Rebus has been portrayed by John Hannah, Ken Stott and Richard Rankin for television, with Ron Donachie playing the character for the BBC Radio dramatisations.
In a series of books and short stories by Ian Rankin, beginning with Knots and Crosses published in 1987 and ending with Exit Music in 2007, John Rebus is a detective in the Lothian and Borders Police force, stationed in Edinburgh.
Knots and Crosses was originally written as a stand-alone, non-genre novel and presents the fullest portrait of Rebus as a literary character.
In Dead Souls, he recalls his school-leaving party in Cardenden, Fife (Rankin's own home town) and his ill-fated plans to get a job and settle down with his childhood sweetheart.
As Rankin developed Knots and Crosses into a series of crime stories, he allowed Rebus’s life to continue as if he were living in real time.
In Dead Souls, his reflexive bullying of paedophiles in earlier books[Note 4] is gradually replaced by the realization that some of them, at least, have suffered abuse themselves.
[6]Melanie McGrath, in a review of Even Dogs in the Wild, takes a slightly different view, … an intensely romanticised, self-dramatising lone wolf, a kind of urban cowboy driven to detection as a means of resolving his existential crisis.
In Black and Blue, with the help of his old friend Jack Morton he stops drinking and is able to continue abstaining through the next book, The Hanging Garden.
[Note 5] He has an extensive collection of vinyl, augmented when his brother Michael dies and leaves him records from their youth (The Naming of the Dead).
In Black and Blue, The Hanging Garden, and Dead Souls, Rebus’s stream of consciousness is sometimes presented as a series of song and album names, which both identify and dismiss his emotional reactions to a situation.
In A Song for the Dark Times, she tells their friend Fox, ”John says he wants it put on his gravestone: ‘He listened to the B-sides.’” Books are important to him, but his interest tends to be aspirational; he struggles with the sense that he might (or might not) have done better if he had had better educational opportunities.
Rankin considers him to be "small-c conservative" and therefore unlikely to support political change; at one point in Strip Jack (1992), he tells his friends Brian and Nell that he has only voted three times in his life, "Once Labour, once SNP, and once Tory."
On the other hand, when Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon suggested in a public venue that Rebus would have voted pro-Brexit, Rankin was taken aback.
He has occasional one-night stands (Knots and Crosses, Black and Blue, and Set in Darkness), but his more durable relationships are with women who have a superior education to him, including his wife Rhona, DI Gill Templar, Dr. Patience Aitken, the museum curator Jean Burchill, and Professor Deborah Quant.
Starting with Set in Darkness, Clarke ceases to be a mere helper or sidekick and any erotic element needs to be suppressed in order to maintain this new relationship, which is important to both of them.
In Set in Darkness, Rebus defends her from a stalker and in the 2002-2004 sequence, Resurrection Men, A Question of Blood, and Fleshmarket Close, he is explicitly compared to a knight.
His main ally and sounding-board is Siobhan Clarke, introduced in 1993’s The Black Book and given a larger role starting in 2000’s Set in Darkness.
[10] Malcolm Fox, the protagonist of two of Rankin’s novels and, in the later ones, a colleague of Clarke and Rebus, is yet another style of policeman, intensely self-controlled and aware of the law.
The Jekyll and Hyde theme is explicit in the first three novels, but reappears throughout the series, often expressed by Rebus to himself as the relationship between Edinburgh’s “overworld and underworld.” As John Lanchester noted in 2000, The aspect of the Jekyll and Hyde story which particularly interested Rankin was its portrayal of Edinburgh as a city of appearances and division, a place of almost structural hypocrisy.
The character owes as much to the likes of Scottish football players Jock Stein and Bill Shankly as it does to a more obvious relation, the TV detective Jim Taggart.
Rankin smiled a bit, imagining flashbacks to Rebus's SAS training with Private Robbie Coltrane running over the assault course!
A lot of Rebus's character foibles are glossed over in the adaptations, for example his large LP collection and the frequent popular music references and thoughts that Ian Rankin weaves into the stories.
[15] Rebus's Fife accent is softened as well — in the novel Tooth and Nail, London Metropolitan Police colleagues find it difficult to understand his speech.
In November 2022, it was announced that Nordic streaming service Viaplay would produce a new Rebus adaptation, as the company's debut UK production.
Ron Donachie, who had frequently played the character for BBC Radio, took over the role for the 2019 run after Lawson suffered a minor stroke.