Woman with a loaded gun

Across 40 years and 61 novels, the icy-blooded Ruth Rendell has proven to be more than a great mystery writer -- she's one of Britain's finest living novelists.

By Charles Taylor

Dec 2, 2004 | Years from now, an aspiring cartographer may attempt a map of 20th century London using only Ruth Rendell's novels as a reference point. James Joyce said he hoped "Ulysses" would allow the reader to reproduce a street-by-street map of Dublin. Rendell's work might only produce individual pockets, instead of the city as a whole. But those tucked-away sections of London could be rendered down to the cracks in the sidewalk, the grime on some windows, the flower boxes in front of others.

The self-containment of these individual neighborhoods is the point. The secrets that Rendell's characters clutch to their chests, like Fagin hoarding his most precious treasures under his grimy greatcoat, are hidden in quiet neighborhoods, placid streets, rambling old houses. The London of the 1960s in "The House of Stairs" and of the 1980s in "King Solomon's Carpet" (one of her books that can reasonably be called a masterpiece) have the nocturnal ominousness of Gothic novels set in the city a hundred years earlier.

"The park is deserted by night. That is, the intention is that it should be deserted," Rendell writes of a private enclave in a small London neighborhood in her 1996 "The Keys to the Street." "No vagrant could sleep undisturbed under the lee of the pavillions or the bandstand, but the police cannot search everywhere every night. The canal bank remains as a place of concealment amid the wide green spaces, and, in summer, the long grass under the trees." Does that passage describe an enchanted refuge? Or, since the small private park is inhabited by both the homeless and the killer impaling them on the park's spiked fence, something more sinister? And why can't it be both?

Ruth Rendell is not an either-or writer. She takes a grim view of human nature, which does not preclude empathy for her characters. Not for Rendell the cold, rancid misanthropy of the perpetually overrated Patricia Highsmith. The 61 books Rendell has written in the 40 years since her first, "From Doon With Death," appeared -- they include the Inspector Wexford series, stand-alone mysteries like her new "The Rottweiler," the 11 novels she has written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, and seven short-story collections -- are about obsession. The subject is coolly observed in the Rendell books, and almost feverishly in the Vine books. To render obsession successfully you need to be, if not wholly sympathetic to the obsessed, at least aware of how they willingly make themselves look foolish. The paranoid states to which her characters are so susceptible would not rouse our anxiety so strongly if Rendell weren't able to pull us into some sense of complicity with them.

I don't mean to make Rendell seem a softer writer than she is. She can pass judgments withering enough to make you cringe, like these lines from "A Judgement in Stone": "'Norm and I always longed for kiddies,' she was in the habit of saying, 'but they never came. The Lord knew best, no doubt, and it's not for us to question His ways.' No doubt He did. One wonders what Joan Smith would have done with children if she had had them. Eaten them, perhaps."

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