How do you see Rebus as a character?

He was meant to be a one-off. I never meant to get involved in writing a series so I learned about him very slowly and he was not a fixed character. I didn't know him when I started writing the book. In the first novel he really is just a way of telling a story and round about the time of Black and Blue, which was six or seven novels in, I really felt, 'I know this guy now. I know the inside of his head,' so it was a fairly long apprenticeship when I was learning what I could or couldn't do with him as a character, and I've just been very lucky so far that every theme I wanted to explore, I've found I can do it as a Rebus novel. Sometimes it was tough. I lived in France for six years and there was a war crime from World War II that happened locally that I wanted to write about, and I thought how the hell can I write about that from the point of view of a jaded Edinburgh cop in the 1990s, but I found a way through it. I had a suspect war criminal living in Edinburgh in The Hanging Garden and I got back to Edinburgh and found there was a suspect war criminal living quietly in Edinburgh so the book got a bit closer to the real thing than I was expecting.

You were once a punk musician. Rebus has definite tastes in music. Were they also yours?

Yes. If you put him and his colleague Siobhan Clark together you'll get my musical taste. I do tend to like a lot of 60s stuff, but I do like a lot of the new stuff as wel, so she listens to the young bands and he listens to the old dinosaurs and one reason for doing that is that I get to write off all my CD purchases as taxable expenses. As far as the taxman is concerned I'm not buying them for fun but because I need this stuff for research and the titles of these books, not the new one, are named after songs or albums. I love getting the right title and my editor is on at me just now to get the title of the next one. I can't start writing until I have the title even though it might change later. A Question of Blood was not my first choice. I was going to call it Dark Entries but my publisher felt it was just too dark and might put people off.

What are your favourite bands?

I went and saw the Stones last week at the Astoria. It was a great gig. The Edinburgh Festival is not long finished and I did see a lot of good live music there. There was a Manchester band called the Duritti Column and a guy called Jackie Leven who was Scotland's answer to Van Morrison. He's a very soulful singer-writer guitarist who writes very well, I think, about disillusioned hardmen so Rebus is also a fan of his.

There is a strong sense of place in your novels. Edinburgh seems to be in a character in its own right but your books obviously have a wide appeal outside Scotland?

For Rankin and Rebus Edinburgh is "a real Jekyll and Hyde city."

Obviously or the novel wouldn't be Number One in the UK this week. I'm translated into 25 languages and it does not surprise me that people in Bradford would read them but that people in China, Taiwan or Bulgaria would. I think people have got a very narrow idea of what Edinburgh is. I went there as an 18-year-old to go to university and I thought all the tourists and visitors are not really seeing the city. They are seeing the surface that we put in front of them so I was determined to write books that would be about the other side of Edinburgh. It's a real Jekyll and Hyde city and most cities are. I think that's what resonates on people when you get a strong story and an interesting character but it's about the world that we live in. There's more to life than just the surface that we pass by every day.

Did you think that John Hannah was the right actor to play Rebus on TV?

John Hannah was too young and good-looking probably to play Rebus. He hasn't been bashed around by life quite enough. It was John's own production company who bought the books and I knew he was going to play Rebus and he came up to Edinburgh to discuss the character and everything, and I remember that in the first book Rebus was 40 and John Hannah was 38 at the time. It's just that now readers think of Rebus as being in his mid-50s. The TV series was fairly well received and it was shot entirely on location in Edinburgh, even the mortuary scene was in the real mortuary. I didn't know how they got permission for this and I love it that they really do utilise the city. They are making some more, not with John Hannah, but I'll be the last person to find out.

Who would you like to play the part?

I think Ken Stott, the actor from the Vice. He's Edinburgh-born. There's Brian Cox who played Hannibal Lecter in the first film, Manhunt. These are actors who've got quite a chiselled look as though they've been bashed around by life and its secrets.