Inheritance Tracks: Ian Rankin

“Inheritance Tracks” is a BBC Radio 4 feature (Saturday Live) in which guests choose a piece of music inherited from their parents and one to pass on to their children. The episode with Sir Ian Rankin aired on 12 October 2024, lasts seven minutes and is available to stream and as a podcast. It was produced by Ben Mitchell and Noa Dowling.

The programme text introduces the guest as the “king of Tartan Noir”: the best-selling crime writer grew up surrounded by food (his father ran a grocery in Fife, his mother worked in a school canteen), reviewed wine as a young writer, and changed his style, and his life, with the hard-drinking, stubborn Edinburgh detective Inspector John Rebus. Since Knots and Crosses in 1987 there have been 25 Rebus novels, as well as TV dramas and stage plays, mainly dealing with Scotland’s dark and dangerous underworld.

The chosen pieces: as inherited track “Seven Drunken Nights” by The Dubliners, and as the song to pass on “Another Man’s Rain” by Jackie Leven. It is known from other remarks by Rankin that a misheard line from this song gave his novel Standing in Another Man’s Grave its title. What he says about Leven in the programme itself cannot be gathered from the programme page.