Good reads: From Rebus to Inspector McLean, top Edinburgh crime-writers explore how their best-loved characters would cope in lockdown

In the first of a two-part series, five Capital crime-writers reveal how their fictional characters would cope when faced with a coronavirus-style lockdown.

BEST-SELLING crime writer Ian Rankin recently brought his best known character, John Rebus, to life with the help of Brian Cox in The Lockdown Blues, a short film for the National Theatre of Scotland. In the literary world, Edinburgh has no shortage crime writers and fictional characters who keep the Capital’s streets safe, now, in the past, and in some cases, the future. But how would these characters have coped with life in isolation and how has lockdown affected their creator’s creative flow?

Rankin reflects that being in lockdown has given him “more time to actually write. I finished the next Rebus novel -set in the summer of 2019 thankfully. It has been decidedly odd going for walks around the city centre’s empty streets, but I doubt I’ll ever set a book during this particular time.” As for Rebus, the writer says, “He is in his late-60s and has COPD, so he’s in a very high-risk group.

“As such, he’s pretty well trapped in his flat with his friend Siobhan bringing him daily deliveries and insisting on taking his dog Brillo for walks so that he doesn’t have to. He has plenty of books and LP records and Siobhan will be topping up his alcohol supplies. But he’s mightily missing the Oxford Bar - and he’s not alone in that.”

One character who would be quite at home in the midst of a pandemic is international best seller Ken McClure’s Sci-Med investigator, Dr Steven Dunbar.

The East Lothian medical thriller writer, who admits, “The only downside to the current situation is that I’ve become addicted to news programmes.

“Having a doctorate in microbial genetics means I know what I’m talking about when it comes to viruses and infection. The ‘experts’ wheeled out on a daily basis by the BBC often clearly don’t and I find this leads to my swearing a lot.”

He reflects, “The hero of my 12 book Dr Steven Dunbar series is no stranger to the horror of rampaging disease. He has come up against Ebola and Pandemic Flu in a couple of stories and another book features an outbreak of Smallpox in Edinburgh - sorry Muirhouse. Steven and his partner, Tally, continue their struggle against epidemic disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo in my latest book, Miasma - currently No 1 in the best seller list in the Czech Republic.”

In her Jem Flockhart series, local author ES Thomson’s heroine, Jem Flockhart, solves crimes in the times of Queen Victoria. As a writer, Thomson concedes lockdown hasn’t troubled her much, “Queuing outside the supermarket means I can just stare into space for 20 minutes thinking about what I’m going to inflict on my characters next. I’ve always been a dreamer. Isolation gives me the chance to indulge it.”

So how would her protagonist, a mid nineteenth century apothecary cope with lockdown. “Jem would have no problem with being in quarantine - she would be used to a world seething with unpredictable infectious diseases, when the transmission of many of these, rather like coronavirus, were not fully understood. Cholera was believed to be spread by bad smells, or ‘miasma’, so face masks might have made sense to many. But there was also typhus, typhoid fever, diphtheria, even the plague was not unknown. Death by infectious disease was just a part of life for Jem, and leaving the house every day brought with it the risk of catching a something deadly - an outlook we might find hard to comprehend today.”

Bringing a more supernatural slant to policing in the Capital, award-winning James Oswald will shortly release the eleventh novel in his Inspector McLean series, howev

Good reads: From Rebus to Inspector McLean, top Edinburgh crime-writers explore how their best-loved characters would cope in lockdown - Part One