IT IS one of life’s few certainties. As sure as tourists visiting Edinburgh Castle will get fleeced; as sure as the vast majority of fringe acts will be mediocre – any writer who chooses to set a crime thriller in Scotland’s capital city will be compared, favourably or otherwise, to Ian Rankin.
It is both a blessing and a curse that Rankin and Rebus cast a long, almost impenetrable shadow over the Tartan Noir genre.
But while former Press and Journal reporter Tony Black is flattered by his own inevitable comparison to the UK’s bestselling crime writer, he is quick to dismiss the suggestion that he is vying for Rankin’s crown.
“I think at one point or another just about every new crime writer from Scotland has been called the ‘New Rankin’,” says the 36-year-old, whose debut novel, Paying For It, was published this month.
“I’m obviously delighted to be spoken of in the same breath as him, but I take it with a huge pinch of salt.”
Considering he has spent the best part of a decade trying to get published – he had four previous novels taken on by agents that went unsold – Black is now asking himself why he waited so long to delve into the dark side of his home city.
“It’s the first genre novel I’ve ever written,” he explains. “The first one was a rites of passage, heavily inspired by John Byrne (The Slab Boys), another was straightforward literary, and another was literary-historical. But writing crime was in many ways such an obvious choice that I’m surprised I didn’t try it sooner.”
Paying For It is the first book in what Black hopes will be a lengthy series of novels to feature Gus Dury, a failed hack turned private detective. After a young man is found brutally murdered on Arthur’s Seat, Dury is asked by the victim’s father to investigate.
As he starts to lift the lid on the city’s underworld, the whisky-soaked sleuth makes some shocking discoveries, including child prostitution, crooked politicians and bent cops.
Black, like so many others, found that Edinburgh’s deep-rooted dichotomies lent themselves perfectly to his writing.
“Edinburgh is almost the perfect place to set a crime novel with its schizophrenic heart – the divisions of old and new towns, the rich and the poor and so on,” he says.
Having early in his career worked as a club reviewer for a tabloid newspaper, Black had an embarrassment of riches when it came to inspiration for some of his novel’s less desirable characters.
“I met lots of shady club owners and their heavies who found their way into my work,” he admits. “I remember one incident in a city up north, in a pub that will remain nameless, where the owner was a known wrong ’un and I was a bit apprehensive going in.
“The guy was what you’d get if you cross a rottweiler with a skinhead and inside five minutes he was demonstrating his martial arts for me in the bar, he was doing roundhouses and stopping inches away from my nose – that kind of thing.
“I was starting to get nervous when he turned me over to his manager with the words, ‘I know where you live’. That was it. He just said it straight out and walked off.”
There are also some similarities between Gus Dury and his creator: “We’re the same age, we’re both trained hacks and we both like punk and David Bowie. We’re also both a bit bookish but Gus really wears his erudition on his sleeve. He’s also a lot quicker with his fists than I ever have been. I’ve also never nutted a government minister . . . although I might have thought about it.”
After such a long wait in literary wilderness, Black now seems set for the big time, and has already spoken to his publishers about creating up to 20 Gus Dury novels.
He added: “I’ve just finished the second one, called Gutted, and I’m raring to go on the third.”
Paying For It is published in hardback by Preface, an imprint of Random House. Tony Black will appear at the Edinburgh Book Festival on August 15.