While Rankin was ostensibly working on a PhD about Spark, he was really trying to turn himself into a Stevensonian-style writer with Edinburgh as his central character. His first few Rebus books were supposed to be updatings of Jekyll and Hyde, but because he pitched them as crime novels about a repressed detective haunted by his past, nobody realized his intention. He even called his second Rebus novel Hide and Seek, but nobody caught on, or so he says.