet at Edinburgh Festival Theatre. “Whether it’s a concert, an opera or a play, that communal thing – when the audience all laugh together, all gasp, are all talking about the thing in the interval – is a buzz I don’t get as easily from a screen or even a book because I’m at a distance from the reader or the viewer.” [READ MORE]