Best-selling crime author adapts Rebus for the stage

A best-selling crime author has written a new stage play featuring one of his most popular detective characters.

Sir Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus novels, has written A Game Called Malice, which is being performed at The Theatre Royal Bath.

It follows a six-part BBC adaptation shown earlier this year which reimagines the gritty detective as a younger officer.

Sir Ian said Rebus' world in Edinburgh was just like Bath, where it looked "gorgeous", but "something's happening below the surface".

Richard Rankin played Rebus in a BBC series earlier this year

"Edinburgh is the main character of my books, it always has been, but walking around Bath, they're very similar," he said.

"They look gorgeous, they're full of tourists, they're cultured and civilised but... if you scratch the surface you find the same seven deadly sins."

Coronation Street actor Gray O’Brien plays Inspector John Rebus in the stage play, which is running in Bath until Saturday.

"When an actor takes it on, whether it's on television or on the stage, I'm actually getting to see Rebus in the flesh, I'm getting to hear how he stresses certain words, who he says a certain line, how he performs," Sir Ian told BBC Radio Bristol.

"Rebus to me is just inside my head and ink on paper.

"It's intriguing to me, I'm learning more about the character all the time."

'A complex character'

The 64-year-old Scottish author said the play depicts a Rebus who is recently retired and is "at a posh dinner party in a posh part of Edinburgh not knowing that the hostess has devised a murder mystery".

"He's well out of his comfort zone. He's quite a complex character.

"I keep writing about him to get to the core of what makes him tick and the process is ongoing," he added.