Ruth Rendell R.I.P.

I learned of the sad news of the death of Ruth Rendell a few minutes before joining Katherine Hall Page for our "Malice Remembers" conversation about Patricia Moyes. We both felt that it was right to pay a brief tribute to Rendell before turning to Moyes, though breaking the news to audience members who were unaware of the loss of this great writer was bound to be a shock.

I've been a huge admirer of Ruth Rendell for many years, and I've often referred to her as my favourite living crime writer. I recall meeting Sophie Hannah for the first time when we were on a panel together in Runcorn, and an audience member asked me to name my favourite crime writers. I named Agatha Christie among those who were dead, and Rendell from among the living. Sophie - who had just published her first novel - exclaimed: "I was going to say that!" A shared enthusiasm is a good way to bond with a fellow author..

I'm sure that Rendell, along with her friend P.D. James, will be ranked as one of the great writers of popular fiction of the second half of the twentieth century. I enjoyed her Wexford novels, such as A Sleeping Life, but I enjoyed the non-Wexfords even more. A Judgement in Stone is a masterpiece, a crime genre cornerstone, and books like A Demon in My View and The Lake of Darkness almost equally brilliant. As if this wasn't enough, she proceeded to write stunning novels as Barbara Vine. My favourite is A Fatal Inversion, but the quality was invariably high. She wrote of particular,worlds - much bleaker and more restricted than, for instance, those of the great Reg Hill, who once gently teased her at an event I attended; Her books, unlike Reg's, seldom attempted humour, but she explored her favoured landscapes in utterly compelling fashion.

That wasn't all. She was an equally gifted short story writer, and when she tried her hand at a novella, the result, Heartstones, was characteristically excellent. For decades, she maintained an astonishingly high standard, despite being very productive. I cannot think of any prolific crime writer, with the possible exception of Reg himself, who has kept writing at anything like such a consistently high level for so long. Inevitably, as the twenty-first century dawned, she found it more difficult to avoid repeating herself and books such as The Saint Zita Society seemed to me to fall well short of her earlier, stellar achievements. Nevertheless, few crime novelists of the past fifty years have left such a wonderful legacy.

In my own writing, I like to pay occasional tributes to writers and other people whom I admire - Conan Doyle, Christie and so on. When I was planning The Arsenic Labyrinth, I conceived my version of a "Ruth Rendell type of sociopath" in the character of Guy. I loved writing about Guy, and I may return to that type of character one day. But of course, nobody could match Rendell..

One more thing. I never chatted to Ruth Rendell in person, but I corresponded with her, and on several occasions I invited her to contribute short stories to CWA anthologies that I was editing. Each and every time, she agreed readily, and authorised her agent to accept exactly the same - extremely modest - fee offered to other contributors. She did not attend CWA events, as far as I know, but she remained a member right to the end. I found her willingness to help truly admirable. and it's yet another reason why I respected her so much.

    

Yesterday's Papers Once More

This week sees the publication of Yesterday's Papers, my fourth Harry Devlin novel, as an Arcturus Crime Classic, not quite twenty years after its first appearance. Unusually, the book has been published by three different publishers as a mass market paperback over the years (there is also an ebook version with a wonderful intro by Peter Lovesey, as well as a paperback print on demand version.) Originally the publisher was Bantam. Later, when I moved publishers to Hodder, they reprinted the earlier titles including this one. It's also, in a way, a "cold case" story that anticipates elements of my Lake District Mysteries.

I'm especially gratified because this is a book for which I've always had a soft spot. If pushed, I'd say it's probably my personal favourite among the Devlin titles. I'm not one of those authors who disowns his earlier books, or feels unduly embarrassed about them - even though I'm the first to admit that I'd write them differently (in some respects) if I were writing them today. I must say that it's rare for me to re-read my earlier work, though I do have to do so occasionally (for instance, when checking proofs of new versions or checking facts for an article.) But the early books provide, in some ways, a snapshot of ideas and issues that were interesting me or concerning me at the time I wrote them. That's true of most novels, of course, and it's one of the reasons I find it so fascinating to investigate books of the past. They cast a light on the times when they were written, even if the author didn't intend to do so.

The story of my career as a writer is illustrated (or so I might think in darker moments0 by the story of Yesterday's Papers. I felt it was the most successful book I'd written to date, with lots of twists and quite a bit of humour, as well as a glance at the era of the Mersey Sound in Liverpool during the Sixties. Bantam had tried to promote me by pricing the books very competitively. But it didn't result in mega-sales, and a complication was that I had a separate hardback publisher, Piatkus. Yesterday's Papers, however, earned numerous glowing reviews in Britain and elsewhere, and was even one of only a couple or so of crime novels featured in The Sunday Times Paperbacks of the Year. I dreamed that this would boost sales - only to be told that Bantam had already decided not to publish me any more. A shame, because they are a top publisher, and I had a really nice editor, Francesca Liversidge. But these things happen in a writer's career, and one of the most corrosive emotions is self-pity. Frustrating as the writing life can be, it's also a great life. You have to get on and make the most of it. And before long, as I say, another good publisher, Hodder, and an excellent editor, Kate Lyall Grant, came along..

Against this background, the revival of Yesterday's Papers is really rather a Christmas treat for me. I still think the plot-lines are among the best I've managed to come up with. And I'm hoping that a new group of readers will enjoy discovering Harry Devlin, and will be entertained by a story that reaches back to a time when the songs of Liverpool were being sung the world over.

The Birthday Present

I’m a huge fan of Ruth Rendell, whether writing under her own name or as Barbara Vine, and I’ve often cited A Judgment in Stone and A Fatal Inversion as favourite titles. The Lake of Darkness and A Demon in My View are almost as brilliant. But it’s been a while since I’ve read anything by her. No particular reason for this, though I was disappointed by Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, while finding Thirteen Steps Down at least a partial return to form.

On holiday I read The Birthday Present, a Vine title, and I had mixed feelings about it. As ever, I admired the author’s insight into disturbed minds and the strange behaviour. The story has two narrators. One is the brother in law of an Old Etonian Tory MP whose sleazy behaviour during the Thatcher era when the Conservative Party dominated the British political scene is the catalyst for the book’s events. Ivor Tesham embarks on an affair with a married woman (who, in a nice touch, has changed her name from Hilda to Hebe) which ends in tragedy, and Hebe’s accidental killing in a car crash. Ivor fears exposure, and conceals the part he played in the events that led to her death. He is not really a criminal (unlike one or two real-life Tory MPs of the time) but his selfishness is portrayed with clinical distaste by Rendell (a Labour party donor who was herself elevated to the House of Lords, from where she has presumably contemplated the sleazy antics of contemporary politicians with similar contempt).

The other narrator is one of Hebe’s friends, a woman teetering on the brink of derangement. She knows Ivor’s secret, and one of the questions that teases the reader throughout is whether she will expose the politician, and thus destroy him. Rendell is very persuasive when she describes the thought processes of deranged people, and much of the book is very gripping.

However, there are weaknesses. The early pages are rather ponderous, and the finale seems unsatisfactory. There is a great deal of foreshadowing of future events, and at times this got on my nerves. If you’re looking for likeable characters, you won’t find many here, and I also thought there were a couple of gaping plot holes.

So, to my mind this is not a book to rank with Vine’s masterpieces. I venture to express various reservations simply because she is such a great writer that I think she has to be judged by the highest standards – not in quite the same way, at least for the purposes of a short blog review, as a debut or mid-list writer, or a purveyor of action thrillers. But I must emphasise that I really did enjoy reading it and, subject to those caveats, can recommend it warmly.