Writing Knots and Crosses
In the Exile on Princes Street foreword to Rebus: The Early Years, Rankin says he wrote this book shortly after giving his father a James Kelman book (the type of book he was studying at the time) and being shocked when his father said it wasn't "written in English" and had no story; Rankin says this made him rethink what type of writer he wanted to be. He wrote Knots with the idea of updating Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into then-modern Edinburgh, with Rebus as the Jeckyll figure (the book implies for a while that Rebus himself is unwittingly the killer) and he put Rebus in the same road, Arden Street, that he himself was living in. He states he was shocked to find out later that everyone thought he'd written a crime book, as he was unfamiliar with the genre.
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“I cannot express the pleasure I have in writing down my thoughts [in her journal], at the very moment—my opinion of people when I first see them, and how I alter, or how confirm myself in it—and I am much deceived in my foresight, if I shall not have very great delight in reading this living proof of my manner of passing my time, my sentiments, my thoughts of people I know, and a thousand other things in future.”
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