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
John Rebus with BBC Radio Scotland, Rankin corrected his interviewer in the description of "Exit Music" as not the last Rebus novel, but Rebus's retirement novel. Rankin expects to revisit the Edinburgh he created in fiction, with Clarke as his central police officer character. In the same interview, Rankin suggests several reasons for his creation's popularity, despite the policeman's unlikeability. First, Rebus is an outsider, and many people can feel as though they do not fit in as well as they think they should; secondly, Rebus is a curmudgeon, and there is a pleasure in such characters; and finally, he does not