Ian Rankin: Divestment in the arts? You can never be pure enough for some people

‘You can never be pure enough for some people,” says Ian Rankin. He’s preparing for this year’s Bloody Scotland, a weekend festival dedicated to one of the country’s most successful products: tartan noir. 

As he does so, he’s thinking about the direction of travel in the arts and culture sector – in particular, funding. 

It is a year since the Edinburgh International Book Festival, arguably the country’s preeminent literary event, cut ties with principal sponsor, investment fund Baillie Gifford, after 20 years and in the face of sustained campaigning by climate protesters over the company’s links to fossil fuel firms. The move left the festival with a black hole filled by a £300,000 Scottish Government grant, and by the backing of writers like Rankin and Jenny Colgan. Legal firm Digby Brown and the Hawthornden Foundation have also given support. The theme of the festival, fittingly, was ‘repair’.

Rankin’s contribution came through a company run with wife Miranda and founded on the success of his blockbuster Rebus series, which now spans 25 books and iterations on stage and screen. He’s been a patron for some years already and says the step-up “seemed reasonable”. But that doesn’t mean he thinks the same of the pressures affecting festival funding. “The more grief they get, the less likely they are to subsidise the arts,” he says of what he calls ‘the corporates’, “which would mean a lot of the arts wouldn’t happen.”

Bloody Scotland is perhaps on a firmer footing than other festivals. Founded in 2012 by authors Lin Anderson and Alex Gray, the Stirling-set showcase is amongst the country’s biggest book events, bolstered by a bankable USP. Crime fiction is a lucrative business – the most popular genre for UK readers. This year’s programme, which Rankin has helped to curate, reads like a bestsellers chart: Denise Mina, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Douglas Skelton, and Chris Brookmyre and wife Marisa Haetzman (who write together under the pen name Ambrose Parry). Judy Murray, whose tennis-themed Game, Set and Murder shot up the charts, is on the bill, as are big-hitters Kate Atkinson, Jo Nesbo, Kathy Reichs and Mick Herron, all of whom have had works adapted for the screen. They are slated alongside a host of emerging talent in what festival director Bob McDevitt has described as “one of [its] strongest ever programmes”.

Judy Murray | Alamy

The event has not had to wrestle with the protests that have affected its near neighbour. Concerted pressure from climate change activists turned into headline news in 2023, when more than 50 authors backing the Fossil Free Books campaign urged the festival to cut ties with Baillie Gifford. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg pulled out of the bill over “greenwashing” and the sponsor said only two per cent of its clients’ cash was invested in fossil fuel-linked enterprises, with five going to others developing “clean energy solutions”.

When ties were finally cut last year, Nick Thomas of the investment managers said an “anonymous campaign of coercion and misinformation” had put “intolerable pressure on authors and the festival community”. “We hold the activists squarely responsible for the inhibiting effect their action will have on funding for the arts in this country,” he said, with the firm’s support for festivals in Wigtown and the Borders also ending.

As Edinburgh’s festivals began this year, First Minister John Swinney, whose administration has committed to investing at least £100m more in the arts by 2028-29, said a conversation is needed on arts funding. 

This year’s budget made an additional £34m available, following campaigning by the Equity union and others. Music venues were exempted from non-domestic rates, with funding there for grassroots artists, festivals and organisations. The move was something of a U-turn and came after coffins representing the death of the arts were assembled outside the Scottish Parliament last September in response to proposed cuts. National arts agency Creative Scotland had said it would be closing its £6m Open Fund for Individuals, cutting off a support stream for writers, producers and others, but that funding was reinstated.

Speaking in Edinburgh, Swinney said the country’s creative economy “enhances our reputation globally” and is a “unique selling point every bit as powerful as our landscapes and food and drink”. That soft power is useful to a government which seeks to be a global player under a devolution settlement which restricts its authority on key policy areas like trade and foreign policy. And, highlighting its contribution to education and social dialogue, he said putting public money into the arts is “the right and smart thing to do”.

But he also signaled a need for change in existing models, intimating that the government can’t pick up the entire bill and that there’s a need to do more to keep creativity flowing. “I’m asking that, from crowdfunding to patronage, to philanthropy, to local authority support and much more, we all ask ourselves ‘how can we do more to support the arts from the grassroots up?’” Swinney said in a speech at the Edinburgh International Festival’s Hub. “How can we better support emerging artists that don’t necessarily fit the current mould? And how, in particular, can Scotland’s emerging businesses in new sectors become the new generation of patrons of the arts and culture in Scotland? How do we incentivise a new guard of custodians and investors in Scotland’s creative economy?”

I live in the real world; the real world is full of compromises

When asked about whether there will be a place for corporate patronage in the future of Scotland’s arts and culture scene, Rankin says the drive for ‘pure’ sponsorship is unrealistic.

“What’s needed is a dialogue, a conversation, a debate, not just people threatening festivals, threatening staff who work at festivals to try and shut [them] down. 

“The protesters would say that’s not their aim but the festivals will not continue if they don’t get sufficient funding, and if the state – the local government or national government – isn’t supporting the arts, and corporate entities aren’t supporting the arts, a lot of it’s just going to go.”

“Some of these companies could never divest themselves enough,” he goes on. “Those who’ve got a grievance will find somewhere else to go, something else to have a jab at them with. I live in the real world; the real world is full of compromises. 

“Something every politician understands is that there’s got to be give and take, there’s got to be a compromise or else nothing happens. A book fest, of all things, is a place where these debates can happen on stage in front of an audience and be streamed to the world. Shutting down a book festival is not a way to further the debate and to get any sort of progress for a cause.”

The issue has played out at a time when the culture sector has been under profound financial pressure. Covid shuttered venues and grounded tours, and then the cost-of-living crisis pushed up operating costs. Under those same increased pressures, households sought cuts of their own and traditional revenue streams dwindled. “The culture sector generally has struggled, post-Covid, to get an audience back, whether it’s an audience in a theatre, in a cinema or in a bookshop event,” says Rankin, “but things have been improving. I mean, it’s always there – there’s always financial struggles, whether you’re a writer lower down the tree than me or whether you’re a rep theatre or you’re trying to make television, money’s tight everywhere. We know that but, you know, creators always find a way. People who want to produce something, who want to make art, will very often find a way of doing it, despite all the constraints and the problems.”

Rankin speaking at Stockbridge Church, Edinburgh | Alamy

And so, in programming Bloody Scotland, he’s conscious that “you’ve got to entertain”. 

The team must be doing something right. Last year’s audience share surpassed the pre-Covid figure by 3,000, with digital offerings allowing fans to watch along in 25 countries and on-the-ground book sales up 41 per cent. What’s the secret? There’s little mystery in that, Rankin suggets – it’s the allure of genre and the opportunity for connection. “Crime fiction, throughout its history, has dealt with the fears of its contemporary audience. And so it keeps reinventing itself.” 

That reinvention has seen the emergence of particular trends. “At the moment, a lot of the bestsellers are high concept thrillers that deal with kind of paranoia,” explains Rankin. “It’s like the modern world is your enemy: your computer is spying on you, your neighbours aren’t who you thought they were, someone is stealing your identity, you’re being hounded online, some photos have been taken of you surreptitiously and put online. That’s kind of where we are at the moment because everybody’s, I think, slightly scared by modern technology. We’ve all become, not slightly paranoid, but people don’t know what to trust. Where is the truth? Where are the facts? 

“We’re now in an age where we just can’t believe what we see with our own eyes because fakes have become too good. So all of that is being taken on by contemporary crime writing. At the same time, post-Covid, we’ve seen a resurgence of what is sometimes called the cozy crime novel. And it’s a kind of novel with no gruesome murders in it, necessarily, but just nice people solving crimes, nice, ordinary people rather than hard-bitten detectives.” 

Richard Osman, author of The Thursday Murder Club, is “the king” of that type of writing, in Rankin’s opinion. “I think the audience wants, to some extent, a comfort blanket. They want crime fiction to explain the world to them and also to offer some solutions, because when they look around them at the real world, they don’t always see solutions, they only see problems,” he says.

“Reading is a solitary activity,” he goes on, “it’s not something you tend to do in groups. I mean, you get reading groups, but they’ve already read the book and then they get together to talk about it. Well, a festival is an extension of that. It’s just saying to the readers, ‘look, here are lots of people just like you’, and it’s a chance to make friends as well as get to meet writers and find new books. You know, you’re walking past somebody and they’ve got a book in their hand and it’s something you really like and you say ‘oh my god, I love that book’. At a festival, nobody’s going to freak out because you’ve stopped and spoken to them about the book they’re reading. Quite the opposite, they’re going to be enchanted that they’ve met another reader. I love that. I just love all these people just sitting around, browsing books, reading books, talking about books. It’s terrific. And you’ll be introduced to stories, introduced to writers and themes that you’ve not come across before, and so it’ll actually stretch you. It’ll stretch your imagination and stretch your brain.”

That's been a lot of fun for me

Rankin admits this year’s curatorial role is leaving him “terribly stretched”. “I’ve got to read all these bloody books,” he says jokingly. He’s been writing in margins and underlining passages – behaviour he describes as “terrible”. “It will be a pleasure, not a chore,” he says, “but I didn’t realise when I took on the curator’s mantle that it would lead to me chairing just so many events. It means I need to be stone cold sober all weekend.”

One that he might not have to gen up so much for is that dedicated to his most famous creation, hardbitten Edinburgh cop John Rebus. Fans will see the writer in conversation with two actors who have brought him to life off the page – audiobook narrator James Macpherson, formerly of Taggart, and Gray O’Brien, who played the DI on stage in the play Rebus: A Game Called Malice. 

It is this work, above all else, that has so endeared Rankin to the reading public and made him a giant of his genre. “He feels very human to me,” the author says of his star. “One thing that stops him being a caricature, I guess, is he ages more or less in real time. He’s not like one of these golden age detectives who just does case after case and is unchanged by the cases he works on, he’s been changed by every investigation he’s taken part in, and for a long time now he’s been retired. That keeps me on my toes – how can you take someone who’s no longer a detective and keep them realistically involved in a criminal investigation? That’s been a lot of fun for me, seeing just how much Rebus can and cannot do now that he’s no longer part of Police Scotland.” 

Bloody Scotland runs from 12-14 September