Thanks are due to the following for their inestimable help; Alex Eadie, who was until his retirement the MP for Midlothian; John Home Robertson MP; Professor Busuttil, Regius Professor of Forensic Medicine, University of Edinburgh; Lothian and Borders Police; City of Edinburgh Police; the staff of the Edinburgh Room, Edinburgh Central Library; the staff of the National Library of Scotland; staff and customers of Sandy Bell’s, the Oxford Bar, Mather’s (West End), Clark’s Bar and the Green Tree.

Strip Jack was the first of the Rebus novels to be written entirely in the rundown French farmhouse which I’d moved to with my wife in 1990. Our first couple of years there, we put most of our effort into doing the place up: rewiring, putting up ceilings, and trying to cultivate the acre of brambled wilderness around us. The attic became my office. It was accessed by a rickety wooden ladder and a trapdoor. The floor was so badly warped that any pens placed on the desk would roll off with frightening speed. The decor consisted of bus maps of central Edinburgh, postcards of the city’s monuments, and a list of police regions in Scotland.

Yet little of our French idyll seeped into the book. Quite the opposite: it’s one of my most Scottish works, perhaps in reaction to the previous novel’s London setting. Words such as ‘brae’, ‘keech’, ‘birl’, and ‘haar’ creep in. Whisky is referred to as ‘the cratur’, while ‘ba-heid’ is used as a term of insult. Many of the words, such as ‘shoogly’ and ‘peching’, were favourites of my father: it’s possible I was thinking of him as I wrote. This was my first book since his funeral in 1990. Certainly, he was the only person I’d ever heard say, ‘If shit was gold, ye’d have a tyke at yer erse,’ words I would now give to Rebus’s own father.

To reinforce the book’s Scottishness, I suggested its original jacket design – a lion rampant flying cheekily from the Houses of Parliament. But as well as being very Scottish in its language, Strip Jack also seems to me a less savage and biting book than my three previous efforts in the series. This could be due to a change in family circumstances. My wife Miranda became pregnant in 1991, and our son Jack was born in February 1992. This is why Strip Jack is dedicated to ‘the only Jack I’ve ever stripped’ – something which now makes my teenage son cringe, of course.

The title came from a compendium of card games. I’d been looking for something which would reflect the playfulness of Knots & Crosses and Hide & Seek, and had compiled lists of children’s and adults’ games and pastimes. The card game ‘Strip Jack Naked’ appealed to me: I could give my chief suspect in the book the surname Jack. It seemed, after all, that someone was out to strip him of his standing, his good name – maybe even his life. The three-word title seemed clumsy, however, so I shortened it to two.