Britain’s bestselling crime writer has stirred up a fine literary row by suggesting that female authors — and gay ones in particular — are more bloodthirsty than male ones. Ian Rankin’s detractors are scouring his Inspector Rebus novels for evidence of his own gory predilections. But so far they have overlooked a real killing that weighs heavily on the writer’s conscience.

Rankin’s unsuspecting victim was a pig — whether it was male, let alone chauvinist, is lost to history. Before becoming an acclaimed author whose dark tales of Edinburgh sell 1m copies a year, he was briefly a swineherd in a Dordogne vineyard. His duties included treading grapes and feeding the fresh pips and skin to the pigs.

He confessed in 2004: “I got drunk one night and left it to next morning, by which time the pulp had fermented. The pigs got drunk and one of them died of alcohol poisoning, putting an end to my swineherding career.” It was not quite the feeding-people-to-pigs scene in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, but it was enough to disturb Rankin’s dreams.

The 47-year-old writer found himself in the mire again last week when something else from his past came back to haunt him. The venue was the Edinburgh international book festival, where one of Rankin’s leading female rivals, Val McDermid, took exception to remarks he had made in an interview last year — “The people writing the most graphic novels today are women. They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.”

McDermid, a lesbian whose gritty crime novels have been adapted for the television series Wire in the Blood, described his comments as “arrant rubbish” and “offensive”. Women, she argued, did not need permission to write about violence, which they did not see as “groovy pornography” but as a source of hurt that damaged lives. Her book The Last Temptation, whose killer is in the habit of taking a pubic “scalp” from his victims, does not quite square with this assertion.

The spat was simmering nicely. It was a chance to rake in other lesbian thriller writers who are not averse to lots of blood on the carpet, including the American author Patricia Cornwell, whose forensic mysteries kicked off the revolution in women’s crime fiction; Louise Welsh, another Scot whose last novel, The Bullet Trick, is a murder mystery set in Berlin; and Manda Scott, a veterinary surgeon from Glasgow whose crime books have titles such as Night Mares and Stronger Than Death.

Meanwhile, Rankin was merrily adding fuel to the fire: “It seems to me that to get into the top 10 it helps, if you are a woman, if you write quite violent books. It helps, if you are a man, if you don’t.” A topic calculated to inflame readers of both genders.

Soon, however, both Rankin and McDermid were claiming that the whole thing was a storm in a teacup, while stoutly defending their views. “We are still friends — he danced at my wedding, for Christ’s sake,” said McDermid, referring to her civil partnership ceremony.

In fact McDermid had done Rankin a great favour. By complete coincidence, he was about to announce Rebus’s retirement from the police in his latest book, Exit Music, the 20th in the series, which will be published on September 6. So he had an attentive audience when he revealed that the dour sleuth would not run a B&B or retire quietly abroad but may continue in some form, either by helping out detectives or working in a “cold case” squad. “It would be very hard to let go,” he said. “Rebus has been my punchbag and psychiatrist for the last 20 years.”

Yet superficially John Rebus and Rankin could not be more different. The surly detective inspector sees the dregs of society through a whisky glass, returning to a house he can ill afford. SAS trained and obsessed with rock music, he has suffered a nervous breakdown, failed as a husband and father and turned to drink, fags and Christianity. Rankin, a tall man with green-brown eyes and a farmer’s haircut, lives in a seven-bedroom Victorian house in Merchiston, Edinburgh’s most exclusive area, with his wife Miranda and their two young sons. A Jacuzzi and a trampoline are in the garden with a life-sized pink cow.

His neighbours include Alexander McCall Smith, who penned the successful No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books, and JK Rowling, the squillionaire author of the Harry Potter series. Rankin’s wife spotted JKR the other day “scribbling away in a cafe”, he said last week, speculating whether she was “writing her Edinburgh detective novel”.

Rankin is often at pains to point out that he could afford to move to the area only four years ago. Besides swineherding, he has worked as a taxman, alcohol researcher, hi-fi journalist, college secretary and punk musician. “My wife and I struggled by on £5,000 a year at one point when I was trying to make it. For a long time I was earning £4,000 or £5,000 a book. I went up to £30,000 in 1997 after winning the Golden Dagger award.” Phenomenal sales and the Rebus television series starring John Hannah and latterly Ken Stott, now keep the wolf from the door.

The large house was chosen to give his youngest son, Kit, a separate wing. At 18 months the child was diagnosed with Angelman syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes severely arrested development. With two carers who work in shifts, Kit will never be able to live an independent life. “His care will swallow up any amount of money that we can put towards it,” his father said.

Rankin was born in 1960 in Cardenden (sometimes known locally as Cardeadend), a former mining town 30 miles north of Edinburgh which he recalled as a place “full of Slade fans and soccer hooligans”. His parents, Isobel, a dinner lady, and James, who worked in a grocer’s shop and then at the Rosyth naval dockyard, had married after the deaths of their previous spouses and had a daughter each.

Eschewing his rowdy chums, Rankin haunted the library. At Beath high school in Cowdenbeath he edited a magazine that was closed after one issue because the headmaster suspected something too exotic in the title, Mainline. Although his plan was to study accountancy, in the hope of buying a car like an accountant uncle, he opted to read English at Edinburgh University.

He has evoked “a rollicking good time” at university, where he first started writing books and undertook a PhD on Muriel Spark. But his wife, whom he met there, revealed that he was “often very depressed, if not suicidal”. His writing tutor Allan Massie, discerning that “there was certainly something there”, commended Rankin to his London publisher, who accepted the youngster’s first novel after five other publishers had turned it down. Knots and Crosses, introducing Rebus, was published in 1987.

Rankin believed that he had written a modern-day gothic novel in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Frustratingly, everyone else thought it was a crime novel. He wrote another two novels before returning to Rebus.

In 1990 Rankin and his wife moved to France, where he could concentrate on his fiction. The diagnosis of Kit’s disability in 1995 led him to drive around country lanes in the middle of the night in his Citroën 2CV “screaming and screaming and screaming” to relieve his anguish. By now on his ninth Rebus book, his publisher was on the verge of dropping him as an author. “Suddenly there was just me and a computer and I would dump all this stuff on Rebus.”

The result was an angry book, Black and Blue, which marked Rankin’s commercial breakthrough in 1997. The next book was even grittier, in which Rebus’s daughter ended up in a wheelchair after a hit-and-run accident. Rankin only later came to realise that Rebus “was basically me in that his thought processes were very like mine and his childhood memories are my early memories”. Yet there were mismatches: would a Scottish working-class policeman who left school at 15 be able to quote Walt Whitman and King Lear as Rebus could?

The critical consensus was that Rankin had raised the bar of crime fiction by importing the mood and feel of the troubled American sleuth. It was a departure from the British tradition of whodunnits and blandly honourable policemen, injecting a strong sense of place and a hint of Scottish mysticism. The books have been translated into 29 languages. Rankin has been showered with honours and was awarded the OBE in 2003.

So successful is the Rankin brand that every publisher is keen to invest in a stable of crime writers. “He has transformed the business,” said a critic. “He’s shown that crime novels can be intelligent and well written.”

Rankin looks forward to a string of new projects — a 15-minute libretto for Scottish Opera, a graphic novel and a novella about an Edinburgh art heist. And what of Rebus? It depends on two things: “Have I anything new to say — and is Rebus holding anything back from me?”

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