British crime writer mapped extremes of human behaviour
Rendell best known for Wexford mysteries
Baroness Rendell of Babergh, the novelist Ruth Rendell, who has died aged 85, was one of Britain’s bestselling celebrity crime writers.
She revitalized the mystery genre to reflect postwar social changes and wove into more than 60 books such contemporary issues as domestic violence, transvestism, pedophilia and sexual frustration. Her Inspector Wexford mysteries became an extremely popular television fixture in the 1990s.
Her work, mapping the manic and malevolent extremes of human behaviour, was distinguished by terse yet elegant prose and sharp psychological insights, as well as a talent for creating deft and intricate plots and believable characters.
With her friend and fellow crime writer PD James — with whom she shared the accolade of “Britain’s Queen of Crime” (which she detested) — Ruth Rendell redefined the “whodunnit” genre, fashioning it into more of a “whydunnit.”
But unlike the conservative Lady James, Rendell was politically to the left and professionally far more prolific; she completed more than 50 novels under her own name and 14 writing as Barbara Vine, as well as two novellas and more than a dozen collections of short stories.
She remodelled the traditional detective story to explore what she considered to be the complex social causes of crime. Her books were largely gore-free, focusing instead on the unsettling details of ordinary madness. Her characters often lived on the margins of society and sanity.
Sex was an abiding theme in her work; she considered it one of the most interesting things in life “and it’s grotesque the way some writers shy away from it.” She invariably took a liberal line, and the victim in her first book was gay.
Rendell herself was a lifelong feminist; her early novels deal with women trapped in oppressive domestic settings. “I think if you’re a woman, you are naturally a feminist,” she once explained. “Unless you’re hiding something.”
She was born Ruth Barbara Grasemann on Feb. 17, 1930, in South Woodford in suburban east London. Her parents were teachers, and she was their only child. The marriage was unhappy, and her Swedish mother fell ill with multiple sclerosis and died while Ruth was still very young. She was raised by the family housekeeper. Ruth often spent Christmas and other holidays in Scandinavia, and learned both Swedish and Danish. Her upbringing, she said, was coloured by a sense of being on the outside.
Seized at a young age by a compulsion to make up stories, at 23 she began to experiment with different styles and genres. She completed at least six unpublished novels before the ingenious From Doon With Death (1964), her first published mystery featuring her enduring and popular yeoman Detective (later Chief) Inspector Reginald Wexford.
The Wexford books are traditional crime stories set in the fictional mid-Sussex town of Kingsmarkham, and if there was a certain sameness about them, more marked as Rendell’s interest in the orthodox detective yarn waned, she always sought to compensate by applying an unerringly astute eye and ear to the sights and sounds of life in middle England.