Dressed in a washed-out polo shirt and jeans that could have come from a pound shop, he looks more like a bloke standing at the back of a gig than the millionaire creator of hard-drinking, harder-smoking Edinburgh detective John Rebus. When it comes to his books, he will not be following the latest trend either. Unlike rivals, including Reginald Hill, he will not bump off his star in his next and final outing. Rankin will start writing the final book in the Rebus series in two weeks’ time, once he’s finished promoting The Naming of the Dead, which came out last week.

“Rebus isn’t going to die,” he says leaning towards me, adding conspiratorially: “I say it will be the final Rebus book, but I have promised my publisher that I will do at least one book with Siobhan [Clarke, Rebus's English sergeant], with him in the background.”
Fans will be relieved Though not everything will go their way. Rebus and Clarke will not end years of sexual tension, broken only by a cringe-making attempted kiss at the end of A Question of Blood. “They will never jump into bed together,” the 46-year-old writer says emphatically.The reason, I suspect, that Rankin can’t kill off Rebus is that the character is too deeply embedded in his own psyche The lives of the two elide. They share the same musical obsessions – during the interview the soft tones of the Scottish band Saint Jude’s Infirmary, for whom Rankin has written lyrics, play in the background.

And then there’s those clothes: Rankin likes bloke anti-chic rather than the all-black numbers worn by the actor Ken Stott in the new Rebus series. Indeed Rankin’s only criticism of the programmes is, “Rebus just wouldn’t wear that.”The line between reality and fiction thins even more in his latest book, his best in years, which covers the week of the G8 summit last year, kicking off with the march in Edinburgh and Live8 and finishing with a world in shock after the 7/7 bombings. Even George Bush appears – Rebus, it transpires, was responsible for his tumble from a bike in Gleneagles.The Naming of the Dead is the third overtly political book in the series The last two tackled immigration, asylum seekers and racism. By focusing on the G8 protests and the Make Poverty History campaign, the book tackles the question of whether the individual can effect change The conclusion is not optimistic. As protesters take to the streets of Edinburgh and surround Gleneagles, it becomes apparent to Rebus that the decisions they wish to influence have already been made. Worse, he discovers that instead of tackling poverty, aid is tied to arms and, yet again, big business triumphs over the needs of the poor.Rankin says he used the characters in the book to explore issues raised by the G8 summit so that he could come to his own conclusions. “The concert in Hyde Park, Geldof and Bono on the telly – did any of it make any difference whatsoever?” he asks.

Geldof had wanted a million protesters to head north after Live8. “People went to the gig and went home,” Rankin observes sourly Not that he regrets the apathy of London music fans He thought the whole idea was preposterous. “A million people in Edinburgh would have been a complete nightmare. Not content to leave it at that, Davies’s next project was The Second Coming (2003), a drama starring Christopher Ecclestone as a video shop worker who realises that he is the Son of God (Davies, an atheist, hoped it would provoke people into thinking about religion.) Mine All Mine, a 2004 black comedy set in Swansea, starring Griff Rhys Jones as a man who announces that he owns the city, was critically well received but didn’t win huge audiences.