The law of diminishing returns is something no creative artist can afford to ignore, no matter how successful, or established. What once was novel does not remain novel for long. And so while it’s undeniably true to say that readers of crime fiction in particular do seem to like more of the same – in the case of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, ad infinitum – sometimes the returning character simply runs out of steam, just as the author surely runs out of plot.
Enter Ian Rankin, now Sir Ian Rankin, Scottish author of the beloved Detective Inspector John Rebus series, which he’s been writing for 40 years.
“Trust me, I’ve tried to kill him off many times and write something else,” Rankin told me when I interviewed him for The Independent last year, “but he keeps coming back.”
Does he ever. Rebus has, to date, come back in no fewer than 25 iterations, doggedly impervious to all his creator’s murderous instincts. Given the length of his service to law enforcement, one might have expected Rebus by now to have solved all the crimes in Edinburgh. Rankin clearly thought so too, because in the character’s last outing, 2025’s Midnight and Blue, he seemed to end his storyline fairly definitively.
Perhaps this was a good thing? Rebus was tired, Rankin also. Authors should be able to exert a certain autonomy over their literary creations, even if their legion of fans tend to think otherwise. No?
Rankin, now 66, has just published his new novel, The Heights, his first standalone fiction in two decades. Nevertheless, it treads very familiar ground – troubled detective solves crimes in the gritty underground of a British capital. In place of Rebus comes DS Gillian Gish, who hails from Tottenham, and whose particular beat is central London. She has been called to investigate a murder in a swanky high-rise on the edges of Hyde Park, where various wealthy individuals reside: a Russian oligarch, an art dealer, a gaudy star of reality TV, and a young singer who goes by the name of Zafk.
DS Gish has a winningly deadpan mien. When told that security is one of the reasons people choose to live in such a luxurious “millionaire’s playground” – where, remember, a murder has just taken place – she witheringly responds: “I wouldn’t say security’s your strong point, sir.”
Outside of work, Gish manages a complicated private life (her mother has dementia), and passes her days with the same mixture of world-weariness and gallows humour seemingly possessed by all police, all of the time.
Gish has 330 pages to sort wheat from chaff and solve the case. This she does with an attention to detail her Scottish counterpart might appreciate. That’s the thing, ultimately, about The Heights: Rebus may be absent, but he remains an invisible lurking presence. DS Gish is good, but as good as him?
By 2025, Ian Rankin felt much like his enduring literary hero: getting on a bit. “I used to knock out a book a year, working 10 hours a day, fuelled on nothing but coffee and Snickers bars,” he told me, “but now I’m knackered after half an hour’s creative effort.” He had to reduce his output to just one book every couple of years, crime novelists writing far faster than their literary counterparts – who can, and often do, take years, even decades between books.
His productivity has paid off. The Rebus series have sold millions, been translated into 36 languages, and adapted for the screen. Like James Bond, Rebus doesn’t get older, but rather possesses the unusual ability of being able to stall the process, and occasionally age backwards. Quite the trick. When he first appeared on TV in the early 2000s, he was played by the winningly crumpled Ken Stott, later replaced by the younger John Hannah. When the character was revived by the BBC in 2024, the actor who played him, Richard Rankin (no relation), was just 41.
“In real life,” the author has said, “Rebus would be well into his 70s now, perhaps even 80…”
For Midnight and Blue, Rebus was in his mid-60s. Rankin clearly thought the way he ended things there – I won’t go into details, to avoid spoilers – would be a winning cliffhanger.
Fans, however, were less happy. “They wanted to know what happened next!” Rankin lamented.
But he was adamant. Time for a change.
But, let’s be honest here, not too much of a change. The Heights remains a police procedural. It’s good on detail and dialogue. And the author clearly has fun with his high-net-worth individuals. Where Agatha Christie kept her suspects on an opulent train (specifically, the Orient Express), Rankin keeps his motley crew up a tower block, where each has their own reason for not exactly welcoming questions from the law. Here, high above London’s city streets, new money rubs alongside old, and occasionally chafes. Inevitably, Gish has her work cut out.
But while the narrative zips along, and it’s all entertaining enough, a nagging feeling persists: what a shame Rankin didn’t step out of his specialist field altogether, and broach something wildly different. Perhaps that’s an unfair expectation – there are surely very few crime novelists desperate to locate their inner Jane Austen. But you can’t suppress the sense that if Rankin were going to write something this similar to Rebus, he may just as well have written a Rebus book itself.
The author is in a bind: The Heights is too similar to avoid unfavourable comparisons with Rebus – and not new enough to stop you wishing you were in the familiar world of the Edinburgh detective instead.
Of course, successful writers rarely dare tamper with their brand. The prospect for failure looms ever large. Ian Rankin is an avid music fan, and so likely knows only too well what happens when pop stars suddenly jump genres. No one liked it when Sting picked up the lute, did they?
Hence the Rebus-adjacent The Heights, then. If it seems ultimately unlikely that DS Gish will get to enjoy further literary adventures, Rankin electing to return to what he really knows best, then this is simply nature at work. The moth always returns to the flame.
‘The Heights’, by Ian Rankin, is published by Orion,at £25