Ruth Rendell: Wolf to the Slaughter (1967)

Edition: Arrow, 1982
Review number: 1061

When a woman goes missing and the Kingsmarkham police receive an anonymous note alleging that she was murdered, Wexford and Burden launch an investigation into the seedier side of English market town Kingsmarkham. (Burden feels, with his conservative outlook, that an unmarried woman who sleeps around should expect trouble.) A human side to the story is provided by the romance which develops between one of their junior subordinates, hitherto strongly focused on his career, and the daughter of a local villain.

Pretty typical of Rendell's Wexford novels, Wolf to the Slaughter is a short and enjoyable traditional detective story.

Ruth Rendell: An Unkindness of Ravens (1985)

Edition: Arrow, 1988 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 772

When a neighbour's husband goes missing, Rendell's detective Wexford is reluctant to investigate. But what seems initially likely to be a case of a man going off with another woman turns out to be more complex, as he is revealed to have been a bigamist and as it becomes clear that no member of either family actually liked him very much.

As a murder mystery, An Unkindness of Ravens is neither particularly memorable nor difficult to solve (though it relies on something which is likely to be very obscure in a few years). As a novel, however, it is principal notable for its distinctly unfavourable portrayal of militant feminism. While Rendell herself was reasonably liberal, she was anti-extremist, and there are several of her novels with similar portrayals of, say, New Age travellers and the like. The issues of feminism pervade the whole novel: the most interesting character is the wife of Wexford's sidekick Mike Burden, who is pregnant and is shocked to find that, despite her belief that women are equal to men, she's really unhappy when an amniocentesis declares the unborn child to be a girl rather than a boy. The conflict between her conscious beliefs and something deeply felt - presumably conditioned by her cultural background - could be made more of, but that would overbalance what is meant to be a murder mystery and Rendell wisely leaves it alone, even at the cost of making the character less believable.

Ruth Rendell: Vanity Dies Hard (1965)

Alternate title: In Sickness and in Health
Edition: Arrow, 1984
Review number: 298

In general, Ruth Rendell's Wexford novels are better than the others; Vanity Dies Hard is an exception to this. It is perhaps rather over-extended, a problem that frequently seems to afflict Rendell; it is too much a one idea piece of work to be a top class novel. However, it is gripping, and the idea is very interesting, an unusual variation on the 'woman's fears that something strange is going on are dismissed as hysterical' theme.

Alice Whittaker is rich and beautiful, recently married to a younger man, but still terribly insecure. Her close friend Nesta Drage has recently moved away, but the letters received from her are strange - and type written (a skill Nesta does not possess). Sensing something wrong, Alice goes in search of Nesta, only to discover that her letters have been going to a non-existent address. This makes the fact that she received replies to them seem really strange, and prompts further investigation. When Alice begins to be sick after every meal, she becomes convinced that Nesta was poisoned, and that her murderer is now poisoning Alice's own food.

Since all this is familiar territory for the thriller genre - it is the ending which is unusual about this story - it could be sketched in far more quickly with at least equal effectiveness. Rendell introduces episode after episode to increase our belief that Alice is indeed hysterical, but that on the other hand something is going on. The writing is skilful enough that negative reactions only occur on reflection by the reader. While actually reading the novel, you are drawn in. The fact that the book is over-extended, and the subsidiary faults which make this the case (Alice is a little too hysterical to be believable, the sequence of events which convince her that someone is trying to kill her a little too fantastic) are only obvious later.

Ruth Rendell: The Speaker of Mandarin (1984)

Edition: Arrow
Review number: 40



This is a short member of the Inspector Wexford series of crime novels. The first half describes a holiday he had in China; the second his investigation of the murder of a middle-aged woman who was on a coach-party he met there.

The description of the trip to China is the most interesting part of the novel; the murder and investigation seem almost to have been put in to pad the novel out and to fit it in with the general themes of the series.

The juxtaposition of the two parts does mean that the novel suffers from the complaint I particularly dislike about Ngaio Marsh: the strange coincidence which means the investigator meets the victim beforehand.

The mystery also has a rather abrupt ending, and is rather unsatisfactory; to explain why I would have to give it away. In conclusion, there are better Wexford books, but the description of a holiday in China before these were commonplace is worth reading.