Ruth Rendell's Books | Crime Books

Biography

Ruth Rendell (1930 – 2015) was born Ruth Barbara Grasemann to a British father and Danish Mother in South Woodford, Essex.

A Little Too Much Imagination

After school, she became a feature writer for her local paper, the Chigwell Times. Her career as a journalist was short-lived as she tended to ignore reality. On one occasion, she wrote a story about an abandoned house and suggested it was haunted. The owner threatened to sue. The nail in the coffin of her journalism career was the annual general meeting of a local tennis club. After the paper published her piece, it became clear that the club chairman had had a heart attack and dropped dead in the middle of his speech. Rendell neglected to mention this in her story. She hadn’t attended the meeting, writing the story from an advanced copy of the speech that she had been sent. Rendell quit before she was fired.

On a more positive note, whilst she was a reporter, Rendell met her husband, Don Rendell, who she married when she was 20. They stayed together until he died in 1999, happily married, except when they divorced in 1975. The separation was short-lived, and they remarried 2\two years later. When asked why she quipped that there were only so many men you could go on a 200-mile drive with and not have to say a single word.

In her late twenties and early thirties, Rendell settled into domesticity. Her husband became a financial journalist, and between them, they raised one son. During this time, she wrote several unpublished novels, finally managing to sell her 7th book, From Doon With Death, in 1964 for £75, equivalent to roughly £2,000 in 2020.

Since that first book, Rendell churned out over 70 novels and collections of short stories. She has received critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, winning a clutch full of both Dagger and Edgar awards.

Two Bodies of Work

Like Georges Simenon, her work falls into two camps. She is best known for twenty-four detective stories featuring the resolute Inspector Wexford. However, she has also written many psychologically dark, stand-alone novels.

“I found that I preferred to deal with the psychological, emotional aspects of human nature rather than the puzzle, forensics, whatever, most seem to come within the ambience of the detective novel.” (Murder Mayhem)

From the mid-1980s, she used two pen names to identify the different styles. Rendell published the Wexford novels under her own name. The more literary, psychological thrillers sold under the name Barbara Vine Whilst the Wexford books are popular — they formed the basis of a long-standing television series — it is for the Barbara Vine novels that she won most plaudits.

A Nail in the Coffin of the Classic British Mystery

Rendell (along with other writers of the time such as P.D. James) is credited with starting the drift away from the classic British detective novel. Her novels are more concerned with the reasons why someone commits a crime than a central whodunnit puzzle.

“To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.”

Shades of Grey

Whilst Rendell doesn’t paint graphic violence; her writing is gritty and realistic. She often relays the monologue that plays in the heads of her characters. Instead of good and evil, she embraces shades of grey. Readers are often left wondering what will happen to the criminal at the end of her books.

Social Politics

Ruth Rendell’s books often highlight the social injustice she sees. In A Dark-Adapted Eye, she built on the story she heard as a child of a sixteen-year-old housemaid who became pregnant and committed suicide rather than face the shame of having an illegitimate child.

In 1997 Rendell became a Labour life peer (she had given to the Labour party throughout her career). She took her fight against class disadvantage to the house of Lords. Here she sponsored a bill that made it illegal to send girls abroad to be subjugated to female genital mutilation. (A subject featured in her book Not in the Flesh).

Despite the seriousness with which she took her work, she didn’t take herself so seriously. When one interviewer — rather verbosely — asked her:

“Your working out of good and evil is much more complex in your non-Wexford novels. Approximately half of your books, however, employ Chief Inspector Wexford. What attracts you to the use of Inspector Wexford and, let’s say, the detective genre, when clearly you’re pulled to the more complex exploration of human nature and murder outside of the format?”

Her answer was simple.

“I should say money.” (Murder Mayhem)

Literary Crime Fiction?

Rendell didn’t dumb down her work to fit within the crime fiction genre. Many argue that she should have been awarded the Man Booker Prize, for which she was only once longlisted. She did, however, receive the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.

If you want to enter the head of a psychopathic criminal, Ruth Rendell (particularly writing as Barbara Vine) is the author for you. Though I warn you, it is an uncomfortable place to be.