Ian Rankin's Reading List

"Maybe Muriel Spark's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." If I describe it as an absolute Tardis of a book, "Dr. Who" fans may understand. It is bigger on the inside than the outside."

"I'll be rereading "Bleak House" one week and Carl Hiaasen or Elif Shafak the next."

""Rivals" became a particular favorite. It's all about the battle for a TV station franchise."

"Having devoured Kate Atkinson's "Transcription," I then pressed it on to my wife Miranda — not that she needed much encouraging!"

"Though I was reluctant I became a fan, devouring all 12 volumes. We follow the central character, Nicholas Jenkins, from school days through World War II to eventual old age as a respected novelist."

"This book has been haunting me since student days. It has been an influence on Scottish literature and certainly on my own Inspector Rebus stories. Set in pre-Enlightenment Scotland it concerns a young religious zealot called Robert Wringhim. Convinced by his preacher guardian that he is a member of ‘the elect,’ Wringhim then meets a charismatic stranger by the name of Gil-Martin who convinces him that they should dispatch anyone who has strayed from the path of righteousness. But who is Gil-..."

"Dickens spins a yarn crammed with mysteries, unexplained deaths, blackmail plots, and courtroom drama. There’s also plenty of satire and a serious exploration of the ties that bind us all together. The main mystery concerns the parentage of Esther Summerson. A lawyer called Tulkinghorn may hold the answers, but there’s also a landlord with the all-too-apt name of Krook, a mysterious tenant called Nemo, and the enigmatic Lady Dedlock. Spinning a web to trap all of them is the extraordinary fig..."

"When I wrote my first Inspector Rebus novel, I was supposed to be studying towards a PhD in the novels of Muriel Spark. This incredibly slim, satisfying, and surreal slice of modern gothic is my favorite of hers. Lise is a woman from northern Europe, who decides on a holiday in the south. We first meet her as the assistant in a boutique tries (without success) to sell her a non-stain dress. Lise, it transpires, is a ‘victim’ looking for someone to end her life. She wants the fleeting fame tha..."

"Eco’s brilliant deconstruction of the traditional crime novel wasn’t actually published in English until 1983 (in a superb translation by William Weaver), but literature students knew it was coming. Some of us wondered if the literary theorist’s first novel might turn out to be a bit dry, a bit too serious. We shouldn’t have worried. The Name of the Rose is a playful homage to Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, and many others. It also manages to be an engrossing mystery in its ow..."