Curiously, it was only in leaving Scotland that I began really to become interested in my native country’s history and politics. I started to devour books on these subjects, and would return to Edinburgh three or four times a year, usually begging a bed or sofa at a friend’s place. I would take long walks around the city, using up rolls of film in my cheap camera, and spending hours in the various libraries. Now that I was a full-time writer, I felt a fresh obligation to get the details right. For Strip Jack, I wrote to the University of Edinburgh’s Pathology Department, and was granted a meeting with Professor Anthony Busuttil. He became responsible for much of the forensic detail in the book (and in others in the series). When Dr Curt speaks of ‘diatoms’ and ‘washerwoman’s skin’, it is really Professor Busuttil talking. That first meeting was memorable in that the Professor momentarily mistook me for a police officer and began discussing the case of a slashed throat. As he started to bring out the autopsy photos, my greying face told him he’d made a mistake . . .

Living and working so far from Edinburgh, I fell back on personal history and reminiscence for much of Rebus’s inner life. When he recalls picnics and holiday destinations, they are my experiences rather than his. The MP Gregor Jack, however, comes from nowhere other than my imagination. I based him on no one I knew. His circle of friends, though, is another matter. I had made close friends in high school, and not many since. The story of how ‘Suey’ got his nickname comes from a real-life event which occurred during a school trip to Germany when I was sixteen. And the ‘dyslexic bigotry’ of ‘Remember 1960’ appeared on a friend’s tenement stairwell in Easter Road.

Rebus also takes on some of my own characteristics. On one trip to Edinburgh, I’d consulted a doctor about the panic attacks I’d been suffering. Rather than medication, he’d prescribed self-hypnosis and relaxation techniques. In giving my problems to Rebus, I was using my writing as a form of therapy. Just as I had taken him to London in Tooth & Nail, so that he could dislike the place on my behalf, so I dumped my health problems on him too. However, I also did him the favour of placing him in a relationship with Dr Patience Aitken, who had a flat in Oxford Terrace next door to one of my high-school friends. (He would pop up in the book, actually, in the scene in the Horsehair Bar.) Patience would provide Rebus with some much-needed emotional stability . . . at least for a few books.

Reading the novel now, it seems to me that Strip Jack is partly a story of friendship, of ties formed at school and never loosed. But it’s also another of my explorations of the theme of Scotland’s Jekyll and Hyde character: people hide their true selves behind a veneer of respectability. By the end, the villain of the piece has been reduced to something ape-like, bringing to mind descriptions of Mr Hyde in Stevenson’s story.