Ruth Rendell
Ruth Rendell (1930-2015) was a prominent British author known for her crime and psychological fiction. Born Ruth Barbara Grasemann to a Swedish mother and English father, she spent her early years in London before moving to Suffolk, where she found inspiration for her writing. Rendell began her career as a journalist and later transitioned into fiction, gaining fame for her character Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford, who solved crimes through keen observation and steady police work, diverging from the eccentric detectives of earlier literary traditions.
Rendell's work is characterized by its exploration of societal issues and psychological depth, often blending elements of tragedy with crime. She also published under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, producing more poetic narratives that delved into the characters' haunted pasts. Throughout her life, she remained politically active, advocating for nuclear disarmament and the improvement of public services, and even served as a member of the House of Lords.
With a writing career that spanned over five decades, she received numerous accolades and achieved international readership, while her novels were adapted into films by notable directors. Rendell's last works continued to explore complex themes, with her final novel "Dark Corners" published posthumously. Her legacy endures as a significant figure in modern crime literature, admired for her literary craftsmanship and social insight.
Ruth Rendell
English novelist known for her Inspector Wexford series of detective fiction.
- Born: February 17, 1930
- Birthplace: London, England
- Died: May 2, 2015
Biography
Ruth Rendell (REHN-duhl) was born Ruth Barbara Grasemann, the only child of a Swedish mother and an English father, both schoolteachers in London. Her early years appear to have been lonely and reflective. Having discovered a talent for writing in childhood, her first work was as a journalist. Following that trade, she met and married, twice, Donald Rendell, a political reporter. Their son, Simon, eventually became a sociologist and settled in the United States. After working in London, the Rendells in later years made their primary home in a sixteenth-century manor house in Suffolk. Ruth Rendell’s love for this region was evident in the picture book she produced with photographer Paul Bowden, which celebrates the beauty, the mystery, and the ghosts of Suffolk.{$S[A]Vine, Barbara;Rendell, Ruth}
Never a reclusive writer, Rendell frequently gave interviews, yet she remained reticent about her personal life. Politically active, she espoused nuclear disarmament and worked to improve public libraries and transportation. In 1997, after the Labour government awarded her a seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Rendell of Babergh, she became a working member of Parliament. Discovering a talent for public speaking, she made frequent trips to the United States, where she had a huge readership.
Rendell never aspired to be the literary heir to Dorothy L. Sayers or Agatha Christie, the first ladies of British detective fiction. Rather, her first novel, From Doon with Death, was conceived as straight fiction, until she discovered that its chances of publication were much improved if reshaped as a detective narrative. Thus, Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford was born. In subsequent books, Wexford’s personality acquired dimension and complexity. Lacking the eccentric brilliance of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot and free from the glib snobbishness of Lord Peter Wimsey, famed literary detectives preceding him, Wexford solved his cases through steady police work and keen observation of human behavior. While most earlier investigators had been loners—spinsters and bachelors have seemed especially adept at literary detection—Wexford had a wife and two daughters. He experienced family rivalries, struggled with health problems, and battled personal demons. As Wexford solved crime after crime, Rendell proved she could concoct detective puzzles as skillfully as Christie or Sayers, and her books never degenerated into formula fiction. In them, believable personalities confronted the genuine problems of society. Emotional attachments, frequently culminating in crimes of passion, ignored distinctions of gender, race, and class.
Though the Wexford books remained Rendell’s best-sellers, two other categories of her fiction pleased the professional reviewers more. A second group published under the Rendell name was composed of psychological crime stories, without the details of police procedure. Some readers complained that these plots lacked closure; not all crimes were punished to the extent of the law. Behavior was complex, often only dimly understood, while ethical situations were always ambiguous. Echoes of Rendell’s favorite authors—Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, and her friend and contemporary P. D. James—were easily identified. Rendell’s interest in Freudian and Jungian psychology was evident, as was a compassion even for criminals that was reminiscent of Russian master novelist Feodor Dostoevsky. Rendell’s achievement was, in the judgment of some professional critics, the raising of crime fiction almost to the status of tragedy.
The third category consisted of the lengthy books issued under the name of Barbara Vine, not really a nom de plume but the identification of a different literary persona, more feminine, according to Rendell, and more poetic. Vine had been the name of Rendell’s paternal great-grandmother. In the Vine books, vivid characters were haunted by mentally induced ghosts from their past and were led inexorably to their destinies. On the first page the reader might learn that an important person has been hanged or that another is soon to die. Ambiance was especially important to these books, as to all Rendell’s writing. Though at home in the elegant country houses and wind-swept moors so loved by British mystery writers, Rendell was equally familiar with dark London streets, basement flats, the London metro system, and the city’s network of rooftops.
From the beginning, Rendell was a prolific writer who, nevertheless, managed consistently to maintain a high literary standard. It is even more remarkable that her writing was produced in the midst of a busy private and public life. Like her colleagues Dorothy L. Sayers and P. D. James, she maintained an active affiliation with the Church of England, though she valued the Church’s ethical teachings and liturgical graciousness more than its theology. Less conservative than Sayers and James, social problems remained her central preoccupation in both her life and writing. Never prostituting her art in order to preach a message, several of her books did make effective use of contemporary issues as backdrop. Road Rage dealt with environmental activism; An Unkindness of Ravens roused the condemnation of Ms., the leading American feminist periodical, for its moderate approach to feminism. Harm Done treated domestic violence, while Simisola featured the plight of “foreign workers,” an increasing European preoccupation at the time of its publication. A Judgment in Stone, which many regard as Rendell’s masterpiece, begins with the sentence: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.”
Well into her seventh decade, Rendell maintained a full schedule of writing, travel, lecturing, and activism. By that time, she had earned every major award in her field, along with an international readership in twenty-two languages. Masters of the international cinema, including famed directors Claude Chabrol of France and Pedro Almodovar of Spain, had adapted her work to their own artistic media. Literary critics had generally designated Rendell an artist who transcends the previous limits of the crime and suspense genres.
Rendell’s two final novels were stand-alone works that did not feature the famous Wexford. The last book that she was able to see published was The Girl Next Door (2014), which deals with the theme of the complications involved with dredging up a long-buried crime. Rendell passed away in London on May 2, 2015, a few months after suffering a stroke. She was eighty-five. Her final novel, Dark Corners, was published in October of that year and explores the psychological impact of blackmail.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
From Doon with Death, 1964
To Fear a Painted Devil, 1965
Vanity Dies Hard, 1965
A New Lease of Death, 1967
Wolf to the Slaughter, 1967
The Secret House of Death, 1968
The Best Man to Die, 1969
A Guilty Thing Surprised, 1970
No More Dying Then, 1971
One Across, Two Down, 1971
Murder Being Once Done, 1972
Some Lie and Some Die, 1973
The Face of Trespass, 1974
Shake Hands Forever, 1975
A Demon in My View, 1976
A Judgment in Stone, 1977
A Sleeping Life, 1978
Make Death Love Me, 1979
The Lake of Darkness, 1980
Put on by Cunning, 1981 (pb. in U.S. as Death Notes)
Master of the Moor, 1982
The Speaker of Mandarin, 1983
The Killing Doll, 1984
The Tree of Hands, 1984
An Unkindness of Ravens, 1985
A Dark-Adapted Eye, 1986 (as Barbara Vine)
Live Flesh, 1986
A Fatal Inversion, 1987
Heartstones, 1987 (novella)
Talking to Strange Men, 1987
The Veiled One, 1988
The House of Stairs, 1989 (as Vine)
The Bridesmaid, 1989
Gallowglass, 1990 (as Vine)
Going Wrong, 1990
The Strawberry Tree, 1990 (novella)
King Solomon’s Carpet, 1991 (as Vine)
Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter, 1992
Asta’s Book, 1993 (as Vine pb. in U.S. as Anna’s Book)
The Crocodile Bird, 1993
No Night Is Too Long, 1994 (as Vine)
Simisola, 1995
The Brimstone Wedding, 1996 (as Vine)
The Keys to the Street, 1996
Road Rage, 1997
The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy, 1998 (as Vine)
A Sight for Sore Eyes, 1998
Harm Done, 1999
Grasshopper, 2000 (as Vine)
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, 2001
The Blood Doctor, 2002 (as Vine)
The Babes in the Wood, 2002
The Rottweiler, 2003
Thirteen Steps Down, 2004
The Minotaur, 2005
End in Tears, 2005
The Water’s Lovely, 2006
The Thief, 2006
Not in the Flesh, 2007
Portobello, 2008
The Birthday Present, 2008
The Monster in the Box, 2009
Tigerlily’s Orchids, 2010
The Vault, 2011
The St. Zita Society, 2012
The Child’s Child, 2012 (as Vine)
No Man’s Nightingale, 2013
The Girl Next Door, 2014
Dark Corners, 2015
Short Fiction:
The Fallen Curtain, and Other Stories, 1976
Means of Evil, 1979
The Fever Tree, and Other Stories, 1982
The New Girl Friend, 1985
The Copper Peacock, and Other Stories, 1991
Blood Lines: Long and Short Stories, 1995
Piranha to Scurfy, and Other Stories, 2000
Nonfiction:
Ruth Rendell’s Suffolk, 1989 (coffee table book)
Undermining the Central Line, 1989 (with Colin Ward)
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
Archie and Archie, 2013
Edited Texts:
The Reason Why: An Anthology of the Murderous Mind, 1995
Bibliography
Bakerman, Jane S. “Ruth Rendell.” In Ten Women of Mystery. Ed. Earl Bargainnier. Bowling Green: Bowling Green UP. Print.
DeAndrea, William L. Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television. New York: Prentice Hall, 1994. Print.
Dubose, Martha Hailey, and Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: Minotaur, 2000. Print.
Leavy, Barbara Fass. The Fiction of Ruth Rendell: Ancient Tragedy and the Modern Family. Revised ed., Poisoned Pen Press, 2012. Explores the themes of classic Greek dramas as seen in Rendell’s crime fiction.
Lindsay, Elizabeth Blakesley, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers. 2nd ed. Westport: Greenwood, 2007. Print.
Munt, Sally R. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Reynolds, Moira Davison. Women Authors of Detective Series: Twenty-one American and British Authors, 1900–2000. Jefferson: McFarland, 2001. Print.
Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Print.
Stout, David. “Ruth Rendell, Novelist Who Thrilled and Educated, Dies at 85.” New York Times. New York Times, 2 May 2015. Web. 28 Dec. 2015.
Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. London: Viking, 1985. Print.
Winn, Dilys. Murderess Ink: The Better Half of the Mystery. New York: Workman, 1979. Print.
Woeller, Waltraud, and Bruce Cassiday. The Literature of Crime and Detection: An Illustrated History from Antiquity to the Present. New York: Ungar, 1988. Print.