Dead centre of the city

Ian Rankin leads the way down a dark, stone stairway into the bowels of his city. He takes a turn, passes under the massive stone arch of a bridge and, after walking another 50 yards, turns and stops. "There it is," he shouts above the traffic. "Anyone who dies in Edinburgh starts their death here." We have arrived at an anonymous 1960s brick building, its two stories dwarfed by the towering structures around it. Inside, piled up against the highest window, is a stack of pots that look a lot like paint tins through the opaque glass. But it's doubtful that they ever contained anything quite so benign as paint, because this is the City Mortuary. Embalming f luid, perhaps?

Another Ian Rankin invterview - this one the cover feature in the T2 section of the Times. Read more here: Rebus Walk. The pun on the dead centre of Edinburgh was in the original copy but removed by a passing sub. It would never happen to Giles Coren, eh?

Here's a jolly spread about the joys of second hand books, which I helped out with: Old books.

On the trail of Rankin's Rebus muse

Sunday Times 18 January 2004

These are dangerous times for shrinking violets to be out and about in Edinburgh, even in an unassuming little pub in a shadowy street near the city centre. This is the Oxford Bar, and here Ian Rankin is at work researching his 15th Inspector Rebus novel. A careless word, a gesture, a nervous habit, and you might find yourself immortalised in its pages.

When he was in his early twenties and starting out as a writer, Rankin found "everything I wanted to say about Edinburgh" in the Oxford's claustrophobic rooms and social mix -policemen, postmen and the rest who jostled together at the bar.

Two decades on, munching on a "Rebus roll" of corned beef and beetroot, he finds the place as inspirational and congenial as ever.

It's not that he sets out to monitor the behaviour of his fellow citizens, Rankin explains between mouthfuls, it just happens. The other night he was listening to two taxi drivers discussing the computerised codes they use to identify police cars and speed cameras. "Brilliant stuff," he says. "I was scribbling it down on a beer mat, maybe for the next book or maybe not. Just that bit of inside information, then if you put it in a book, every taxi driver who reads it says, "Wow, he really knows his stuff," and all you've done is listen in a pub. It's like Muriel Spark says, 'Nothing is lost to the writer'. We loiter with intent, we sit around and without knowing it we are actually picking up characters, the tics, the little personal things they do, which they don't know they're doing."

For an interviewer -like those cabbies looking askance at him with his beer mat - this watching brief can be unnerving. "It's like you with your pen," he says, "click click, click. Six months down the line I might want a character who is slightly nervy and I'll think, 'Maybe he's clicking his pen ...' You just never know where you're going to get a character from, or a trait or a one-liner or a story. I don't know what's useful until I start writing, then this repository of stuff seems to come to the surface."

It may be part of creating the perfect Rebus environment, but weaving fact and fancy like this can be a risky business. In Let It Bleed, the fire, the fug of smoke and the folk musicians in the Oxford were lovingly described as "Rebus rested his foot on the polished brass bar-rail and drank his drinks". For years afterwards regulars were chiding Rankin about that nonexistent bar-rail. "I misremembered," he shrugs. "I was living in London at the time. Make a mistake about the Oxford and I get picked up more than for any mistake about police procedures or historical inaccuracies."

In the early novels some of the Edinburgh scenes were only composites of real places. Then, Rankin says, "I decided I was making life hard on myself -why don't I write about real pubs and real police stations?" So he burnt down the fictional Great London Road copshop; Rebus moved to St Leonards police station on Edinburgh's Southside.

More changes will be required for the novel due in the autumn. Lothian and Borders police recently closed their CID operation in St Leonards and the detectives moved out; Rebus will follow suit. "You have to stay true to the changes in the city," says Rankin. "It means he'll lose a lot of people he used to work with." Rebus is "95% certain" to be assigned to the Gayfield Square station off Leith Walk, though the author has never set foot inside it. "I just need a rough idea of the layout - I could do it by talking to a cop," he adds.

Here in the Oxford, the symbiosis between the writer's pub and his pen expressed itself in the names of his characters. John Curt was the post-graduate student who worked in the bar and introduced Rankin to its nicotine-stained charms. He lends his name to the trusty pathologist of the novels, outranked in fiction as in life by Professor Gates, named after the landlord of the Oxford, John Gates.

The pub began to feature by name by the sixth novel. Harry Curran was immortalised as "Edinburgh's rudest barman" in Dead Souls. When Rankin embarked on A Question of Blood, Curran asked the author to improve his sex life, at least in his fictional persona. The result? "Siobhan noticed that Harry, the dour barman, was smiling. 'He seems unusually chipper,' she commented to Rebus. 'I think young Harry's in love'." Rankin winks across his pint: "Mission accomplished."

Real customers began to appear at the bar alongside the fictional Rebus. Leith gallery owner Muir Morrison was consulted by the detective after an art theft, and Hayden Murphy, Edinburgh's most charming Irish journalist, was identified as "the writer", his work spread over a table in the Oxford's back room. "I went over to give a serious lecture at Trinity," says Murphy, who has joined Rankin among the late morning customers, "and their introduction was: 'Hayden's main claim to fame is he appears in Set in Darkness'." The Oxford has a website devoted almost entirely to its place in the literary hall of fame.

The blurring of fact and fiction, says Rankin, helps to suspend reality. Those featured in the books don't mind because it is done without malice. True, the cops who once used to drink in the Oxford have found a new watering hole ("You're not really surprised, are you?" asks Murphy) but the author insists most people are flattered to think they might make it into the novels.

On the other hand, there are many people who mistakenly believe they have appeared in a Rebus book. "I say: 'Have I ever met you before?' 'No.' 'Well how can it be you?'"

In Knots and Crosses, Rankin recalls, there is a reporter who plainly works for The Scotsman. "He's quite sloppy -not his journalism but his personal habits, egg down his tie and everything. James Naughtie reckons it's him." The villain (described as "insane ... the most dangerous-looking man Rebus had met in his entire life") works in the public library on George IV Bridge. Rankin says: "Alan Taylor (associate editor of the Sunday Herald) thinks it's him, because he was working at the library then."

Other hardened professionals discern themselves. Thomas Richey, serving 65 years for shooting a woman dead while under the influence of LSD, wrote to Rankin from an American jail in Washington state. "He said: 'In Dead Souls, you've got a Scottish guy who's released from Walla Walla state pen and comes back to Edinburgh with a score to settle. It must be me.' He wasn't pissed off, he thought it was just a bit odd." Rankin had chosen the prison because he had visited a friend who lived near it.

In fact, these days the most dedicated fans can book a place in a Rebus novel through charity auctions. A merchant banker parted with Pounds 5,000 for a mention in A Question of Blood; Belle and Sebastian's bassist got a part in another book.

One woman handed over Pounds 200 for her cat to appear. "That was really hard work," says Rankin. "The thing was called Boethius." The first time Rankin auctioned off a fictional role, a pal of his wife's won and asked for her American friend -Fern Bogot -to have a part. "Fern Bogot?" shrieks Rankin, still incredulous. "How the hell do you get her in an Edinburgh-based book? I made her a prostitute. Fern was a bit iffy at first, but she's fine about it now."

But Rankin continues to borrow from real life. One novel was based on the case of Bible John while Rankin admits a lingering fascination with the Edinburgh World's End pub murders. "I quite like writing about unsolved crimes because it's telling the people who did it, 'Look, we've not forgotten, people are never going to forget and eventually they are going to get you'."

But he doesn't approve of those true-life crime books, which fill the shelves next to the fictional detectives. They're apt to attract some unhealthy minds, though Rankin reckons he's in the clear on that score. "I'm not worried about being obsessive," he retorts in the face of the accusation. "I'm not that obsessive."

This from a man who has just eaten a Rebus roll for breakfast.

Scottish? English? Library thinks twice

Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, January 15, 2008; Page C05

EDINBURGH, Scotland

The stroke of a pen at the Library of Congress -- which rebranded 700 years of Scottish literary tradition as "English literature" -- has in recent weeks generated a spluttering uproar here. And last week, faced with Celtic fury, the American institution made an undignified U-turn.

The decision by the library's Cataloguing Policy and Support Office to abandon 40 headings and subheadings for Scottish writing meant every author in Scotland would be categorized under predominantly "English" categories. In a country whose domestic policy is run by a minority Scottish Nationalist government, the "English" labels caused disbelief.

Not even the national bard, Robert Burns, was exempt from the new Library of Congress rules. Despite penning the indisputably Scottish line "Wee, sleekit cow'rin, tim'rous beastie," he stood to be reclassified from the heading "Scottish Poetry" to "English Poetry, Scottish authors," under the system.

The reclassification took place in 2006 but wasn't noticed until the London Times called attention to it just before Christmas.

Then, after weeks of protest from "appalled" government ministers, writers and academics, Washington relented. In an apologetic letter to the National Library of Scotland here and the British Library in London, Librarian of Congress James Billington said the institution would return writers to their former Scottish status.

"The letters acknowledge that it was their interest and concerns over the issues created for them that led to the reversal," said Matt Raymond, a library spokesman.

The letter to the British institutions states: "After reviewing thoughtful comments received from several correspondents, the Cataloguing Policy and Support Office of the Library of Congress will be reinstating headings for Scottish literature, Scottish poetry and similar headings. . . . Bibliographic records will also be updated to restore former subject entries."

It is hard to overestimate reaction to the Library of Congress policy. Many Scots believe the country is enjoying a literary renaissance with writers such as Irvine Welsh, A.L. Kennedy, Ian Rankin and Christopher Brookmyre selling millions of books worldwide. The country's literary tradition is founded on authors such as Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, who strongly asserted their sense of Scottish identity.

The effect of the recent Library of Congress system had meant that works by John Buchan, a Scottish aristocrat, would be found under "Adventure Stories -- English," rather than "Adventure Stories -- Scottish." The same was true in other categories, from science fiction to gay literature.

The absurdity aside, the change was likely to have dramatic consequences. Library of Congress subject headings are adopted by libraries, publishers and retailers throughout the world, raising fears in Scotland that its proud literary heritage would be buried.

"The Library of Congress did not make a logical decision," said Cairns Craig, professor of Scottish and Irish studies at the University of Aberdeen. "If you are going to have national literatures in English, then Scottish literature ought to be one of them since it is the oldest national literature in English other than English itself."

Craig was one of a number of Scottish delegates at last month's American Modern Language Association conference in Chicago, which agreed to lobby to have the policy reversed.

Rankin, who has sold 20 million books worldwide, had also bitterly opposed the Library of Congress decision and said he was delighted by the reconsideration. His Inspector Rebus series was written and set in Edinburgh but would have been filed under "Detective and Mystery stories, English" had the library policy continued.

"If you talk to Scottish crime writers and ask, 'What are your influences?,' instead of answering Raymond Chandler or Agatha Christie, they will tend to say 'Confessions of a Justified Sinner' or 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson, or John Buchan's 'Thirty-Nine Steps.' We have grown up reading different books and grown up in a different culture," Rankin said.

Linda Fabiani, the minister of culture in Edinburgh, played a leading role in seeking to have the policy overturned, lobbying Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-N.C.), who then raised the issue in Washington. "I am very pleased," he said, "that the U.S. Library of Congress has made the proper decision to recognize Scottish identity for Scottish literature. This is a very important issue to the Scottish people, Scottish heritage and to Scotland-U.S. relations."

Scotland's resistance to English rule goes back centuries. Responsibility for domestic government in Scotland was given over to the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh in 1999 by British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor Party administration. In last year's Scottish election, the National Party, which favors complete independence for the country, won the biggest share of the vote.

There's more of this Scottish literature story further down the page. You can link to the Washington Post here: Washington Post

The story has also been picked up by the Scottish media website, allmediascotland. Read about it here: Mike Wades in - to the rescue

Great Scots written back into history

The Times, January 12, 2008

When cataloguing staff at the world’s most powerful library consigned a 700-year-old literary tradition to history, they little realised the storm they would release on the other side of the Atlantic. But now, just weeks after the revelation that it had abolished its Scottish literature headings, the American Library of Congress has been forced to climb down.

Last month, The Times revealed that a decision of the library’s Cataloguing and Support Office in Washington had effectively reclassified authors such as Sir Walter Scott and Irvine Welsh as ‘English’. The policy cause outrage, prompting an intervention from the country’s culture minister and drawing an unprecedented condemnation from the National Library of Scotland, which accused its American counterpart of “a gross inaccuracy” in its cataloguing system.

Under pressure from the authors, academics and politicians, the library has reinstated around 40 Scottish headings and sub-headings. It turns out that Scottish literature – whether is the medieval epic poetry of John Barbour, the doggerel of William Topaz McGonagall, or the modern ‘Tartan Noir’ school of crime writing - is not English after all.

The Library of Congress confirmed its revised policy in an e-mail to the National Library of Scotland and the British Library yesterday. The text reads: “After reviewing thoughtful comments received from several correspondents, the … Library of Congress will be reinstating headings for Scottish literature, Scottish poetry, and similar headings. The reinstatement will appear on a future weekly list of subject headings issued by the Cataloguing Policy and Support Office. Bibliographic records will also be updated to restore former subject entries.”

The move was met with delight in Scotland. Ian Rankin, whose works are quintessentially Scottish, said: "If you talked to a lot of Scottish crime writers and asked, ‘What are your influences?’ instead of answering Raymond Chandler or Agatha Christie, they will tend to say Confessions of a Justified Sinner or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson, or John Buchan’s Thirty-nine Steps. We have grown up reading different books and grown up in a different culture.”

Under the system which had been proposed Library of Congress, the heading “Scottish Literature”, and sub-headings ranging from “Erotic poetry, Scottish” to “television plays, Scottish” had been removed and re-categorised under English headings.

The object had been to introduce “conformity” in cataloguing practice, by removing “redundant” headings, explained a policy document. The aim was not “to imply that such authors are ethnically English”, but that their works formed a “subset” of the totality of English literature.

The effect of the new system meant that John Buchan’s works were filed under “Adventure Stories – English”, rather than “Adventure Stories – Scottish”, and that novels filed under “Science Fiction, Scottish,” were filed under “Science Fiction, English”.

The proposals had far-reaching consequences. Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are used by libraries, publishers and retailers throughout the world, raising fears that modern Scottish literature would be buried under the heading “English”.

The climbdown was welcomed on both sides of the Atlantic. "I am very pleased that the Library of Congress has made the proper decision to recognise Scottish identity for Scottish literature. This is a very important issue to the Scottish people, Scottish heritage, and to Scotland-U.S. relations,” said Congressman Mitchell. The Scottish culutre minister, Linda Fabiani, said she was delighted that there had been a change of heart.

Cairns Craig, professor of Irish and Scottish studies at Aberdeen University, said that the issue was a matter of logic. “This is part of the old difficulty about whether the literature is a function of the language, or whether the literature is the function of the nation. If you are going to have national literatures in English, then Scottish literature ought to be one of them, since it is the oldest national literature in English other than English itself,” said Professor Craig.

Alasdair Gray, author of Lanark said it was important that libraries were accurate. “If a library is allocating literature to national areas then it ought to do it accurately. If you put all the authors who wrote in German under the heading ‘German literature’, Kafka would become a German, along with umpteen others, he said. "And by God! If they are going to put Scottish authors into English literature, I insist they put the Americans there too.”

The author Allan Massie said: “English is both a country and a language and the language has a wide application. Most Scottish writers write in English, so there is a grey area, but then so do most American, Australian and many Indian authors. My novels are not set in Scotland, but I think of myself as a Scottish writer. “

Not everyone was celebrating. Gregory Burke, who wrote the hit play Black Watch, said Scottish literature headings were unimportant. “Someone once said: ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’ It [Scottish literature] is a dialect of English. I don’t care about things like that – you can file me under anything you want. There are bigger things to worry about.”

Screen but not heard

IT SOUNDS like the worst kind of joke. There are these two blokes arguing in a pub. One man, his face growing redder and redder, insists that the proliferation of television screens is destroying the traditional Scottish bar by killing the art of conversation. The other - in the person of Ian Rankin, the Edinburgh crime writer who plots his novels through a glass, darkly - says mildly that his companion is spouting much hot air.

To help advance his view, Rankin has theorised that his companion is possibly a little paranoid. Perhaps, Rankin suggests with a snigger, whenever his red-faced friend walks into a bar, someone switches on a telly just to annoy him: "Or maybe you're just a jinx."

Maybe. But I am that red-faced man and a graduate of the hard-drinking school of journalism. Years of observation and a heavy use of alcohol have convinced me that pubs - to be specific, traditional one-room Scottish bars - are spiralling into decline

A return to my one-man crusade against tellies in pubs, this time in the Sunday Herald. The images shows Ian Rankin pouring a pint and, below, an image of the interior the Oxford Bar, one of around ten on Ian's list of "great traditional Edinburgh pubs which don't have a telly". Keen-eyed readers may observe a television in the back row, second from the left. Read more at: Screen but not heard

You can visit one of Edinburgh's best bars (two tellies notwithstanding) at: Oxford Bar

Great Scottish authors? No they're English

The Times, December 22, 2007

With a few strokes of a bureaucrat’s pen, the entire Scottish literary tradition stretching from the medieval epic poetry of John Barbour to the drug-addled excesses of Irvine Welsh has been dismissed by the US Library of Congress and now appears as a subheading of another topic: English literature.

The decision to reclassify 700 years of Scottish writing as a subset of English has prompted the Scottish Government to raise the matter with the US Congress and sparked outrage among Scottish authors and academics.

The Washington-based institution is accused of “subjugating” a unique literary canon and classing Scots as an ethnic group within England. The poet Liz Lochhead described the American move as “appalling” while the crime writer Ian Rankin said the library’s dictat “made no kind of sense”. Even a spokesman for that most reserved of bodies, the National Library of Scotland, accused the Library of Congress of “a gross inaccuracy” and urged it to reconsider its decision.

Under the new rules – announced in the library’s Cataloging Services Bulletin - the heading “Scottish Literature”, and more than 40 Scottish subjects ranging from “Erotic poetry, Scottish” to “television plays, Scottish” are replaced just three headings: “English Literature – Scottish authors”, “Dialect Literature, Scottish” and the catch-all “Scotland - Literatures”.

The results are almost laughable. Readers searching for The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan and similar works of derring-do by Scottish writers will have to look for the books under the heading “Adventure Stories – English”, rather than “Adventure Stories – Scottish”, because that category has ceased to exist.

Similarly, differences between genres of Scottish poetry are wiped out. “Science Fiction, Scottish” becomes “Science Fiction, English”, while fans of crime writing seeking modern “Tartan Noir” authors will have to search in “Detective and Mystery Stories, English” .

But if the changes can seem absurd, they could have far reaching consequences. Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are routinely used around the world. Even local libraries which employ the familiar Dewey decimal system for organising collections refer to LCSH when accessing material by topic. Publishers and booksellers worldwide are heavily influenced by the classification, raising the prospect that modern Scottish literature and poetry will be subsumed under the heading “English”.

Some of these difficulties have already been raised by the National Library of Scotland, which has urged the Library of Congress to restore distinct subject headings for Scottish literature. A National Library spokesman said that “aside from the obvious objections on the grounds of national identity”, the American decision presented practical problems.

“We are now in the position of having to choose between adopting these changes, thereby adopting what we consider to be a gross inaccuracy to our catalogue records and risking the alienation of many our readers, or else we abandon this international standard and accept a substantial increase to our cataloguing workloads,” said the spokesman.

Linda Fabiani, the Culture Minister, said the decision was ultimately one for authorities in the USA. However, she added: “This government believes that Scottish Literature is quite distinctive from English Literature and should be recognised as such . I shall also be raising this issue directly with Congressmen early in the new year.”

The Library of Congress maintains that “English literature” does not refer to the literature of England, but to all the literature of the countries of the United Kingdom, and the Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Irish authors writing in English conform to “the customary scope of English literature as a discipline […including] works by authors such as Sir Walter Scott, Dylan Thomas and James Joyce.”

The wider Scottish literary community reacted to this position with a mixture of incredulity and rage.

“Any Scottish writer would be appalled by this,” said Lochhead, the award winning poet and playwright. “We write in English – but sometimes not. I can’t imagine how this can happen, without anyone being consulted. There must be a very strong protest. The British Isles is not England alone. This goes absolutely against the political and cultural movements in Scotland.”

The crime writer Ian Rankin – who has sold around 20 million copies of his novels worldwide – said he was mystified by the library's stance.

“There are specific cultural differences between the countries of the United Kingdom but this smoothes them all out, If I was Irish, I would think it very odd to find Irish poetry lumped in with English poetry. And it is very odd to find Hugh MacDiarmid listed as if he was Shakespeare,” said Rankin.

The novelist AL Kennedy – who recently won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year award for her novel Day – said that the decision was depressing and harked back to her literary apprenticeship in the 1980s, when Scottish writers were routinely treated as if they were part of the English tradition.

“There has always been this difficulty that English literature can mean literature in English. I have one collection of English literature in my house which contains only one author who is actually born in England. It is depressing that there are centres of very fine centre in America which specialise in the study of Scottish literature. It is disappointing that this has happened,” she said.

A spokesman for the Library of Congress said it would consider the issue again.

Inspector Rebus comes home

Just months after he shuffled off into retirement, the life and times of Inspector John Rebus are to be celebrated at the Edinburgh institution which laid the foundations of his tormented career. But in a twist worthy of a whodunnit, the drink-sodden detective will not be found at his accustomed haunts, St Leonard’s police station or even the Oxford Bar, but at the National Library of Scotland where this fictional policeman was originally created.

Launching the exhibition Crime Scene Edinburgh, Ian Rankin revealed that Rebus emerged on to the page at the library in the mid 1980s, when as a postgraduate student, the writer was supposed to be completing a doctorate on Muriel Spark.

With research funding behind him, Rankin said that he had been presented with an opportunity too good to miss. “I thought: ‘What would Muriel Spark want? A thesis which isn’t read by anybody? Or would she like me to try and be a writer?’ So I did enough of the thesis so they couldn’t kick me out and managed to write novels as well,” he said.

Among items loaned from Rankin’s personal collection, the exhibition features manuscript pages of his still unfinished thesis and his “most precious possession” a copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, signed by Dame Muriel on the only occasion the two authors met.

Rankin’s first completed work was Summer Rights which he described as a black comedy set in a Highland hotel, “featuring a one-legged, schizophrenic librarian called Janine”. It was turned down by the publishers Gollancz. He followed up with the first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, which was published 20 years ago. The book’s denouement is worked out in the tunnels under the National Library building and in Edinburgh Central Library which is almost directly opposite on the city’s George IV Bridge.

Crime Scene Edinburgh celebrates the author and his creation and draws out literary and other connections which influenced the Rebus series. Some items highlight macabre aspects of Edinburgh’s past, such as a note book made from the skin of the murderer William Burke, on loan from the Royal College of Surgeons. Others detail the musical references in the books.

A display of Tartan Noir crime fiction indicates Scottish authors who have been influenced by Rankin and who have influenced him It includes William McIlvanney’s 1977 novel Laidlaw, the first of three to feature a misanthropic detective with a drink problem.

“McIlvanney was an influence, definitely, in the early days,” said Rankin. “He was a ‘proper’ writer, a literary author who had turned to the crime novel and written Laidlaw. I remember going up to him at the Edinburgh book festival in 1985 and saying, ‘Mr McIlvanney, I’m writing a crime novel that’s a bit like Laidlaw, but set in Edinburgh.’ I gave him a paperback of Laidlaw and he wrote ‘Good luck with the Edinburgh Laidlaw’. I still have that.

“I met him last year at the festival. I got [McIlvanney’s 2006 novel] Weekend signed by him, and he said, ‘The Edinburgh Laidlaw done good.’”

Rankin, 47, is currently working on the script of a comic book and a libretto for Scottish Opera, and intends to “beef up” a serial he wrote for the New York Times and publish it as a novel next autumn. The story, based around an art robbery in Edinburgh features neither Rebus nor his assistant, Siobhan Clarke.

The author said he remained undecided about continuing his Rebus series, which was written in real-time, and apparently concluded this summer with the publication of the 17th novel, Exit Music when his fictional hero reached the retirement age of 60.

“Next summer I will be able to take a breather or sit down and start to think about whether I want to do a book with Siobhan, or do I want to try and bring Rebus back. By then I might have discovered I have nothing new to say about him,” he said. In the meantime, he joked, he had been receiving hate mail from serving police officers for suggesting that the retirement age should be raised to enable his creation to continue in his job.

Rankin scotched a suggestion the National Library display should become permanent. “There is a permanent museum. It’s called the Oxford Bar,” he said.