RankinWatch (TM) revived

Over the course of this blog's history, I've linked to many an article about the UK's bestselling crime writer. How can I not when weird and bizarre things keep happening to him? Like being invited to a real crime scene around the corner of his house. Or being mistakenly recruited for police work.  Naturally, all those strange events are faithfully documented by his home papers, and this recent incident is no exception:

IT WAS the kind of scene which best-selling Scots crime writer Ian Rankin might have written for his famous gritty detective.
 
But it was Rankin, not his fictional Edinburgh policeman Inspector Rebus, who found himself confronting a gang of intruders after they sneaked into the garden of the author’s city home at night-time.
 
Rankin only discovered the six-strong gang after he glanced out of an upstairs window at his house and noticed suspicious shadows below.
 
Fearing for the safety of his two young sons, one of whom is in a wheelchair and both of whom were in the house at the time, Rankin began to give chase.
 
But while Rebus would undoubtedly have apprehended the gang, Rankin found himself simply watching the troublemakers as they argued with a neighbour further down the street before they fled once more into the darkness.

Unfortunately, Rankin believes he wouldn't have fared nearly as well as his fictional creation had the youths actually entered the premises:

"Would I, in fact, have done anything other than, in a manner of speaking, ‘play dead’? Rebus would be ashamed of me."
 
Confessing to feeling "queasy" after the incident, he explained: "In my life, when confronted by violence I’ve tended to play dead. The one fight I got into at high school, the moment my adversary landed a Doc Marten toe-cap on my chin, I fell to the ground, eyes closed, pretending he’d knocked me out.
 
"Later, as a student in Edinburgh, when two friends and I were attacked from behind on a darkened street, I feigned being hurt in the first wave, so I would be excused the full brawl which followed (one of my friends was a nightclub bouncer: best leave these things to the professionals). On both occasions, that same queasy feeling followed.
 
"I’ve always played the spectator: it’s what novelists do. In Muriel Spark’s phrase, we ‘loiter with intent’, the intent being to use the experience later in our work."

I can't say that attitude is anything to be ashamed of; someone breaks into your house when you least expect it, your first instinct may not be to beat the crap out of them or fight. The unpredictability of human nature means that one really doesn't know how he or she would react in a seeming life-or-death situation. And if you're a crime writer facing a real-life crime, the results can be markedly different from how you actually write about them in books.

Comments

[John Rickards]

At uni I had a friend, Sam, whose girlfriend woke him up one night, saying she'd heard a noise in the house they shared with his invalid mother and another student friend who rented their spare room. Suspecting intruders, he left the bedroom with a chairleg, IIRC, to defend himself. In the front room he found two guys just about to finish unloading a bunch of his and the lodger's stuff out the front door, just struggling with the last of his electrical goods like his TV and video.

Sam was caught kinda by surprise, but raised the chairleg and shouted something at them. And was promptly smashed in the face with his own VCR and given a badly broken cheekbone.

The two thieves vanished into the night. The cheekbone was a nuisance, but he wasn't too put out, 'cos the insurance claim meant he got a load of new stuff to replace his old worn-out stuff, and the criminal injuries compensation he received meant he could buy a new computer. He did, however, fit a pretty solid security system after that though.

Another friend, Pete, down here in Eastbourne, is heavily into his medieval re-enactment - does all the big shows in the UK. He has a wide variety of swords, axes and other weapons, and a working trebuchet in his garage. He's a biggish guy, with long hair and the occasional tattoo. He also sleeps, apparently, topless.

One night, his wife wakes him up because she can hear a noise in the back garden. He looks out the window and sees a shadowy figure trying, and failing, to climb over his back fence to gain entry to his property. A few moments later, there's a muffled knock on his front door. He suspects that this is a group of would-be burglars who are resorting to tricking him into opening the door, since they haven't managed to get over his fence, and then overpowering him and ransacking the place (he lives in a bit of a rough area).

So he grabs an axe and a sword, charges down the stairs and wrenches the door open with weapons raised and screaming his head off like some wild-eyed Viking berserker with mad hair.

To find that he is confronting a group of three utterly, utterly petrified 11 year-olds who live down the road. One of them stops cowering long enough to whisper, "Please can we have our ball back. It's gone in your back garden and we can't get in there." They'd been having a late-night game of football.

"Oh right," says Pete, lowering his weapons, now feeling rather sorry for the poor terrified scamps. "Sorry about that. Come on through and we'll get it."

[Ray]

"IT WAS the kind of scene which best-selling Scots crime writer Ian Rankin might have written for his famous gritty detective."

You would've thought they'd come up with something a little better than that. But nooooo, every single time.

As for burglar stories, I did know a newsagent/general store owner who got so sick of being burgled (he lived above the shop) that he kept a hatchet and a length of chain by his bed. One incident ended up with a robber in hospital thanks to a mysterious axe-shaped wound in his shoulder and the shattered remains of a half-dozen Irn Bru bottle in his head. They both kept their mouths shut (because, let's face it, it wouldn't be the first time a shopowner had been charged with assault). But then, that's Newbiggin for you.

[Rebecca]

Funny. Just today I got asked (by a very sympathetic interviewer) if I had ever "witnessed or participated in a crime?" Presumably like the ones in my books. I felt a little bad saying that no, I hadn't actually ever been involved in an execution-style murder with political overtones. I watched someone catch a pickpocket in the subway once. (Twice actually, once in New York and once in Madrid.) Oh, and I had a friend in high school who was mugged on the L train (the equivalent of Donna's 62 bus) when carrying samples to a doctor's appointment, and charged down the platform yelling indignantly "Give me back my urine!" People got out of her way quickly. Does that count?