Rebus: Actress Lucie Shorthouse on stepping into the shoes of sidekick Siobhan Clarke for TV reboot

On her most recent visit, Lucie Shorthouse was playing the much-loved sidekick of one of the city’s best-known literary creations. The actress has been propelled into the limelight as Siobhan Clarke, the character long described as the “perfect foil” for John Rebus, in a long-awaited new TV adaptation of Ian Rankin’s novels.

The best-selling novels, adapted by playwright and screenwriter Gregory Burke for the BBC reboot, were almost a complete mystery to Shorthouse before the opportunity to audition came up.

But she deliberately decided not to read them too much – before or after landing the part in the show, which has launched on the BBC iPlayer, and stars Richard Rankin as Rebus.

If she was very much a new newcomer to Rebus's world, that is in keeping with her character, a young new arrival in Rebus’s team as the series gets underway.

Clarke, a detective constable as the series opens, has come through an “accelerated pathway scheme” after moving north from England to study at Edinburgh University, a source of early jibes from her less-than-friendly new colleague.

However, the pair quickly forge the famous partnership which has been at the heart of Rankin’s novels for more than 30 years, since Clarke’s debut in The Black Book in 1993.

Shorthouse was brought up in Warwickshire and studied English and drama at Cambridge University, joining its famous Footlights sketch group, which brought her to Edinburgh for the Fringe several times.

But she was only introduced to the darker side of the city that is depicted in Ian Rankin’s books when she went for the role.

She said: “I was definitely aware of the Rebus books beforehand. My two best friends are massive book fans and I’d seen them on their shelves. When you walk into Waterstones, they’re always in prime position in the crime section.

“When the audition came up, I read up a bit about the books as I wanted to try to understand the world of them. I was given the scripts for the first two episodes. I started reading the first one late at night and thought ‘I’ll read for 20 minutes and then read the rest in the morning’. I was so engrossed I couldn’t put them down.

“I only read snippets of the books before we started filming. I tried not to involve myself too much with the source material, because I think I’d have felt so overwhelmed. You don’t want to betray your instincts and you can only play what is on the page of the script as an actor.

"I actually started reading the books towards the end of filming, because I felt like I knew the character in that context.”

Shorthouse describes her character as “a bit of an upstart” who feels the need to prove herself after being paired with Rebus by detective inspector Gill Templer, a familiar character from the early novels.

Shorthouse said: “Siobhan has come through what Rebus sees as a short-cut. There is friction between the old school way and the new school way and a sense of ‘you haven’t gone through all the ropes that we have, you haven’t earned your stripes, you don’t understand this world’. She is also a woman in what is still essentially a male-centred profession and she’s not Scottish.

“Rebus has a chip on his shoulder at first and isn’t welcoming at all. She definitely feels his abrasiveness. But she is feisty and is not going to let Rebus completely dress her down. She is intimidated, but isn’t going to crumble around him.

“She’s a lot more ‘by the book’. Rebus is a lot more maverick in his ways. There is nice balancing out with each other. She maybe makes him toe the line a bit more, whereas he encourages her to think a bit more outside the box.

"She is hungry for the job and wants to prove herself. The more she does the job, the more she recognises how much she is enjoying it.”

Clarke is one of several key female characters in the new Rebus series, along with his ex-wife Rhona, his sister-in-law Chrissie and Maggie Blantyre, the wife of a long-time colleague.

Shorthouse said: “Greg was very open to our feedback on how to make these female characters as rounded and rich as their male counterparts, which you don’t always get. He was so generous and collaborative.

"You don’t always get writers who want to make sure that female voices are authentic. He was really adamant that he wanted the female characters to be as strong as the male characters. They have their own autonomy and agency. They don’t take it lying down. They have their own desires and wants. All that is very much on screen.”

Shorthouse admitted fans of the books, which have been published since 1987, may feel a sense of “disorientation” with the new series, which is set in modern-day Edinburgh.

She added: “I know that I’m not going to be everybody’s Siobhan. I absolutely understand that, as a fan of books myself. But I hope that people think I’ve done it justice or will get something new out of the character.

“The series is a reimagining. There are obviously traits of Siobhan which are true to the books, but there might be discrepancies in some very subtle, nuanced ways.

“I would absolutely love to do more Rebus. I know that everybody involved would say the same thing. It was such a labour of love and really a joy to work on.

“It’s only since filming Rebus that I’ve really gotten into the books. There is obviously so much source material there. I feel like we’ve only just scratched the surface. There’s so much more we can delve into.”