High Crimes and High Art
Once again, Ruth Rendell proves she’s an unparalleled master of the crime thriller
by Michael Sims
Every time a genre writer surpasses her peers and reaches a consistently high level of performance, reviewers start claiming that she “transcends the genre.” I committed this reviewer sin myself, back in 1999 in this very publication, when I reviewed Ruth Rendell’s 18th Inspector Wexford novel, Harm Done. Let me revise myself: Ruth Rendell does not transcend her genre. She demonstrates what genre writing is capable of at its highest level.
Rendell has two distinct—and only occasionally overlapping—audiences. Fans of psychological suspense devour her crime novels, written under her own name and the pseudonym Barbara Vine, but don’t necessarily care for the more literary and socially responsible novels about Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford of the Kingsmarkham CID. Wexford followers, in turn, often skip the other books. Surprisingly, her works in both categories are acclaimed as the best in the field. Her crime novels almost reach the claustrophobic heights of Patricia Highsmith. And her detective stories leave every one of her colleagues gritting their teeth in her dust—even the other elderly Englishwoman dubbed “the queen of crime,” P. D. James. Unlike James, Rendell doesn’t meander off into pages of describing characters who turn out to be utterly irrelevant to the story. Nor does she carefully shape a convincing narrative and then let it go all to Hollywood hell in the final pages.
End in Tears opens with what seems a random act of violence; a concrete block thrown off a bridge kills the driver of a passing car. Then a young woman named Amber Marshalson is found murdered. At first, Wexford and his colleagues investigate these incidents separately, but soon they realize that the two crimes are linked, that the first may also have been an attempt on Amber’s life. What could this young woman have been doing to inspire such hatred? How could she have acquired so much hidden cash? The investigation peers into even more layers of English society than Rendell usually squeezes into a book.
In some ways, this book unites Rendell’s authorial personae, merging thriller-writer and detective novelist. For example, the book opens with a cheating glimpse of the murderer—cheating because we follow a character’s movements, and even conversation, without getting a description or any other identifying information. This gimmick—an attention-grabbing but essentially unrevealing opening—is a staple of crime fiction, but Rendell seldom resorts to it.
We also spend time with several characters, witnessing the incidents from various points of view rather than merely following Wexford and his resourceful assistant, Mike Burden. Hannah Goldsmith is an amusing newcomer to the Kingsmarkham force. Always obsessed with language, Rendell pits Goldsmith’s insistent political correctness against Wexford’s old-fashioned ways: “Hannah gave him the sort of look she kept for a middle-aged man who still called the woman he had married his wife.” When Goldsmith becomes involved with a fellow officer, Baljinder Bhattacharya, she catches herself in an embarrassing morass of preconceptions about race—and of course in more trouble than she imagined.
End in Tears is the 20th Inspector Wexford novel. Readers who have followed the series—or gone back and reread the books in order, as I have—witness an evolving portrait of England during the last half of a tumultuous century and into a new millennium. Kingsmarkham is policed by the Mid-Sussex Constabulary, and the suburban counties south of London have no more attentive chronicler than Ruth Rendell. Without sentimentality, without sermonizing—although not without sadness and anger—she watches the degradation of ecosystems, the decline of schools, the rise of juvenile delinquency and the abandonment of the poor, and incorporates them all into her stories.
Over the course of so many books Rendell has returned, of course, to favorite themes. She writes often about the confusing frontiers of gender and sexuality—one gender masquerading as the other, mistaken identifications, misplaced affections. She is also charmingly preoccupied with, and impressively knowledgeable about, the natural stage behind the human dramas. Rendell is precisely observant about parent/child relationships, and this theme plays a major role in her new book. “Children,” she writes, “appeared to be treated in a very cavalier fashion by some of these people, easily conceived, no doubt, but easily disposed of once born, yet this in a time when ‘the family’ was spoken of with more weight and reverence than had perhaps ever been accorded it before.”
End in Tears, while lively and entertaining and a small joy to any Wexford devotee, is not the best book in the series. It is a bit more formulaic, a bit less polished. For any other writer it would be a triumph, but for Rendell it is merely another Wexford case. It’s worth mentioning, however, that among the Wexford novels are several masterpieces. Over the decades, Rendell has become increasingly committed to exploring the familiar tragedies of everyday news, instead of “merely” crafting some of the most ingenious plots ever devised and unfurling them in fluent prose. These later books include Harm Done (on the theme of domestic violence), The Babes in the Wood (fundamentalist religion) and the astonishing magnum opus Simisola (not a whit of whose perfect plot, or even theme, will be revealed here). Earlier notable successes include Death Notes and the masterful A Sleeping Life. Long ago Inspector Wexford joined the ranks of the immortals. Longtime readers now await each installment as eagerly as Sherlock Holmes fans clamored for the latest issue of the Strand magazine.
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