Ruth Rendell

May 3, 2015 at 1:26 pm (Book review, books, Mystery fiction, Remembrance, The British police procedural)

 

Ruth Rendell and P.D. James

I didn’t know where to begin. But an article in the Guardian helped. It listed five key works by this author. They are as follows:

1. From Doon with Death (1964). Ruth Rendell’s first published novel. In it, she introduces her policeman protagonist  Reginald Wexford.

2. A Judgement in Stone (1977). A standalone containing one of the best known opening sentences in modern crime fiction.

3.  A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986). Winner of the 1987 Edgar Award for best mystery, this is the first work that Rendell published using the pseudonym (alternate identity?) of Barbara Vine. A book I’ve always meant to read and still haven’t.

4. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (2001).  This choice, another standalone, threw me. I know I read it, but I remember nothing about it. Time to revisit, I suppose.

5. Not in the Flesh (2007). A later Wexford, and one of the best in the series, in my view.

I think by “five key works,” authors Alison Flood and Vanessa Thorpe mean to suggest good entry points into Ruth Rendell’s large and varied body of work. Looking at this list, the one choice they made that I totally agree with is A Judgement in Stone. I’ve led book discussions on it,  and I’ve read it three times.  And every single time I’m filled with dread  and awe, despite already knowing what the shattering climax will be. The build-up of tension over the course of the narrative is simply incredible.

For me, the Wexford novels, good from the very beginning, became increasingly compelling from the mid-1980s to the present. From An Unkindness of Ravens (1985) to No Man’s Nightingale (2013), I’ve loved them all. Somehow, when I’m reading them, my critical faculties are suspended. I’m held in the thrall by the writing, the story, the characters, Wexford and his utterly ordinary yet fascinating family life, his second in command Mike Burden, whose starchy, conservative exterior serves to protect the vulnerable man within.

 

 

I thought The Vault was an especially cunning work. It’s a sequel to A Sight for Sore Eyes, in which Rendell gave us one of the most uniquely frightening characters I’ve ever encountered in fiction: Teddy Brex. The Vault is a Wexford novel; A Sight for Sore Eyes was a standalone. In The Vault, Rendell brings in a retired Wexford to help investigate an extremely strange discovery: the remains of four bodies  found in the sealed off basement of a house. If you’ve read A Sight for Eyes, you the reader have some recollection of who these people are. Wexford and company lack that advantage.

Houses are often fateful places in Rendell’s fiction; so it is with this one, named Orcadia Cottage.

 

The Girl Next Door, a standalone that came out last year, stands as a kind of summation of Rendell’s art. The vagaries and the irony of the human condition find rich embodiment in the cast of characters that people this narrative. I thought it was outstanding. 

I’ll save my final words of praise for  novel written in 1987 but not read by me until 2012: A Fatal Inversion. This is probably the most riveting and haunting work of psychological suspense that I’ve ever read. Read my review to find out why.

I’m running out of superlatives. I leave you with this insightful encomium by Val McDermid, as well as this gracious tribute from British  Labour Party Leader Ed Miliband:

Ruth Rendell was an outstanding & hugely popular figure in British literature & served in the House of Lords with great loyalty & passion.

Oh – and the famous first line of A Judgement in Stone?

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.

Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE February 17, 1930 – May 2, 2015