Ian Rankin, creator of troubled sleuth Detective Inspector John Rebus, is putting his typewriter to one side and releasing a record.

Rankin’s a self-confessed music buff: his site includes a prominent section on the musical influences behind his work, he’s collaborated with folk artist Jackie Leven, and he’s named a glut of Rebus novels after The Rolling Stones albums. As The Quietus reported late last week, Rankin is now primed to release a single of his own.

‘A Little Bit Of Powder’ will arrive on O Genesis, the label run by Tim Burgess. The track features actor Craig Parkinson reading an original Rankin short story, with Burgess handling production duty. By way of exposition, Rankin has written a substantial blurb for the track, which reads as follows: “Tim contacted me a while back with the idea of a spoken word project – me writing a story – to give out to his fans as a little Xmas gift. We met in Edinburgh in August and bounced around a few ideas.

“I then gathered my thoughts. A friend in Glasgow had told me an anecdote some months previously about a local musician who was told to meet another musician in a bar, and take his acoustic guitar with him. When he arrived, a bag of powder was produced – the ashes from a mutual friend and fellow musician – and sprinkled into the sound hole. This was apparently a last request from the dying musician – that his ashes be shared out among musician friends. So that was the genesis of the short story.

“I am a sucker for rock biographies and rock movies and decided to tell the story from the point of view of a hardened roadie. Thinking about the ashes, I then realised powder of a different kind might have been behind the breaking up of a band, and also that, by setting the story in winter, I could also add snow (hah!) to the mix. Three different types of powder… And after that all I had to do was write the bastard. It was fine actually – only took three or four days, then I timed myself reading it and found that it ran to around 15 minutes. Tim had wanted 5-6 minutes so it would fit on one side of a single. I reckoned this was a problem and told Tim as much, but he wanted to read the ‘director’s cut’ before I got busy with the editing scissors. Having seen it and like it, he then insisted we couldn’t leave out any of it.”

The single will be launched on November 26 at The Lexington in London. O Genesis’ recent R. Stevie Moore retrospective, meanwhile, remains excellent.