The scenario: Take one best-selling crime writer – Ian Rankin. Ask another major player in the genre – novelist and screenwriter Colin Bateman – to take the reins. Add some enlightened conversation, intriguing lines of enquiry and a few trade secrets. The verdict? A one-off contemporary crime classic.

When Ian Rankin’s world-weary Scottish sleuth John Rebus took his final bow in last year’s swansong Exit Music, it marked the end of an era in British crime writing. Like P.D. James’s Dalgliesh, Ruth Rendell’s Wexford and Colin Dexter’s Morse, Rankin’s enigmatic tough-guy cop has become part of our cultural psyche, earning his creator no less than four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards and an unrivalled reputation as the UK’s number one genre bestseller. A regular broadcaster and cultural commentator, Rankin is as renowned for his acute critical perspective as his fictional output. He was awarded an OBE in 2002 for services to literature and holds three honorary doctorates.

Featured in the Daily Telegraph’s recent ‘50 Crime Writers to Read Before You Die’ list, Colin Bateman is the author of Divorcing Jack, Belfast Confidential and BBC1’s prime-time thriller series Murphy’s Law, starring James Nesbitt.

So, for the last word on Rebus and everything after join Colin Bateman as he puts Ian Rankin under the spotlight.