Jim Cassidy: Let’s go back to the beginning Ian. You came from a small mining village in Fife, Cardenden. What do you remember most about those days? Ian Rankin: Well Cardenden was a mining town but, in the mid-60s when I was growing up, suddenly the mines proved to be uneconomic so they were closed down, so there was a slight air of desperation that was starting to drift in and I think a lot of the kids who could, we used our imaginations to make our surroundings, the world that we lived in, seem a much more exciting place, a much more adventurous and thrilling place than it really was. And, in some ways, I think writers really are like kids who’ve never grown up, because in some ways what I was doing back then is what I do now: I was creating an alternative universe, where I could move into other people’s skins, playing games of cowboys an Indians or commandos or whatever, you really felt like you were that person for the amount of time that you were playing that game. And that’s what it’s like when I pick up a pen or switch on a computer and start writing; that I really do inhabit these people. And it means that in real life I can be quite a boring, pedestrian individual, because I get all my kicks in this fantasy world inside my head. Jim Cassidy: But you went to university, at Edinburgh. Were you the first in the family to go to university? Ian Rankin: I was the first in the family to go to university, yes, and neither of my parents was a big reader so we didn’t have that many books in the house but my penchant for comic books was indulged to the full, so it was the Dandy and the Beano and the Topper and the Beezer and all that lot; and then moving onto Superman and Batman, you know, I was reading these things and then finally moved onto reading lots of books. And the reason I started reading books, I think, was predominantly that there was no censorship. I wasn’t old enough to go and see Kung Fu films or Clockwork Orange or the Godfather - they wouldn’t let me in aged eleven or twelve - but nobody stopped me taking the books out of the library. I think that was something I found, being brought up in a mining village as well, was that the library was extremely important to the working class people there. Well there was no book shop in - I say it was Cardenden, it was actually Bowhill which is even smaller than Cardenden and is now kind of part of it. There was no bookshop; there was a newsagent’s with a few kind of JT Edson cowboy books and things like that. The library had been built and paid for by the mining community, by the miners themselves, and it was a place of refuge and it was expected that you would use it because it had been put there by working men and their wives. page 3>>> Internet links:
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Part one: 
