IAN RANKIN, the bestselling crime novelist, will begin a new career as a comic writer after he finishes the last Inspector Rebus novel.

However, Rankin will not be abandoning his chosen field completely. He has decided to throw himself not into the world of muscle-bound, cape-wearing heroes but that of a supernatural detective, John Constantine, who appears in the monthly comic Hellblazer.

Rankin is the latest author to transfer his skills to comics after Jodi Picoult, who has written bestsellers such as My Sister’s Keeper, announced last month that she was writing storylines for Wonder Woman.

Rankin announced that he was in negotiations with Vertigo — an imprint of DC Comics, which publishes Superman and Batman — at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Thursday night.

He told The Times that he had sent Vertigo a six-line plot outline that would give Constantine a new set of cases to solve. “The beauty of comic books is that you can do new things with the same character and the readers don’t seem to mind,” he said. “In my version he is going to be much more of a pulp fiction-style private eye who happens to deal with supernatural characters rather than ordinary cases like divorcing couples.

“I will do stories for five or six issues, but DC might do it as a complete graphic novel.”

He suggested that he might weave his love of horror films into the plot.

The Constantine character was created in the mid-1980s by Alan Moore, the British writer best known for V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as a minor character in the Swamp Thing comics. The morally ambivalent detective, who has been to Hell and back, got his own series in 1988 and was turned last year into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz. The film made $230 million worldwide.

Rankin has been reading comics since the age of five. “Sadly, at the age of 46 I’m still reading them,” he said. He grew up reading the Beano and the Dandy before moving on to more sophisticated comics including Swamp Thing.

He also tried drawing his own comics at the age of 6, but gave up when he decided he could not draw. “I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I’d have a spy story, a space story and a football story,” he said.

He also drew comics about an imaginary pop group called Kaput, who were always No 1 in the charts.

Rankin was introduced to DC bosses by Denise Mina, a fellow Scottish crime-writer who wrote the most recent Hellblazer issues.

“She broke the barrier,” he said. “This New York-based industry started looking outside its normal area for writers. I pitched the idea for a storyline, but I haven’t fleshed it out yet.”

He said that the discipline needed for writing comics was very different from conventional books. Some writers, such as Moore, can write pages of text for one panel. “You never know what will happen,” he said. “I may not be any good at it.”

Rankin will delay writing Hellblazer until November, when he hopes to have finished his final Inspector Rebus novel. The untitled work will take the detective into retirement.

He is also preparing to publish the penultimate Rebus book, The Naming of the Dead, in October. It is set at the time of the G8 summit at Gleneagles and includes a scene in which Rebus causes George Bush to crash his bicycle into another policeman.

The author promised his audience at the book festival that he would not kill his detective and hinted that the character may return as a civilian. “He won’t go quietly into the sunset and retire to Spain,” he said.

Denise Mina, a Scottish crime-writer, has written the latest series of Hellblazer

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Charles blazes trail as sun king
• Thalidomiders win payout 50 years on
• Libel gag on talk of 'medical hurricane'