#Rankin. Watchman. I. Rankin Introduction.

 

From the age of twelve until I was nearly thirty, I kept a page-a-day diary, and reading through the years 1986-88 has allowed me to place Watchman in its historical context. I got the idea for the book just before my wedding day, and took a bunch (a number of things of the same type fastened together or in a close group) of research stuff on honeymoon. The entry for June 14th 1986 records: 'I'm itching to start a new novel, either Rebus 2 or The Watcher.' By July 14th (nine days after the wedding ceremony) I'd decided to concentrate on what was still called Watcher, and I was able to state in my diary that 'the plot's beginning to gel (a thick, clear, liquid substance, especially a product used to style hair гель)'. I then started writing the first draft a week later, and finished it on Sunday 2nd November.

(Well, it's a pretty short book…')

   Watchman is a spy novel. My previous novel, Knots and Crosses, had involved a fairly cynical, worldly-wise cop, who'd been in the job the best part of fifteen years. Miles Flint, my hero this time round, happens to be a fairly cynical, worldly-wise spy, who's spent twenty years or so in that world (I wish I could explain that attracts me to my jaded (tired or bored with something, especially because you have done it too much) elders ( the oldest of two people).

The difference between the two men is that while Rebus is a man of action, preferring confrontation to rumination (the act of thinking carefully and for a long period about something), Miles starts out just the opposite: he's a professional voyeur

(a person who gets sexual pleasure from secretly watching other people in sexual situations, or (more generally) a person who watches other people's private lives), and my job would be to change his role gradually from one of professional passivity to real ruthless activity.

   I think I was influenced largely by the anti-heroes of Le Carre (John, real name David John Cornwell. born 1931, English novelist, esp of spy thrillers such as The Spy) and Graham Greene, and especially the Greene of The Human Factor. Greene's best characters tend to be men who

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are forced to become involved in the world, to take a stand (to express your opinion about something publicly) - something they'd much rather not do. The books I took on honeymoon including non-fiction works on British espionage (by Chapman Pincher and others, Henry Chapman Pincher (29 March 1914 – 5 August 2014) was an

English journalist, historian, and novelist whose writing mainly focused on espionage and related matters, after some early books on scientific subjects.) and a few on entomology (the scientific study of insects). My partner had paid for me to adopt a dung beetle (Dung beetles are beetles that feed partly or exclusively on feces. All the species belong to the superfamily

 Scarabaeoidea) at London Zoo (it was the cheapest option), and I'd decided that Miles should be an expert on beetles, finding human equivalents for each kind among his colleagues.

   Back to the diary… During that first attempt, I had no job. We newly-weds  (someone who has recently married) were living in London, and my partner was supporting me while I tried, fresh out of the swaddling (to wrap a baby tightly in cloth) that was university, to become a writer. So it was that by January 13th 1987 I'd finished the second draft (A draft plan, document, etc. is in its first form, including the main points but not all the details). Four days later I stated work as 'assistant' at the National Folktale Centre in Tottenham (we needed the money). This gave me a lot of free time and access to a word processor, allowing me to write the third draft. By April 1987, I was ensconced (to make yourself very comfortable or safe in a place or position) at Hawthornden Castle Writers' Retreat, where fellow scribes included the poets George MacBeth and Ruth Fainlight and novelist Alasdair Gray. There, between hangovers, I put the finishing touches to the books final version. (Another diary entry: ' Since I found out that Jeffrey Archer writes six drafts of everything, I've begun to look more seriously at perfecting my own stories.')

   Watchman was announced in the catalogue for Bodley Head (who'd published Knots and Crosses) in November of that year, and finally appeared on June 9th 1988. My diary for that day reads: 'Watchman published; world unmoved.' A few reviews appeared, some of them positive, and people approached me with a view to doing a spec (a clear, detailed plan or description of how something will be made) film script, or maybe to write some episodes of The Bill (a British television drama). It was clear that writing a book a year was not going to keep the wolf from the door, so by this time I'd found a full-time job on a magazine

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called HI-FI Review. Watchman was failing to find a publisher

In the USA, while my new editor at Bodley Head was hinting fairly heavily that I'd soon be needing to seek a new UK publisher too.

   I'd finished another novel, Westwind, but no one was buying that either. Things seemed desperate indeed. I had a full-time job that entailed three hours of commuting (the activity of travelling regularly between work and home) a day; I was reviewing one or two books a week for Scotland on Sunday newspaper; and somewhere in the margins, I was trying to write. My partner meantime was attempting to move us to France, but she wouldn't manage that for another eighteen months or so, and before then, I'd started work on the long-deferred Rebus 2…

   I changed Watcher to Watchman after discovering Alan Moor's graphic novel (a book containing a long story told mostly in pictures but with some writing) Watchmen. I'm guessing that Miles Flint took his surname from the character in the spoof (a funny television programme, film, article, etc that copies the style of a real programme, film, article, etc) 1960s spy films, In Like Flint and Our Man Flint. Re-reading the book recently, I was struck by how fast it moves, cutting quickly from one scene to another, its elliptical, breathless style marking it as a young man's work, a story by someone in thrall  (If you are in thrall to someone or something, or in the thrall of someone or something, he, she, or it has a lot of power to control you) to the possibilities of narrative. Strange, too, that it should be such a period piece: almost no one owns a mobile phone, and Miles doesn't even own a computer. I was pleased to see so many in-jokes (a private joke that can only be understood by a limited group of people who have a special knowledge of something that is referred to in the joke) along that way. There's an oblique reference to the events of Knots and Crosses, and Jim Stevens, the journalist from the book, reappears. There's a pub called The Tilting Room (actually a collection of stories by my friend Ron Butlin), and a gay club called The Last Peacock (title of an Allan Massie,

Allan Johnstone Massie CBE (born 1938) is a Scottish journalist, columnist, sports writer and novelist, novel). There's also a character called the Organ Grinder, whom we'd see again in a later Rebus novel, The Black Book.

   And Mile's son is called jack. I'd forgotten that, though my own son, born four years after the publishing of Watchman,

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has the same name. As to the book dedicatee… well, he went on to win a lot of money on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Funny old world,  innit (used to change a statement into a question)?

                                                                    Ian Rankin

                                                         Edinburgh, 2003

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