Modern Great: Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell’s police procedurals and psychological thrillers captured readers. Brook and Sarah discuss this award winning author’s life and works.

Discussed/References

Death Notes (US) / Put on by Cunning (UK) (1981) Ruth Rendell

A Dark Adapted Eye (1986) Barbara Vine

Master of the Moor (1982) Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell Mysteries (TV: 1987-2000)

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/01/ruth-rendell-life-in-writing

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/02/ruth-rendell-obituary-crime-writer

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-32564813

https://www.npr.org/2015/05/04/377740302/ruth-rendell-dies-pioneered-the-psychological-thriller

https://www.npr.org/2005/10/09/4948848/ruth-rendell-taking-readers-13-steps-down

https://www.npr.org/2005/10/12/4955766/ruth-rendell-is-back-with-13-steps-down

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Transcript

This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but sometimes errors slip through.

Sarah	Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah.
Brook	And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery.
Sarah	Hi, Brook.
Brook	Hi Sarah, I’m looking forward to continuing our Modern Greats series today.
Sarah	Me too, we’re going to be talking about Ruth Rendell or Rendell, and we can talk about how her name might be pronounced, who is credited with really starting the psychological thriller in crime fiction. I’ll begin with a little bio.
Sarah	Ruth Rendell was born in 1930 in Essex as the only child of a pair of teachers. She married at 20, having met her husband while they were both working as reporters, though the pair parted ways for a brief time in the 1970s. They eventually remarried. While she was raising their son, Rendell started writing mysteries. Her first book was published in 1964, and she would go on to publish over 70 novels under her own name and under the pen name Barbara Vine.
Sarah	Similar to other authors who release work under multiple names, there was a difference between what the two personas wrote. As Rendell, she focused on detective fiction and thrillers. As Vine, her tales were darker and slower, often exploring the story from the killer’s point of view. Whether she was writing as Rendell or Vine, she didn’t shy away from exploring the impact of social issues. In addition to her novels, she also published several short stories and saw many of her works adapted for television or translated. At the time of her death, over 60 million copies of her books had been sold. Rendell won her first awards in 1975, one from the Mystery Writers of America for a short story, and one from something called Current Crime for a novel, and I couldn’t find any more information about that.
Sarah	From then on, she won several awards, including the Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement from the Crime Writers of America in 1991, the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award in 1997, and the Mystery Inc. Gumshoe Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.
Sarah	In 1996, she was honored as a commander of the British Empire and in 1997, she was named Baroness Rendell of Babergh and made a life peer in the House of Lords. In her political life, as in her writing one, she focused on social issues. Rendell died in 2015 following a stroke.
Brook	Thanks, Sarah. um So let’s talk about her name for just a minute because we have seen, I’ll I’ll admit like anytime I’ve read it or I’ve you know seen her books in my head, it’s been Rendell, like Janelle or Pharrell. But um I was watching an interview on YouTube and the interviewer referred to her as Rendell. And so you and I looked into it and we’ve seen it both ways.
Sarah	That’s right. Yeah. I’ve, I’ve seen where I heard a couple of interviews where, uh, it was Rendell and others where it’s Rendell. And the audio book that I listened to, uh, it was Rendell. So, I don’t know, maybe she was fine with either pronunciation.
Brook	Exactly. Well, thank you for the summary. I think that her early life is really interesting that she was a news writer. She was a reporter. And we’ve seen that before. Anthony Berkeley, who’s, of course, one of the Golden Age authors, was also a reporter before turning to fiction crime author. But I found it interesting because with Berkeley, I remember you and I talked about how you could really see in his writing style the influence of news writing. And with Rendell, I feel like it’s sort of the opposite. She has a very beautiful and almost literary style.
Sarah	Yeah, I would, I would definitely agree that her style is literary. In several of the bios that I read about her, there was reference to a story where, as a reporter, she filed a story about, um I think it was a tennis club meeting, ah that she actually didn’t go to, but the main speaker at the event died on stage, and that obviously wasn’t in the story that she had filed, and so she ended up leaving the publication as a result.
Sarah	And and it it appeared in almost every um kind of summary of her life that that I looked at. And I thought it was really interesting because in a couple of other places, I saw reference to the fact that she didn’t do a lot of research. So clearly this was something that was true throughout her life.
Brook	Interesting. Yes, I came across that story as well and found it really humorous. um ah As someone who intended, I fully intended to become a journalist, a reporter. That’s where I thought my writing would take me someday. And um I cringed because I thought, oh, dear, you reported on it, but you didn’t attend. But you know maybe that’s something that she had had gotten good at and you know had pulled off in the past. So good for her, I guess.
Sarah	Yeah, and I mean, anyway, it it it is probably good that she didn’t continue in that career because she did end up then writing fiction. um And yeah, her first book was published in 1964. She earned a sum of 75 pounds, I believe it was for that first novel. And obviously there would have been some sales. She would have earned some money as a result of that. But I I think it’s really interesting that she had a very humble beginning to her career. And by the time she died, she was fantastically successful.
Brook	Exactly. And you know you mentioned those awards. She actually is still, I believe, the record holder for the most awards in crime fiction. So not only financially successful, but also like with her peers an acclaimed crime fiction author.
Sarah	That first book that she published introduced her series detective Reginald Wexford. But I thought it was really interesting that the next two books that she published were standalone novels.
Sarah	So it wasn’t until her fourth book that another um in her Wexford series was published. And throughout her career, she alternated one or two standalones with one or two series novels. And interspersed in there were some short story collections. So i I just think it’s really interesting that she, from the very beginning, wanted to explore different elements of crime writing.
Brook	Yeah, I didn’t realize that. I find that interesting as well. And I wonder if it is partly because, you know, in um interviews, she will discuss how she wasn’t necessarily interested in doing the very traditional whodunit kind of story. I mean, she did start with this detective and that in a sense you know, dictates that you’re going to have a ah somewhat of a whodunit. But she really liked the why and the motives behind. And so maybe that going back and forth between different types of stories um was a way to keep her creativity going so that she could investigate, you know, different things and not have to be that puzzle mystery, so to speak.
Sarah	Yeah, i I think that’s true. In one of the interviews that I read about her, it talks about how she didn’t want a kind of a tired detective. And she actually ah it talks about how his qualities are. She shares a lot of traits with her detective, right? They read the same kinds of things. They enjoy the same kinds of activities. She inserted herself a lot into her detective.
Brook	Yes. I enjoyed learning that because I think many times we hear the opposite. Somebody will interview an author and say, you know, is your character based on anyone? And they’ll say, “Oh, no, I just, you know, I don’t, I don’t do that. It’s an amalgamation.” But she did say that Wexford is like a male version of herself and, uh, her opinions then are shared on the page by Wexford. And I, I felt that was really interesting.
Sarah	And probably more honest than a lot of people are, right?
Brook	For sure.
Sarah	So one of the things, Brook, about Rendell is that she’s kind of credited with really creating the psychological suspense subgenre.
Brook	Right. And it’s a, it’s a marriage, isn’t it, of both the detective novel and, and that component because um it’s not just a domestic thriller. She does have the investigation, at least in the Wexford series going on. You know, I, I heard her speak about how she was feeling that, you know, in the, in the late sixties, we still have Agatha Christie novels coming out and they were still quite similar to the same style that Christie had written. And Rendell really felt like that idea of like the locked room or the small circle had run its course. She felt that it was stale and kind of done. And so I think that encouraged her to carry on crime fiction, but you know take it into something a little bit more modern and a little bit more um personal, maybe?
Sarah	Mm hmm.
Sarah	The other thing that I think she really tried to avoid was that what we think of as in traditional mysteries, you know, the small town and all of the um people dying all around the place. She was not a fan of Agatha Christie.
Brook	No, not at all. Actually in a New York Times 1995 article, she says, “I don’t like Agatha Christie. She wrote very badly. Her characters are not real and they are repeated over and over. Although I will acknowledge that she has the most wonderful ideas.” But I think that the problem comes back to what you said. It’s more of the the cozy mystery set up that she is not a fan of. She didn’t like there being a kind of haphazard, um, you know, the niece suddenly decides to kill her rich uncle. Because it comes back to what we said before that she wants there to be a why and a, an underlying psychological motive.
Sarah	Yeah, absolutely. I think she… as you said before, is really she was really focused on the reason behind the crimes. And I think that’s what allowed her to write her tales more slowly, right? Like to unravel her tales more slowly.
Brook	Mm-hmm.
Sarah	Because she’s exploring that, right? It’s not action, action, action, action. It’s you’re really in the heads of these characters.
Brook	Exactly, yeah. In that same um YouTube interview that I watched, she says that. She says, “Oh, I’m terrible about with the action scenes”. It’s just that where her strength lies, she wants to be, as you say, in their heads. I think that her ability to do that just makes her stories very captivating. Like you really want to turn the page.
Sarah	So did you read any of the bar Barbara Vine works that she wrote?
Brook	I didn’t. All I read to prepare so far is, um, in the U S it’s titled Death Notes and, um, it’s in the UK. That one is titled Put on by Cunning and it’s a 1981 Wexford novel. So right smack dab in the middle of that series. Um, did you read any Barbara vine?
Sarah	I started reading um the first one, which is A Dark Adapted Eye. And in it, so she talks about, I think from the beginning, she was very open about Barbara Vine being her pen name, right? It wasn’t something that she was keeping secret. And in it she wrote, “For a long time I have wanted Barbara to have a voice as well as Ruth. It would be a softer voice speaking at a slower pace, more sensitive perhaps, and more intuitive. In A Dark Adapted Eye she found that voice. There would be nothing surprising to a psychologist in Barbara’s choosing as she asserts herself to address readers in the first person.”
Sarah	And apparently, um her mother’s side of the family called her Barbara because Barbara was her mother’s choice of name for her. Ruth was her father’s choice. And so she, for her entire life, kind of had these two personas.
Brook	Oh, that’s fascinating. Yes, it was actually her her middle name. Her second name was Barbara. But I didn’t realize that certain members of her family actually called her that. That’s so interesting. And she did say, you know, those books are very different. She admits that the voice is very different from one name to the other. And that just simply by knowing that she was working on a Barbara Vine book, that it would happen. She almost like kind of became that other identity to write those books.
Brook	In the different um interviews or ah articles that we’ve read, I really got the picture that this was a very, um, reticent, kind of cool, elegant woman, you know, maybe even a little prickly, like with interviewers and, um, and the public in general, which is maybe why there’s not for some people, you can just find lots and lots of information. And and it was a pretty small menu to choose from for Ruth Rendell.
Sarah	Yeah, I I would agree. Given how popular her writing is, there really wasn’t a lot that has been written about her. um So I think you’re right. I think she was a little hesitant to um give interviews. I did see her reading from her books. But yeah, I think just, I think she appreciated being a private person. There was one interview that I read where she talks about that, you know, she doesn’t really get recognized on the street and she’s quite fine with that.
Brook	Well, whether she would appreciate this or not, that is something she shared with Agatha Christie, who also wanted to just be private and ah and and not have a ah big public persona.
Sarah	Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Brook	I I liked learning and it seems to go along with the personality traits we were just talking about that she had a very specific um writing schedule. She would start writing at the same time every day and end at the same time every day. And I think that that’s a little unique to her as well from compared to some of the other people that we’ve chatted about.
Sarah	Well, that’s interesting. I didn’t uncover that. So that is um that is really interesting. What time of day did she start writing?
Brook	She did not share that, but she said she ate the same thing every day whenever she was at home and she would walk 11 miles a week.
Sarah	So I did read that she spent a lot of time walking and I think that was, and we’ve seen this before when we’ve talked about other authors, that was her opportunity to kind of really turn over the story, right? Um was while she was walking.
Brook	Absolutely. And also, um you know, observe the world because that’s something else that I think her writing because she does you get so deep into someone’s psyche, she really understood people and relationships. And um she was definitely, I think, a people watcher when she was out there walking.
Sarah	She didn’t have any formal umm training. And you know she started working as a reporter after high school. So she didn’t go to university or college. So I think it’s really remarkable the way that she just had that ability to understand people.
Brook	Yeah, that’s an excellent point. I I hadn’t put that together, but you’re right. She didn’t have any education after after high school. um Yeah, that’s that’s amazing.
Brook	How about adaptations, Sarah? I know that some of her work has been brought to the screen.
Sarah	There was a series that was produced called Ruth Rendell Mysteries, and several of the Wexford stories were televised. As well as several of the standalones and there I found them on Britbox and watched one of each one of the standalones and one of the Wexford stories and I enjoyed them and yeah I mean they were done in the I say the late 90s. I think were very popular at the time that they were released on on TV.
Brook	So, in one thing I read Sarah, it was this interviewer was posing that her novels aren’t crime fiction novels at all. They’re literary novels that happen to have crimes in them. Where do you fall on that? Where do you think they, they are on the spectrum?
Sarah	So I would probably agree if we’re not talking about the Wexford novels. Right. Because I I think those I read a couple of those and they follow what we would consider the traditional kind of detective um sequence of events. Right. There’s a crime. The detectives are called in. They interview people. They solve it.
Brook	Mhmm.
Sarah	But I read The Master of the Moor, which is one, it it is not a Vine novel, but it was written shortly before she published her first Vine novel. And so, like, I think it probably could have been a Vine novel because it was really, really slow. You’re in the the mind of the um of the killer, but it takes a long time to get there. And it was, I mean, beautiful descriptions of setting and and really interesting to think about kind of how this character interacted with people. But it wasn’t, it definitely wasn’t like a lot of the other books that we read under the mystery umbrella.
Brook	Yeah, very interesting. And having only read a Wexford, you know, in my opinion, they are crime. They are crime novels, but with a very literary feel for sure. And the other author that came to mind that’s maybe our contemporary, uh, compatible author is Louise Penny. I feel like those, uh, those novels are very similar because you still are are in a detective story, but just very beautiful and a little slower paced and you know a lot of description.
Sarah	Yeah, so in this one interview that I read, she talks about creating suspense. “I think one looks at great fiction and sees how that is done. Think about Emma,” she says. “We know there is something strange about Jane Fairfax, but it’s not until very far on that we realize that all the time she’s been engaged to Frank Churchill. It’s done in masterly fashion. There’s nothing clumsy about it. Nothing appears to be contrived, and it’s done by withholding. Some new writers will tell you everything in the first chapter. Everything is thrown in, and so there’s nothing to wonder about, nothing to speculate about.”
Sarah	That said, a lot of her opening lines were telling you exactly what’s going to happen and then taking the whole book to get to that point.
Brook	Yes, actually that thought came to me as soon as you read that quote, I was like, oh my goodness, but I can think of some examples where she does that. Uh, but I think that it’s withholding just enough to create that suspense. And I like, I love the word speculation because that’s something that we want to do, right? When we’re reading, I, I find myself, well, maybe it’s this, well, maybe it’s that. And that’s that feeling that keeps you pushing forward.
Sarah	Yeah. Yeah, she was really interesting to learn about. She’s one of those authors that I had not read any of her work, despite her being incredibly popular.
Brook	And that was the same for me. I’m I’m actually surprised. And as I read this story, I thought, you know, this is the era of detective novels that I really came up on. The 80s and 90s is when I really started reading a lot of it. And I’m surprised but happy that I that I finally read. ah And happy that I finally read some Ruth Rendell. And we’ll probably check out the Barbara Vine as well.
Sarah	Well, thanks for this conversation, Brook. It’s been really fascinating to discuss someone who is, you know, one of the, not the pioneer, but certainly a leader in crime writing.
Brook	It was great, Sarah. Thank you for another wonderful conversation and thank you all for joining us today on Clued In Mystery. I’m Brook.
Sarah	And I’m Sarah and we both love mystery.