There hasn't been much time for tidying up, he explains. Not when you've just driven 1000 miles from Dordogne in France after an emotional weekend spent clearing out what was the family bolt-hole - and the place where he wrote many of the Rebus novels - to make way for its new owners, packing up favourite belongings and even making space in the car for a crate of windfall apples from the orchard that they couldn't bear to leave behind.
If breaking up the Rankin retreat was hard - "My wife was in floods of tears, pointing to things like the kitchen sink and saying: 'Remember we bathed the children there when they were babies'" - there hasn't been too much time to think about it. So far, his plan to take a year off and do as little as possible have been thwarted by simply having too much to do.
Before the manic 2000-mile round trip to France, there was a string of interviews to be done, more to be organised - including a bizarre bus trip in which Ian will accompany a group of German journalists on a tour of Rebus's Edinburgh haunts with the author chatting into a microphone and pointing out places of interest as they go. All that plus the small matter of attending GQ magazine's glittering awards ceremony, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Pierce Brosnan, Charlotte Church, Jamie and Louise Redknapp, the Little Britain stars and Robbie Williams.
"Actually I rubbed shoulders with Robbie Williams' bodyguards," he stresses with a laugh. "They kind of shoved me out of the way to let him past." At least he won the magazine's writer of the year award - beating the likes of Salman Rushdie, Tony Parsons and Ian McEwan in the process - and received a personal invitation from Gordon Ramsay to call his restaurant any time and he'd make sure he'd fit him in for a meal.
"Oh, and I got my award from Carol Vorderman," he says excitedly. "Now that was really quite good..."
In fact, life is pretty good for the man who has put Edinburgh's criminal underbelly on the modern literary map, whose Rebus novels have dominated international thriller bestseller lists for almost a decade and who appears to be doing as much for the city's tourism industry as anything VisitScotland has so far managed to come up with.
Fans from Australia, Canada and the United States make regular pilgrimages to Rebus's beat, desperate to see for themselves St Leonard's Police Station, the Oxford Bar and his fictional home in Arden Terrace. "They want to find out about the city they've been reading about for years," explains Ian. "So they come and walk into the bar where Rebus drinks and see the street where he lives.
"It's not like fiction, he becomes a real person. Sometimes they come into the Oxford Bar while I'm there but are sadly disappointed when they meet me. They want this complex, damaged alcoholic. They don't want the creator, they want the character."
Dressed in loose jeans and a faded black T-shirt, Ian sinks into a large comfortable settee in the sunny lounge of his Victorian mansion in one of the city's most affluent areas.
In a millionaires' row of homes - fellow authors Alexander McCall Smith and JK Rowling live nearby - this is every inch a lived-in, busy family home, with tomato vines growing in the conservatory and the cats' litter tray on the floor. And it's still a far cry from those humble beginnings as a shopkeeper's son in the small Fife mining community of Cardenden.
From what he calls a "slow burn" which almost led to him being dropped by his publishers, these days his books fly off the shelves selling at least 500,000 copies in the first three months of their publication. His novels are the most borrowed books in Scotland's libraries and one - Black and Blue - even features on the school curriculum. The Rebus industry is rumoured to earn the author a tidy GBP 500,000 a year.
Soon his audience will expand further when ITV viewers tune in to a new Rebus played by craggy Edinburgh-born Ken Stott - with Ian appearing for an instant in a Hitchcock-like cameo.
It's all been ticking along nicely... there's just one small blip on the horizon, a niggling issue that needs to be dealt with and one that Rebus fans the world over have been dreading. It's also partly the reason why he's opted to take a year off.
"I wanted to take stock. Rebus is 60, he's got to retire. There are two books to go. Does he retire and stay in Scotland? Does the smoking ban in public places force him to move to Marbella?"
Ian, who is 45, laughs. Marbella, he stresses, is a bit unlikely, but so far at least, even he doesn't know exactly how the final chapter in the last Rebus novel will pan out.
To help him along, he's spent the last few months re-reading his own work, retracing his leading character's steps, identifying gaps in his personality, hoping to tie up loose ends and surprising himself along the way.
"I'd never actually read my own books before," he explains. "I'd write one and then it would be straight on to the next story. But I'm enjoying reading them now - I've even found myself wondering what happens in the end. So it's been an interesting experience."
Revisiting his literary past has also provided the platform for his latest work, Rebus's Scotland, which intertwines his own journey from Fife to becoming a best-selling author, with a biography of his famous fictional detective - revealing striking similarities with the author.
Its publication coincides with another Ian Rankin trip back in time: his first novel, The Flood, which sold just a handful of copies back in 1986, has also been re-released. So with two books to publicise and an up-and-coming television drama in the pipeline, Ian's year off was never really going to be spent relaxing in the front room, stroking the cats. "I was a bit tired of it all," he admits. "The book tours, the interviews. It's not just the UK, there's Australia, Canada, America and the 27 other countries. I wanted time out to think about things about Rebus I've not said, things I wanted to say, tie things up."
So what can the Rebus fan expect from those two, final books? Perhaps reading the Evening News will help provide the clues, hints Ian.
"I get a lot of stuff from the Evening News," he admits. "I'll tear out a page and stick it in a folder. The paper is a great source for me."
"The final book will have to tie up a few loose ends including the relationship between Rebus and Cafferty, the main villain.
"But I've not really thought about the final scene," he admits.
All I know is that it will be weird to write that last chapter. The blokes at the Oxford Bar say I should just go and get a real job. I've been thinking a bit about radio plays and working more with actors.
"Then again, JK Rowling said when she finishes Harry Potter she might write a thriller. Maybe I'll do a swop with her and write a children's book... who knows?"
* Rebus's Scotland: A Personal Journey by Ian Rankin, price GBP 20. The Flood is GBP 14.99, both published by Orion Books
Edinburgh Evening News: September 2005
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