Retiring Ruth Rendell? Not on your life
Octogenarian author has no plans to stop writing
Besides being one of the most famous, critically acclaimed, and best- selling mystery writers in the history of the English ( or any) language, Ruth Rendell has a second job. Since 1997, when she was made a life peer — her title is Baroness Rendell of Babergh — she has sat in the House of Lords, roughly the British equivalent to Canada’s Senate.
It was there she recently made a rather unusual discovery.
First, some background. The children of peers, Rendell explains on the phone from her house in London, have honorifics of their own; they may be referred to as ‘ Honourable.’
“Most of our children do not use it, but they could use it,” she says. “My son is, in fact, the Honourable Simon Rendell. Of course, he lives in America, anyways, and never uses it.
“Now I discovered, the other day, that this applies only if you were married when your children were born,” she continues, aghast. “If your children are illegitimate, which is perfectly respectable these days — not even a cause for comment, I would have thought — I have discovered this does not apply.”
Might it simply be an oversight, the remnants of some arcane law that has yet to be updated? I can almost hear her roll her eyes across the Atlantic.
“We don’t have that kind of thing in the House of Lords,” she laughs. “No, no, no. It has been the result of very careful thought, I’m sure.” The timing of Rendell’s discovery is serendipitous; the plot of her latest book, The Child’s Child, is driven by not one but two children born out of wedlock.
This marks the 14th time she has published a novel as her alter- ego, Barbara Vine.
She says while books published under her own name feature more “excitement” and “sensation,” those written by Vine “don’t have any sort of mystery in them, they don’t have any revelations, really. They’re just really about people.”
Rendell has often used Vine to write about the evolution of morality (“I try to reflect the society I live in as it changes,” she says) and The Child’s Child is no different.
“There were two strands of injustice, simply unjustified nastiness in society, over a very long period of time,” she says. “The first was the horrible stigma of illegitimacy, and the suffering of women, usually young girls, who had illegitimate children.” The other, she says, was homosexuality.
“A lot of people think it’s very easy for me — it just flows out of me,” she says of the first Vine novel since 2008’ s The Birthday Present. “Well, it doesn’t. And I didn’t have an idea for a book, and I suppose I even thought I might not write another Barbara Vine.”
Not that she ever planned to give up writing, full- stop.
Even at 82, Rendell is still producing at a clip that puts younger writers to shame.
She still writes every weekday morning, and still publishes a book a year, on average, although in 2012 she finished two: The Child’s Child and The St. Zita Society, which came out during the summer.
“It’s very demanding,” she says. “I don’t think I would do two in one year again.”
But she is working on the next book starring Chief Inspector Wexford, her most enduring character, which should arrive in bookstores this year, just in time for the series’ 50th anniversary; the first Inspector Wexford mystery, From Doom With Death, was published in 1964.