Inspector Rebus span a broad spectrum of Scotland, including council estates, tenements, business districts, nightclubs, prisons, dying mining towns, secluded villages and desolate hillsides, as well as the better-known pubs and streets of Edinburgh. Some of these locations are fictional, although they may be based on real places. For example, the Pilmuir estate is a conflation of the two real Edinburgh locations Pilton and Muirhouse. Other locations, such as the Oxford Bar, Arden Street, and St Leonards police station, are real. Frequent references to real places, or local politics firmly ground the Rebus series in the real world. Another strong feature of
Real time (media) Ben Dunn's "Ninja High School". Comic strips which feature characters aging in real-time include: In the Inspector Rebus series of detective novels (17 as of 2010) by the Scottish writer Ian Rankin, characters age in step with the publication date. Rebus is stated to have been born in 1947; in the 2007 novel "Exit Music" he reached 60, and retired. The Mandie series of children's mystery novels by Lois Gladys Leppard are exactly one hundred years from the present real time and ended by the eighteenth year (or one hundred and eighteenth year) of the main protagonist in 2006 at