Rude and relentless . . . but my friend Ruth Rendell was world’s greatest crime writer
RUTH RENDELL wrote persistently rather than rapidly and once said of writing: ‘It is absolutely essential to my life. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t write.’ She was equally passionate about politics, for not only was she one of our best and most prolific novelists, she was also a hard-working peer, spending three or four days each week attending meetings, sitting on committees and helping to amend legislation.
She became a life peer at the same time as her friend and fellow crime writer P. D. James, who also died recently.
Whereas Phyllis James was one of nature’s Tories, robustly opposing unnecessary changes for the worse (for example to her beloved Book Of Common Prayer), Ruth saw parliament as a chance to change things for the better. At several times in her life she was the labour Party’s largest private donor. I used to think Phyllis James was the archetypal Cavalier and Ruth Rendell the typical Roundhead; serious, a little puritanical, hard-working and relentless.
She spoke Danish and Swedish fluently and her mother, with whom she never got on very well, was a Swede. Whereas behind P. D. James you felt the jolly old english traditions of Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse, there was always with Ruth (great admirer as she was of Jane Austen) whiffs of cold Scandinavian air.
This did not stop her being a breathtakingly skilful writer. She was the best crime novelist of her generation in any country and the sheer variety of what she wrote is staggering. Among her 80 or so books, I never found a dud.
When we met, she was a churchgoer and I was having doubts. Over a 30-year period, our positions reversed; I started going to church again, and she stopped. ‘I went into a church and simply said “goodbye”,’ she told me. ‘It is the terrible unfairness of life. How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives? That is the question which finishes it for me.’
She was born in South Woodford, essex, and attended the County High School For Girls, loughton. Her first job was on The Chigwell Times and, given deaths come aplenty in her books, there is a joyous paradox in how she lost the job.
As a cub reporter, she was supposed to cover a tennis club dinner but wrote her report without attending the dinner. Had she done so, she would have seen the speaker drop dead halfway through his speech.
THIS was the ultima t e sacking off ence, so s he resigned before she was pushed. However, her boss, who would have had to wield the axe, was also in love with the pretty half- Scandinavian girl and they married.
Don and Ruth had a difficult marriage. They moved house constantly; a sign of her discontent. They started in a ‘nasty little house’ (her description) in Chigwell. They lived in Suffolk and they had a succession of houses and flats in london, sometimes staying for as little as a year.
They divorced in 1975 but remarried in 1977. It was something she would never talk about in interviews.
They were clearly devoted to one another on one level but for Ruth writing always came first. They had a son, now a psychiatric social worker in Colorado. Fairly recently, in an interview, she was asked if she regretted not having more children. She replied, with typical candour: ‘No, I don’t think so.’
She was incapable of insin- cerity and this bluntness could appear r ude. At literary festivals, authors are expected to be performers and their public, who have paid for their books and paid to hear them, want them to sparkle. This was something Ruth resolutely refused to do and i f she considered a question stupid or unanswerable, she would either say so, or, even more disconcertingly, say nothing.
Her normal routine, if she was not at the House of lords in the evening, was to be in her night clothes by 7pm. She would then either write or work on her parliamentary papers until she fell asleep.
She was an extremely conscientious parliamentarian. She was one of the key figures in making it illegal to send young girls abroad for genital mutilation. She was deeply involved in the legislation relating to civil partnerships.
She would rise at five to write and there was never a time, since the day her first book From Doon With Death introduced the world to the leftleaning Inspector Wexford in 1964, when she was not crafting one of her incomparable stories. ‘ Wexford holds my views pretty well on most things, so I find putting him on the page easy,’ she said.
Wexford stories were mainstream whodunnits. Others are more psychological and do not necessarily have a detective, but there’s usually a murder. The Keys To The Street, one of my favourites, features a creepy man called Mr Bean who is a servant and a dog-walker.
His hatred of his employers, and his methods of punishing them, including urinating in their food, are related with quiet calm. When I asked her how she maintained the element of surprise in her stories, she said she sometimes started to write the story and, when it was three-quarters complete, she would change her mind about the killer’s identity.
UNDER the name Barbara Vine, she wrote a third category of book; much fuller, psychological thrillers or mysteries. Typical of these was The Child’s Child, in which a gay science teacher, in the days when homosexuality was frowned upon, meets pregnant 15-year-old, Maud, in the days when it was still a sin to have a child outside wedlock.
The teacher thinks he has the solution to two problems: Maud can move in with him and pretend they are married and that he is the baby’s father. They will thus be able to hide their secrets. Needless to say, everything goes horribly wrong.
It was a story which reflected her sense of the injustice of the world. As a refugee in the Cotswolds during World War II, she was in a village where a vicarage parlour maid became pregnant and, to hide her shame, killed herself.
When many of the ‘literary’ novelists of our time are forgotten, Ruth Rendell’s books will remain, and future generations will see that not only did she keep her readers on tenterhooks with every book, she also wrote stories which held up a mirror to her times.
She is an irreplaceable loss to literature.