Ian Rankin is seriously jet lagged. But you wouldn’t know it if you’d met him that afternoon in Mumbai. Having landed in the city just hours before, Rankin, the Scottish writer and creator of the phenomenally popular Inspector Rebus novels, plunges cheerfully into the rigours of a literary tour. It may have drawn a sardonic comment from the world weary Rebus. But Rankin is no Rebus. (Though he tells me later that writers have split personalities, so you never know!) He meets the press, does the interviews, and jokes, “I’m like a doctor! So many appointments!”

Rankin’s noirish crime fiction, featuring that driven, cynical, self-loathing, hard drinking Edinburgh cop John Rebus, has been hitting bestseller lists for many years now. So much so that there’s a Rebus walking tour in Edinburgh where fans get to look in on the fictional detective’s non-fictional haunts, and maybe raise a single malt to his presence.

Yet just when Rebus had become such a cult figure, Rankin decided to send him into retirement. Exit Music (2007), the 17th Rebus novel, sees him bowing out of the police force and potentially ends the series. But why did he have to retire, I ask Rankin when we sit down to talk in a restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai. The sunlight filters in gently here while the afternoon simmers outside. Rankin, who is in India as part of an ongoing literary programme organised by the British Council, is dressed in a short-sleeved blue cotton shirt and baggy brown trousers. “Oh, I didn’t decide it,” he replies. “His age decided it for him. Of course, my publisher was horrified.”

The 49-year-old author, who has just that hint of a Scottish accent (he pronounces the word “person” as “paerson”, for instance), says that retirement was inevitable for Rebus because unlike most other fictional detectives he was ageing in real time. Rebus was 40 when the first book, Knots and Crosses, came out (1987). So he had to retire in 2007 when he was 60.

But fear not, all ye auld fans. Rebus’s sidekick, Detective Constable Siobhan (pronounced Che-vaughn, I now learn) Clarke is still around. “I could write a book about her and Rebus could be there somewhere,” Rankin tells me reassuringly.

Life without Rebus hasn’t exactly been idle for Rankin. In the last two years, while Rebus has probably been chewing himself up about his superannuated state, his creator has gone ahead and written a short opera, tried his hand at a graphic novel for DC Comics, written a crime thriller called Doors Open and given us another Edinburgh cop, Malcolm Fox, in a new novel called The Complaints. In many ways Fox is the very antithesis of Rebus — he is a teetotaller and more of a family man while Rebus hits the bottle regularly and makes a habit of wrecking his relationships.

“Rebus sees Edinburgh only as a crime city. Fox allowed me to show Edinburgh in a different light. It’s not quite Alexander McCall Smith Edinburgh. But it’s not Trainspotting Edinburgh either,” says Rankin.

Edinburgh is, of course, central to Rankin’s work. With its Princes Street and Castle Rock, its bars and backstreets, the city pervades his books. “It’s the main character in all my novels,” he admits. “I find it fascinating because it’s very much a Jekyll and Hyde city. There is the cultural city that the tourists see. And there is the darker city where all the nasty stuff goes on just under the surface,” he says. “So Edinburgh is a useful microcosm for saying something about human nature. And I always wanted to write books about human nature and contemporary society.”

So, in a sense, crime fiction worked for Rankin. That’s because a detective has access to every layer of society and can uncover the corruption and brutishness that lies beneath. “I could show that the veneer of civilisation was incredibly thin,” he says.

Rankin did not set out to be a crime writer, though. Growing up in a small coal mining town in Fife, Scotland, he just knew that he wanted to be a writer. And perhaps a rock star too. As a child he was a voracious reader, had an hyperactive imagination and was a big fan of rock music. When he was 12, he invented an imaginary band called The Amoebas. “Its lead singer was Ian Kaput, named after me. I also wrote the lyrics. I had no musical ability but I could always be a rock star in my head!”

Eventually, he started writing poems and short stories. It was while he was studying for a PhD on Scottish writer Muriel Spark at Edinburgh University that Rankin wrote his first novel, The Flood (1986). He got £200 for it and the book had a print run of 200 copies. Knots and Crosses, the first Rebus novel, came the very next year. It got him some notices, but it wasn’t until the 6th or 7th Rebus outing in the mid 90s that sales began to soar and Rankin became established as a crime writer to reckon with.

The character of Rebus was initially modelled after the cops who frequented the same bar in Edinburgh that Rankin went to as a student. “They were cynical about their jobs, mostly divorced, and I decided that Rebus would be in their image,” he says. But even then he did not think that he was about to become a writer of whodunits. “I am the only crime writer I know who was not a fan of crime fiction to begin with,” he says. “I read writers like James Ellroy or Ruth Rendell much later.”

But he had read the odd Raymond Chandler. In fact, part of the reason Rebus tends to play a lone hand even though he is a policeman is that Rankin was probably influenced by Chandler’s hard-boiled, yet cynical, private eye Philip Marlowe. But traditional English crime novels set in a closed environment, such as those by Agatha Christie, left him cold. “I grew up in a working class coal mining town and these vicarages, tea parties and people called Poirot — they were completely alien to me,” he chuckles.

They would be. Because Rankin is someone who’s totally plugged into contemporary reality. His realistic, often violent, fiction is firmly rooted in the here and now and set against the backdrop of real social and political events. So whether it is the setting up of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, the G-8 summit in Scotland or even the banking crisis of 2008, they all find their way into his books. And they lend a sense of immediacy to his novels — “help in the willing suspension of disbelief”, as he says.

“But then I am also a news junkie,” Rankin confesses. “I read two to three newspapers every day, go to the Internet for news, listen to the news on the radio and watch TV news too. And every now and again, something will emerge from all that news or a question will arise in my head — why did that happen? To answer that question, I could write a book. That’s how I try to make sense of the world.”

When he writes, Rankin likes to have music playing in the background. The British rock band, Radiohead, is a particular favourite, he tells me. “I think they’re fantastic for writing books to because you can’t make out what they’re singing, so I’m not listening to the words!”

Jokes apart, Rankin is a huge music buff. At university he was a member of a punk band and later put in a short stint as a music journalist with a magazine. His books too are replete with references to music. Even the titles of some of his novels are nods to the stuff he likes to listen to. For example, Let it Bleed and Black and Blue are albums by The Rolling Stones. And now Rankin has music in his family as well — his elder son Jack plays the guitar.

His younger son Kit, who is 15, is seriously disabled and goes to special school. Ironically, this private misfortune probably made the Rebus books get better, feels Rankin. “I used to think, why should this happen to us? And all that rage was channelled into Rebus. At that time I was writing Black and Blue and The Hanging Garden, the first two Rebus books that were successful. The extra element they had was all that rage, I think.”

Rankin has gone on to pick up all the crime fiction awards he could have and the Rebus books have been adapted for television too. But he regrets the fact that crime fiction is still not treated as serious literature. “You’ll never see one on a Booker short list,” he points out. But things are changing. You can study crime fiction at university now, he says. That, at least, is a start.

And there are so many more crime writers today, says Rankin. In fact, Alexander McCall Smith, whose treatment of crime is infinitely gentler than Rankin’s, lives right next door to him in Edinburgh. J.K. Rowling is another celebrity neighbour. Coincidentally, the Harry Potter series came to an end the same year that Rankin wrote his last Rebus novel. “I am always afraid that Rowling will try her hand at crime fiction now. I’d be in serious trouble then,” he grins.

Doesn’t he miss Rebus, though? “Not yet,” replies Rankin. “Because he is not dead. I know exactly what he’s doing. He is part of a special team working on cold cases.” Clearly, the possibility of making Rebus walk again lurks somewhere.

Let it happen, we say.