Murder and more

Ruth Rendell knows so many ways to tell a story you might count her as three or four writers. Her Inspector Wexford stories are probably her most popular works, especially after a long-running television series based on them. Her other mysteries are a bit more complicated, in that they usually have no fatherly detective to make it all better, and certainly no guarantee that a criminal will be identified or caught. You may get poetic justice, or you may not get even that.

Rendell also writes moody and thoroughly unpredictable novels, sometimes under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. They are not quite whodunits. The reader is more likely to ask, has anything been done at all? When will something happen? And will someone please tell me what is going on here?

 

She explores English low-life. Many of her characters are drop-out teens squatting in abandoned houses, petty thieves, slack-jawed men who live indefinitely on unemployment benefits, and husbands and wives made malicious by poverty. She also shows us the high-end low-life, the debtors, embezzlers, adulterers with a reputation to lose, and just plain greedy toffs who can’t wait for their inheritance. Naturally they kill each other. Decent folks are thin on the ground, and half the murders in these novels would be greeted with a resounding rah-rah.

Over and above all that, once in a while Rendell writes a novel that knocks you out into the stratosphere. The Chimney Sweeper’s Son is one of those, an atmospheric, purely psychological masterpiece that demands a revisit once every few years. Rendell’s canvas in this novel is far larger than crime and punishment. Rather, she creates the grander agonies of sin and retribution.

The Wexford novels, too, have sin enough to go along with more mundane crimes. Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford is intelligent but not an alarming genius, nor a maverick who intuitively leaps to brilliant solutions. As all detectives must, he has a sidekick, the gloomy and dandyish Mike Burden. Readers who get a thrill out of police procedure must get their jollies elsewhere. Wexford doesn’t seem to go for grim and methodical search parties or systematic trawls through old case files. Sometimes we wonder whether anyone at all is out looking for missing children and murder weapons.

Instead, we ramble leisurely through the crime scene in the larger sense, the social and psychological context in which a crime first became thinkable and then possible. We probe the minds of every suspect, victim, witness, detective and pub owner in the village of Kingsmarkham. We step around red herrings bigger than buses. We smell the wildflowers or watch the butterflies or hear the bird calls in the meadows. We meet Wexford’s two daughters, the one he loves more and the one he loves less. At some point, Wexford or Burden trip over something and that triggers a memory and so on, till they somehow get their man.

Woven into the stories are broader themes of domestic abuse, racism, the underground slave trade in Great Britain, and environmental activism gone rogue. These are whodunits for the thinking reader, and that reader would insist that Rendell richly deserves every one of her armoury of Gold, Silver and Diamond Daggers. We can’t simply forget the story once the puzzle is solved. There is so much more than murder here, and the characters haunt you for days afterwards.

Rendell’s latest Wexford novel, The Monster in the Box, came out last October. Over the set of 20 or so Wexford novels, she has painted a well-rounded picture of not just this individual but his entire community, from the mansions set well back from the road, where abuses go on in secret, to the raucous council estates, where women brawl in the street over a man. She is the George Eliot of crime fiction, having given us not just a story but a close imitation of life. As in life, we can never say what will happen next. n

Latha Anantharaman is a freelance writer and editor based in Palakkad