A Song for the Dark Times

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

Ian Rankin’s Inside Story: “In some ways, it’s a very odd book because I started writing it just before the lockdown, so the bulk of it was written in lockdown. Normally, I go away. We’ve got a second home up in a little fishing town called Cromarty, which is up past Inverness. I would normally go there to write, because it’s quite isolated, and there’s no interruptions. That wasn’t possible, because the lockdown happened. So I was stuck in Edinburgh, writing a book for the first time in a while. Luckily, I’d done the research before lockdown and the book was written quite quickly, because there was nothing getting in the way. There were no festivals, no trips here and there.

“And honestly, it was an escape. It was a way of just blocking out the virus and the lockdown. I could escape into this other world. So it was actually a fun book to write. And then, of course, published in extraordinary circumstances, where you’re thinking, ‘Will anybody be interested in books?’ So when it was released, got rave reviews and then reached number one in the UK chart, I was just thrilled. And I think it’s a good book. I think it was a challenge for me. The challenge for me with Rebus, is—now that he’s no longer a detective and an OAP—how I can manage to involve him realistically in an ongoing police investigation when he’s basically a member of the public.

“With this one, his daughter phones him up and says, ‘My partner’s gone missing.’ So Rebus heads up to the far north of Scotland to try to help or hinder any investigation. The big moral question for me—the motivating force of that part of the book—was whether Rebus was going to arrive there as a father or as a detective? Because being a detective is in his DNA. If he starts to suspect his daughter may have played some role in the disappearance of her partner, will he try to put her away? Or will he try to protect her and frame someone else? That gave it a dramatic tension right from the get-go. It stretched me, and it stretched Rebus, because he’s no longer in his comfort zone, he’s a couple of hundred miles from his comfort zone.

“I had made the decision early on, thank goodness, that the book would be set in the summer of 2019—not summer of 2020. That would have been a very different book. It would have been the crime being solved through Zoom, or something. That was fortunate. The title came to me in September 2019. I thought the world was going through a pretty dark time: politically, socially, environmentally. A Song for the Dark Times just screamed at me as a great title, without knowing that COVID was around the corner.”