GONE TO THE DARK SIDE
Offering up four mysteries
Ruth Rendell Doubleday There’s an element of loss in the season’s current list of new crime thrillers. That’s because Ruth Rendell’s final novel, Dark Corners, is now in the bookshops. However, it proves to be a worthy farewell.
Rendell, who died this year at the age of 85, had a profound influence on the crime-fiction genre over a career that spanned more than half a century and produced some 70 volumes. In the case of the pioneering books featuring her much-loved Chief Insp. Wexford, she brought both heightened social realism and a more human dimension to the police-procedural novel. But alongside the Wexford canon, Rendell also produced extraordinary psychological thrillers that could be unsparing in their explorations of the murkier recesses of human behaviour.
Dark Corners is one of these. It’s about a struggling young writer named Carl Martin who makes the mistake of his life when he seeks a tenant to share the house he has inherited and accepts the first person who arrives at the door.
Rendell is certainly not the first novelist to explore the “tenantfrom-hell” theme, but she spins her own fresh and unsettling variation on it. Dermot, the new top-floor occupant, works in a vet clinic and is a devoted churchgoer — and what is wrong with that? As it turns out, a great deal. The novel, seething with both philosophical and psychological complexities, also displays Rendell’s gift for weaving more than one narrative strand into a compulsively readable whole. And, like so many of the books from her autumn years, London and its neighbourhoods assert their own distinctive but often sinister presence, making this a memorable novel of place.
A memorable conclusion, therefore, to a great career. But its final words are sadly prescient — “? and now it’s all over.”