No More Dying Then

Ruth Rendell's Wexford novels are a bit like Law & Order - not particularly interested in the characters' personal lives, but over the course of the series, you realize you know them fairly well. Before 1971's No More Dying Then, Wexford's partner Mike Burden was a by-the-book, somewhat prudish policeman. Unlike his superior, he's not a reader and Wexford's literary allusions are lost on him. Like Wexford, he was happily married with two children.

The Burden we meet in No More Dying Then is a changed man. As the desk sergeant says in the opening chapter, Jean Burden had been healthy a year earlier and dead by Christmas. In the intervening 10 months, Burden had a near-breakdown and then buried himself in his work, ignoring his pre-teen children and taking Jean's sister Grace, who'd taken a leave of a absence from her nursing career to help out, for granted.

When 5-year-old John Lawrence disappears, Burden disapprovingly interviews his mother.  She's a single mother and former bit-part actress, but more than that, she's wearing patchwork dresses and long hair and wrapping herself in shawls. In other words, she doesn't look totally unlike my vague 1971 memories of my grad-student mother. while Burden becomes too enmeshed in Mrs. Lawernce's life, Wexford tries to find a link between John Lawrence's disappearance and that of Stella Rivers. Wexford can't get past his suspicions of Stella's stepfather, Ivor Swan. Information from local criminal Monkey Matthews leaves Wexford to an unexpected solution while Burden solves his case through a forgivable coincidence.  I'm looking foraged to the next Wexford novel, not just because Rendell creates intriguing quizzes, but because I want to know what comes next for Mike Burden.