What happened when Ian Rankin came face to face with convicts?
IT IS a wet autumn morning, and Britain’s bestselling crime novelist, Ian Rankin, climbs into a taxi, pulls an unmarked envelope out of his jacket pocket and opens it. It was slipped to him an hour ago, by a man in the audience at a talk Rankin was giving. “If you want some insights into the mind of a paedophile,” the man has written, “I would be happy to help you with that.” “I’m pretty horrified,” says Rankin. “But I know that I should have been prepared for that sort of thing.” The talk was to a room full of prisoners at Wandsworth jail. You can almost hear Detective Inspector John Rebus, Rankin’s fictional hero, snorting into his beer at this. Rebus has received a few notes from criminals himself — in Knots and Crosses one is hand-delivered to his Edinburgh flat — and would never expect anything but the worst from those he is pursuing. But if Rebus doesn’t like criminals much, they like him: Rankin’s novels are the most borrowed books in the Wandsworth prison library. The librarian
