Ian Rankin in West Cork review: Scottish author reflected on 40 years of Rebus

Ian Rankin discussed his famous detective at the Maritime Hotel in Bantry as part of West Cork Literary Festival

Ian Rankin at Bantry House before his event in The Maritime Hotel. Picture: Darragh Kane

Tue, 14 Jul, 2026 - 11:05

Marc O’Sullivan Vallig

Ian Rankin’s participation in West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry is a measure of just how impressive its programming can be. At the Maritime Hotel, the Scottish crime writer not only draws a full house but his arrival on stage - with a full pint of stout - is greeted with a raucous cheer.

That Rankin is popular is a given; worldwide, his Rebus novels are estimated to have sold at least 35 million copies. But he is also beloved for his dry wit and self-deprecation, both of which are in ample evidence this evening.

Eoghan O’Sullivan of the Irish Examiner is just as convivial a host. Clearly an admirer, his questions are well-informed and probing, and he allows Rankin the space to be expansive in his answers.

Rankin is the author of dozens of novels, most of them dedicated to the exploits of Detective Inspector John Rebus as he investigates various murders in Edinburgh. Rankin insists that the first Rebus instalment, Noughts and Crosses, was intended as a standalone novel, and it was only the failure of his next few books that compelled him to bring him back as a recurring character.

Rebus’ adventures have since generated acres of superlative reviews, and have led to Rankin being credited as the father of Tartan Noir. He jokes about how his early novels were said to have painted Edinburgh in a bad light, but by the tenth, Rebus walking tours of the city had become a popular tourist attraction.

Ian Rankin with festival director Eimear O’Herlihy at Bantry House before his event in the Maritime Hotel.

Rankin is happy to talk about the 25th and most recent instalment in the series, Midnight and Blue, which finds Rebus, aged 69, a prisoner in HMP Edinburgh, having been convicted of the attempted murder of his nemesis, the career criminal Big Ger Cafferty. When another prisoner is found dead in a locked cell, Rebus naturally sets out to investigate.

Rankin is now 65 himself, and it is, he remarks, over twenty years since he won the Crime Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award. He admits to finding it harder to focus on his writing the older he gets, but suggests there may be at least one Rebus novel left in him, though he has not begun work on it yet.

Rankin is fulsome in his praise of his wife of 40 years, Miranda Harvey, who reads early drafts of all his books and is his most cutting critic. When he remarks that he expects her to outlive him, one member of the audience asks what he would like to have written on his headstone.

Rankin refers to the late Scottish writer Muriel Spark’s memorial in a cemetery in Tuscany, which, apart from her name and the dates of her birth and death, bears the single word ‘Poeta’, or ‘poet’. He would like something as simple, he says, adding mischievously: “But Miranda has always said she’ll bury me at the bottom of the garden.”