Ruth (Barbara) Rendell Biography

In the thirty-plus years that have followed the publication of her debut "Wexford" novel From Doon with Death in 1964, Ruth Rendell has been writing fiction of a uniquely impressive kind. Incredibly prolific, with some fifty titles to her name, her work rate is more than matched by the high quality of her writing, and her novels and stories have secured her numerous awards while winning favor with readers and critics alike. Most of her books fall under the general heading of murder mystery or detective fiction, but to pigeon-hole her as a "genre" writer is to do both author and potential readers a disservice. In a real sense Rendell has created her own category, operating with great success on three fictional fronts—the "Inspector Wexford" detective series, the stand-alone novels produced under her own name and those written as Barbara Vine. Any one of these formidable streams of fiction would be enough to build her a lasting reputation; taken together, they put her in a class of her own.

Rendell's work is distinguished by strong characterization, assured plotting, compelling atmosphere and deep psychological insights. Her knowledge—of trees and plants and their properties, of Mozart opera, of literature and especially of human psychology—staggers with its range, while at the same time avoiding intrusiveness. The Face of Trespass for most of its length reads like a mainstream novel, Graham Lanceton's despised woodland retreat and curtailed love affair evoked with supreme skill, and one is almost one-third of the way through before the possibility of murder rears its head. Whatever else this may be, it certainly isn't "genre fiction." Similar qualities distinguish A Demon in My View and A Judgement in Stone, where the author examines the thoughts and actions of two psychopathic killers. Rendell's sardonic humor is present throughout her writing, and vulgar or tasteless characters often suffer severely at her hands, but in A Demon in My View a more sensitive treatment is afforded to the strangler Arthur Johnson. Through his recollections she fits together the terrible blend of nature and nurture that has made him what he is, the vicious murderer hidden by a façade of neat dress and prim, austere behavior. A black humor surfaces with the arrival of fellow lodger and namesake Anthony Johnson, a student of psychology who scans texts on psychopathic personalities while a real-life killer walks the floor above him. Unlike Anthony Johnson, Rendell defines Arthur in human terms, and while one feels horror at his murderous acts it is possible to have a grudging sympathy for a man doomed to destruction by his own compulsive urges. Kindred personalities appear in several later novels, a murderous father and son "tradition" established in The Master of the Moor, while in A Sight for Sore Eyes a lethal partnership is formed by two individuals damaged in childhood. In A Judgement in Stone Eunice Parchman, starved of love as a child and cut off from the rest of the world by her inability to read and write, takes center stage. Eunice is harder to identify with, her evident lack of feeling defying any understanding of her as a person, but both she and her crazed ally Joan Smith are brought to fearful life on the page.

The series of novels and stories featuring Chief Inspector Wexford have proved enormously popular, and have been successfully screened on U.K. television with George Baker in the starring role. More conventionally "detective fiction" than her other works, their quality and individuality resists easy pigeon-holing. Like all her writing they are notable for superb plotlines, excellent atmosphere and memorable characters, not least Wexford and his "Watson" figure Inspector Mike Burden. The pair are marvelous foils for each other, the large, sometimes irascible Wexford whose painstaking deductions are allied to intuitive hunches striking sparks from his decent but stiff, by-the-book subordinate. This rapport enables their author to show Burden expounding one mistaken theory while babysitting his young son, and the unforgettable scene in "Means of Evil" where the straitlaced inspector cooks and serves Wexford shaggy-cap mushrooms and whisky in a vain attempt to solve a poisoning case. Once again Rendell impresses by her humanity, the ability to present her detectives and their families as people in their own right. The reader grieves with Burden over the death of his wife and shares his joy in a happy second marriage. When Wexford's wife Dora is kidnapped during a protest over an environmentally-damaging bypass in Road Rage, or his daughter Sylvia enters a refuge for battered wives in Harm Done, their trauma and that of their loved ones involves the reader with them. While the Wexford novels may not inhabit the deeper darkness that pervades Rendell's other writings, they nevertheless reflect the increasingly grim nature of modern society. Such topics as aggressive feminism (An Unkindness of Ravens), drugs, mass murder, and the blight of AIDs (Kissing the Gunner's Daughter), pedophilia, and lynch law (Harm Done) and the vulnerable lives of immigrant workers (Simisola) are brought into the weave of her novels and given thoughtful consideration without preaching or disturbing the movement of the plot. Here, as elsewhere in her work, she examines the formative experiences of her criminals, the often harmful effects of upbringing and chance encounters that lead to violence and murder.

Away from the Wexford canon, one is made aware of a potent, oppressive atmosphere of darkness and doom in which Rendell's characters find themselves trapped without hope of rescue. This atmosphere, evident in A Demon in My View, is equally apparent in the recent A Sight for Sore Eyes. Here Rendell explores through the warped mind of murderer Teddy Brex the poisonous results of parental love withheld. Denied true affection like Arthur and Eunice before him, Teddy shuns the world's ugliness to form a lethal alliance with his damaged soul-mate Francine, herself orphaned by murder. The horrors that follow are achieved with supreme skill, suspense and tension heightened to the final terrifying climax. As Barbara Vine, Rendell studies the effect of chance and circumstance on what we would regard as normal lives, the reaction of characters to sudden stresses and discoveries that lead to obsession and violence. In A Fatal Inversion the weak, easy-going Adam Verne-Smith attempts to set up a commune at the country house he has inherited in the summer of 1976, but his efforts come to grief when the runaway Zosie breaks into the charmed circle. Rendell studies the impact of the attractive, disturbed Zosie on the group, the plot moving with ever-rising tension to a brutal culmination. The aftermath, where years later the survivors are forced to confront past events, shows her at her most subtle and accomplished. In No Night is Too Long the study of three characters caught in a destructive triangular relationship is equaled by the author's description of the bleak Alaskan landscape. The Chimney Sweeper's Boy begins with the death of a respected author, whose daughter decides to write her own memoir of him only to discover that her father invented his past and was not the person he claimed to be. A powerful, disturbing narrative that uncovers those dark secrets so familiar to Rendell's readers, it shows the author at the height of her powers and set to continue her well-deserved success into the 21st century.