Remembering Ruth Rendell, Master Of Smart And Socially Aware Suspense

Transcript

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli in for Terry Gross. Author Ruth Rendell died last Saturday in London at the age of 85. Beginning in the mid-1960s, she wrote crime novels for 50 years, many featuring Chief Inspector Reg Wexford, as well as other books written under the pen name of Barbara Vine. Today, we'll remember Ruth Rendell with excerpts of two interviews she did with Terry, but we'll start with an appreciation by our book critic, Maureen Corrigan.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: When the news of Ruth Rendell's death broke last weekend, I searched for some of her novels on my mystery bookshelves. Rendell wrote more than 60 novels, so I should've been able to find a few, but no dice. I'm forever giving Rendell's novels away to people who need a good book. What made Rendell extraordinary was her consummate simplicity. As a writer, she was akin to the medieval artist Giotto, or at least to the apocryphal story about Giotto, who, when asked to submit a sample of his work to the pope, proceeded to dip a brush in red paint and draw a perfect circle freehand. Likewise, Rendell flawlessly executed the basic elements of the classic British detective novel. Unlike the books written by her good friend and fellow mystery master P.D. James, Rendell's Chief Inspector Wexford novels aren't distinguished by their vivid, off-kilter settings or by the Holmesian quirks of a loner detective.

Instead, when Reg Wexford was introduced in 1964 in Rendell's debut, "From Doon With Death," readers met Detective Normal, a middle-aged, married man with children whose politics leaned left and who himself liked to open up a good book at the end of a rough day. Crimes in Wexford's world were committed in mundane locales - busy roads, suburban villas and even vicarages. The Wexford novels are as traditionally British as a hunk of bloody roast beef, overlaid, that is, with a piquant sauce of nouvelle social criticism because what Rendell did add to the basic formula was a contemporary awareness of racism and sexism. The vicar, whose body is discovered in that vicarage in the Wexford novel called "No Man's Nightingale," is not your standard issue Agatha Christie cleric, but rather a mixed-race, single mother named Sarah Hussein, whose position as an ordained priest in the Church of England doesn't sit well with all her congregants.

Another recent Wexford novel called "Not In The Flesh" opens in time-honored fashion with a truffle-hunting hound unearthing the skeletal remains of a human hand in the English countryside. But the story soon veers into less traditional byways when Wexford confronts the brutality of female genital mutilation among a community of Somali immigrants. By the way, Rendell, who was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire and sat in the House of Lords for Labour, campaigned in real life, as well as in her fiction, against the practice of female circumcision. One of the British obituaries for Rendell wisely pointed out that through her death, re-readers have lost not one but two legendary suspense writers. That's because Rendell, starting in 1986, began writing more nuanced, intricate novels of psychological suspense under the pen name Barbara Vine.

Many years ago, a friend left a copy of "A Dark-Adapted Eye," Barbara Vine's first novel, outside my apartment door with a note that said, I wish I were reading this novel for the first time. That was one of the best gifts I've ever received. And subsequently, I probably bought and given away more copies of that novel than any other. Rendell was a great admirer of Henry James. And her Barbara Vine novels retrospectively trace a main character's dawning awareness of something off in his or her world. Here's a snippet from the opening of a recent Vine novel called "The Child's Child," in which two 20-something siblings inherit their grandmother's mansion. Our narrator, Grace, explains why she and her brother, Andrew, made the decision to live there together.

(Reading) Surely, we thought, a house with four living rooms, six bedrooms and three bathrooms was big enough for a man and woman who always got on with each other. There was only one thing we never thought about, though why not I don't know. We were both young and each had had several partners. And one of us, perhaps both, was likely to have a lover living in. In Andrew's case, that happened quite soon after we moved in.

You already know from the get-go that situation isn't going to end well. The thrill, of course, lies in discovering why. A final stand-alone Ruth Rendell novel called "Dark Corners" is scheduled for publication this October. Like so many of her other fans, I'm grateful to have one last Rendell mystery ahead of me to read for the first time.

BIANCULLI: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University and is the author of "So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures," which comes out next week in paperback.

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