Hardboiled Blues: Exploring Ian Rankin's ‘Novel’ Approach to the Music of Rory Gallagher

In 2013, the estate of the late blues musician Rory Gallagher released Kickback City. Described as a ‘unique immersive album’ inspired by Gallagher's passion for crime noir, it sought to draw attention to the guitarist's oft-overlooked songwriting ability and featured a 40-page novella, The Lie Factory, written by Ian Rankin in the hardboiled style of Gallagher's favourite authors, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. This paper is the first to explore Rankin's ‘novel’ approach to the music of Gallagher through a detailed examination of the Kickback City box set. Using textual and multimodal analysis, it seeks to showcase the complexity of Gallagher's lyrics and how Rankin's masterful incorporation of the songs brings additional perspectives to The Lie Factory that extend the typical first-person narrative offered by hardboiled fiction. In doing so, it demonstrates how distinct features of Gallagher's songcraft contribute to a hardboiled blues subgenre. Overall, it argues that the fruitful cross-pollination of two seemingly distinct genres – blues music and hardboiled fiction – has the potential to reframe how both Gallagher and Rankin are viewed and understood within their respective fields, and how crime media is diffused in the twenty-first century.