Ruth Rendell: Crime writer who refashioned the whodunnit genre

1930-2015

BARONESS Rendell of Babergh, the novelist Ruth Rendell, who has died aged 85, was one of Britain’s bestselling celebrity crime writers.

She revitalised the mystery genre to reflect post-war social changes and wove into more than 60 books such contemporary issues as domestic violence, transvestism, paedophilia and sexual frustration.

With her friend and fellow crime writer PD James — with whom she shared the accolade of “Britain’s Queen of Crime” (which she detested) — 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. Rendell’s characters often lived on the margins of society and sanity; a recurring theme was how they integrated into their communities and how society controlled the quiet threat they could pose.

Rendell represented the bridge between the golden age of crime fiction, the formulas of Agatha Christie and her heirs and successors, and a new, more urban style. Even so, some critics took her to task for a perceived failure to keep up with the times.

For her own part she insisted that she always strove to give a picture of contemporary life. “I try to be very, very aware of all sorts of changes in society, because people do tend to write the same book set in the time when they first started to write.” She kept ahead of the curve by being a good eavesdropper, and by walking everywhere instead of travelling by car, “a very good way of seeing things and people and hearing what they say”.

A small, neat woman with dark, intense eyes, she seldom allowed her privacy to be violated and when, reluctantly, she gave book-plugging interviews, she tended to be edgy and brusque. She was a staunch Labour supporter.

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 February 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 Rendell was still very young. She was raised by the family housekeeper in Essex. Rendell often spent Christmas and other holidays in Scandinavia, and learnt both Swedish and Danish. Her upbringing, she said, was coloured by a sense of being on the outside.

Leaving school at 18, she was determined not to become a teacher. Her first job was as a reporter on the Chigwell Times, but she was sacked after covering the annual dinner STRAIGHT SHOOTER: Ruth Rendell also wrote as Barbara Vine of the local tennis club by writing it up in advance to meet a deadline; her report made it into the paper, but overlooked the fact that, on the night, the chairman had dropped dead in the middle of his afterdinner speech.

In 1950, when she was 20, she married Donald Rendell, a fellow reporter; he later became a financial journalist on the Daily Mail. The couple were together for a quarter of a century, until they divorced in 1975, only to remarry each other two years later. Having nursed her husband through his final illness, Rendell was badly affected by his death in 1999.

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.

An organised, businesslike writer, Rendell would arrive at the word processor and her tidy desk at 8.30 each morning already knowing “pretty much” what she was going to say. On a good day, she would write 2 500 words, on a bad day 500: there were very few bad days. The technicalities of writing fascinated her.

While she considered Christie to have been a bad writer, Rendell recognised that for many of Christie’s readers, her detective stories offered an escape from reality. She was at a loss to understand why some people found her own books depressing: “Bad things happen to good people,” she once explained. “Who wouldn’t want to write like PG Wodehouse? To be so light and blithe would be wonderful. But unfortunately, it’s not how things are, or what I’m like.”

She readily admitted to being not much interested in crime or criminals, and was perfectly content to confirm that she had never met one. She never researched. “Oh no,” she said, “I make it all up.”

A millionairess several times over, Rendell was remarkably generous with her phenomenal success. She donated about £100 000 (about R1.8-million) a year to charities, including the Royal National Institute for the Blind.

Rendell received many awards, including a clutch of Silver, Gold and Diamond Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association and three Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America.

She was appointed CBE in 1996 and created a Labour life peer the following year. In 2008 she admitted to having had a relationship with an unnamed politician in widowhood, but declined to elaborate.

She leaves a son, Simon, a psychiatric social worker who lives in Colorado, in the US. — © The Daily Telegraph, London

I try to be aware of changes in society, because people tend to write the same book set in the time when they first started to write