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Having a ‘Sir’ in front of his name means Ian Rankin often comes in for a bit of ridicule from friends. “When I go into my local bar, someone will look out of the door and say, ‘Where have you parked your horse today?’” he tells me. “The knighthood hasn’t got me very much in terms of freebies or status. Living in Edinburgh keeps you grounded.”
Rankin was knighted in 2023 for his services to literature and charity, with Princess Anne “doing the business” at Buckingham Palace while King Charles was otherwise engaged.
Even if his drinking buddies don’t take the knighthood all that seriously, Rankin does, not so much for what it says about him as what it says about the genre in which he has spent much of his working life.
