Ruth Rendell R.I.P.

I learned of the sad news of the death of Ruth Rendell a few minutes before joining Katherine Hall Page for our "Malice Remembers" conversation about Patricia Moyes. We both felt that it was right to pay a brief tribute to Rendell before turning to Moyes, though breaking the news to audience members who were unaware of the loss of this great writer was bound to be a shock.

I've been a huge admirer of Ruth Rendell for many years, and I've often referred to her as my favourite living crime writer. I recall meeting Sophie Hannah for the first time when we were on a panel together in Runcorn, and an audience member asked me to name my favourite crime writers. I named Agatha Christie among those who were dead, and Rendell from among the living. Sophie - who had just published her first novel - exclaimed: "I was going to say that!" A shared enthusiasm is a good way to bond with a fellow author..

I'm sure that Rendell, along with her friend P.D. James, will be ranked as one of the great writers of popular fiction of the second half of the twentieth century. I enjoyed her Wexford novels, such as A Sleeping Life, but I enjoyed the non-Wexfords even more. A Judgement in Stone is a masterpiece, a crime genre cornerstone, and books like A Demon in My View and The Lake of Darkness almost equally brilliant. As if this wasn't enough, she proceeded to write stunning novels as Barbara Vine. My favourite is A Fatal Inversion, but the quality was invariably high. She wrote of particular,worlds - much bleaker and more restricted than, for instance, those of the great Reg Hill, who once gently teased her at an event I attended; Her books, unlike Reg's, seldom attempted humour, but she explored her favoured landscapes in utterly compelling fashion.

That wasn't all. She was an equally gifted short story writer, and when she tried her hand at a novella, the result, Heartstones, was characteristically excellent. For decades, she maintained an astonishingly high standard, despite being very productive. I cannot think of any prolific crime writer, with the possible exception of Reg himself, who has kept writing at anything like such a consistently high level for so long. Inevitably, as the twenty-first century dawned, she found it more difficult to avoid repeating herself and books such as The Saint Zita Society seemed to me to fall well short of her earlier, stellar achievements. Nevertheless, few crime novelists of the past fifty years have left such a wonderful legacy.

In my own writing, I like to pay occasional tributes to writers and other people whom I admire - Conan Doyle, Christie and so on. When I was planning The Arsenic Labyrinth, I conceived my version of a "Ruth Rendell type of sociopath" in the character of Guy. I loved writing about Guy, and I may return to that type of character one day. But of course, nobody could match Rendell..

One more thing. I never chatted to Ruth Rendell in person, but I corresponded with her, and on several occasions I invited her to contribute short stories to CWA anthologies that I was editing. Each and every time, she agreed readily, and authorised her agent to accept exactly the same - extremely modest - fee offered to other contributors. She did not attend CWA events, as far as I know, but she remained a member right to the end. I found her willingness to help truly admirable. and it's yet another reason why I respected her so much.

    

The Minotaur

I’ve often spoken and written of my admiration for the work of Ruth Rendell, both the books published under her own name and as Barbara Vine. I’ve now caught up with The Minotaur, a Vine book published in 2005, and found much in it to admire, although I must also confess to some reservations.

After a very short opening set in the present day, the bulk of the story is set in the past, when a young Swedish girl, Kerstin Kvist (who narrates the story), comes to England to be closer to her boyfriend, and takes up a job in rural Essex at Lydstep Old Hall, home to the dysfunctional Cosway family. Her duties involve looking after John Cosway, who behaves strangely and is kept on medication at the behest of his domineering mother. There are also four Cosway sisters, three of whom compete in different ways for the attention of a feckless painter who comes to live in the village.

We know that Something Terrible Will Happen, because Kerstin tells us so. Again and again. The relentless foreshadowing, which I mentioned in relation to another recent Rendell, The Birthday Present, rather got on my nerves, I’m afraid. I also found the characters unlikeable (this is not unusual with Rendell/Vine) and thought it difficult to understand why clever Kerstin couldn’t bring herself to leave and get a better job.

On the plus side, the atmosphere of the decaying Hall is marvellously evoked. Above all, there is a fascinating library, which contains a labyrinth of bookshelves – a truly memorable image. Indeed, the title of the book and the extraordinary nature of the labyrinth made me think it would play an even greater part in the story than proved to be the case. There are several gripping, and very vivid scenes, and many nods to Gothic fiction, not least in the explicit references to Thornfield and Manderley late in the narrative.

A check on the internet suggests that opinion is divided on this book. The Daily Telegraph savaged it, for instance, but many others love it. My own feeling – I hope this does not seem disrespectful to an author who has given me endless pleasure over the years - is that, for all the merits of The Minotaur, it would have benefited from quite a bit of pruning, rather like the Virginia creeper that shrouds the old mansion. If you fancy sampling Barbara Vine (and you should, because she is a wonderful writer), you are likely to find A Dark-Adapted Eye or A Fatal Inversion more consistently rewarding.

The Birthday Present

I’m a huge fan of Ruth Rendell, whether writing under her own name or as Barbara Vine, and I’ve often cited A Judgment in Stone and A Fatal Inversion as favourite titles. The Lake of Darkness and A Demon in My View are almost as brilliant. But it’s been a while since I’ve read anything by her. No particular reason for this, though I was disappointed by Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, while finding Thirteen Steps Down at least a partial return to form.

On holiday I read The Birthday Present, a Vine title, and I had mixed feelings about it. As ever, I admired the author’s insight into disturbed minds and the strange behaviour. The story has two narrators. One is the brother in law of an Old Etonian Tory MP whose sleazy behaviour during the Thatcher era when the Conservative Party dominated the British political scene is the catalyst for the book’s events. Ivor Tesham embarks on an affair with a married woman (who, in a nice touch, has changed her name from Hilda to Hebe) which ends in tragedy, and Hebe’s accidental killing in a car crash. Ivor fears exposure, and conceals the part he played in the events that led to her death. He is not really a criminal (unlike one or two real-life Tory MPs of the time) but his selfishness is portrayed with clinical distaste by Rendell (a Labour party donor who was herself elevated to the House of Lords, from where she has presumably contemplated the sleazy antics of contemporary politicians with similar contempt).

The other narrator is one of Hebe’s friends, a woman teetering on the brink of derangement. She knows Ivor’s secret, and one of the questions that teases the reader throughout is whether she will expose the politician, and thus destroy him. Rendell is very persuasive when she describes the thought processes of deranged people, and much of the book is very gripping.

However, there are weaknesses. The early pages are rather ponderous, and the finale seems unsatisfactory. There is a great deal of foreshadowing of future events, and at times this got on my nerves. If you’re looking for likeable characters, you won’t find many here, and I also thought there were a couple of gaping plot holes.

So, to my mind this is not a book to rank with Vine’s masterpieces. I venture to express various reservations simply because she is such a great writer that I think she has to be judged by the highest standards – not in quite the same way, at least for the purposes of a short blog review, as a debut or mid-list writer, or a purveyor of action thrillers. But I must emphasise that I really did enjoy reading it and, subject to those caveats, can recommend it warmly.