Speaker of Mandarin

 Ruth Rendell was a product of her time. Still, by the early 80s I knew that the L-for-R switch to connote a native Chinese speaker using English was at best cringe and generally unacceptable - and I was a tween, not an established novelist. This may have colors my view of Speaker of Mandarin but beyond that, it's not Rendell's best.

Inspector Wexford is on a tour of China. He's supposedly there s part of his London detective nephew's retinue, discussing policing, but once established, Rendell drops this. He's dealing with a stereotypically devoted party member guide and attached to a tour group from the UK. He's also hallucinating a woman old enough to have bound feet following him. 

A few months later, Wexford is called to investigate the death of one of the tourists he met in China. adela Knighton was shot at point blank range in the back of her head, and her jewelry is missing. While Mike Burden investigates the tour group and potentially disgruntled patients of Alan Knighton, Wexford focuses on her family, gaining insight from her lifelong friend.

The Knighton "had" to get married, and for years it was an outwardly satisfactory arrangement - Adela raised their four children while Alan rose in his career. In her friend's words, though, Adela "only had a husband in the sense that he slept next to her." Then, something changed.

None of this seems to connect and it doesn't play into the solution. Both the "hallucination" (which, of course, has a much better explanation than too much green tea) and the murder are solved by coincidence and not ones that are particularly interesting. i try to read entire series, but if you're wandering around the Wexford novels, you can probably skip Speaker of Mandarin.

Death Notes

 In Murder by Death Lionel Twain accuses the characters (based on Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Charlie Chan, Nick and Nora Charles, and Sam Spade) of cheating. I'm not familiar with the last three, but I can't think of a book where Christie cheated. She may have made it look like she did, but trace back through the clues and she supported her conclusions.

Death Notes, however, shows that even the masters like Ruth Rendell can cheat. Sir Michael Camargue was murdered shortly before marrying a woman younger than his estranged daughter (and a casual friend of Reg Wexford's actress daughter Sheila, whose banns are read at the same service). Did his daughter kill him for the inheritance? Or was someone impersonating her? Wexford travels to California ostensibly on vacation to solve the mystery...and then it turns out everything he learned there was irrelevant. I enjoyed parts of the book (Mike Burden has remarried since the last book and he's more relaxed than in the early books as well as becoming more well-rounded through his wife's interests, and it was entertaining to watch Wexford deal with jealousy when he and his wife met up with her old flame and his wife in California), but the ending was unsatisfying enough to affect the entire book.

Vanity Dies Hard

 I shouldn't be so surprised that the first half or so of Ruth Rendell's novels feel so old. Vanity Dies Hard was written 56 years ago, putting it only a year or two closer to today than The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was when I read it in high school. But by the time I discovered her, Agatha Christie was dead and Rendell was only halfway through her career when I picked up her first Barbara Vine novel 30 years ago.

Rendell was a psychological novelist, with motivations more important at times than the actual mystery. But science and society evolve, making Vanity Dies Hard hard to review today. The plot is simple - wealthy but drab Alice Whittaker married a younger man at 37, and after her friend disappears, she believes she's being poisoned by someone. Well, it doesn't take a detective to discover why a 37-year-old newlywed might suddenly feel "unwell" so despite Rendell's talent for creepiness, I never though Alice was truly in danger. I was intrigued by the fate of her glamorous friend Nesta, though, but less so than I was by questions about the framework. Why was Andrew Fleming essentially forced to quit his job and join the family firm when he married Alice? Why was Alice's first assumption poison and not pregnancy? How desperately dull life was for affluent women for whom there was no expectation of even becoming educated just for the sake of knowledge. And how accurate is this portrayal of mid-1960s small town England?

A Sleeping Lie

There's a four year gap between the publication of Shake Hands Forever and A Sleeping Lie but the England of 1979 in which Inspector Wexford lives feels further in the past. Wexford's older daughter Sylvia has left her husband over her desire to start a career, and that (along with the fact that she'd married at 18) feels like it belongs to the early rather than late 70s. As does her return home after the purchase of a dishwasher.

Wexford's domestic life ends up providing him with the lightbulb moment that solves the murder of Rhoda Comfrey. Miss Comfrey was stabbed to death after visiting her hospitalized father, but there's no proof of her existence other than her corpse. Or of the novelist whose wallet she's inexplicably carrying. Moving between London and Kingsmarkham, Wexford and DI Mike Burden try to flesh out the life of a woman who all but disappeared after winning a football pool and to trace a man who was apparently born in his 20s. After an embarrassing (but amusing) mistake, Wexford's actress daughter Sheila unwittingly provides the final piece of information Wexford needs.

Shake Hands Forever

There's something wrong about the widower's response. Inspector Wexford can't get past Robert Hartnell's odd reaction to his mother's discovery of his wife's strangled corpse. There's no evidence against him; no evidence against anyone for that matter. The house has been completely cleaned, leaving only two handprints, that of the landlord on the inside of a seldom used cupboard and on the bathtub that of a woman with an L-shaped scar on her forefinger. No one in Kingsmarknam knew the Hartnells so who could possibly have a motive? No, Hartnell had to be having an affair and plotted with his lover to kill his wife. 

But there's no evidence and Hartnell complained to Wexford's superior, so he has to investigate on his own time. With the help of his nephew Howard, Mike Burden, informant Ginge Matthews, and a lucky break involving the disappearance of a young woman in a neighboring town, Wexford manages to piece together what happened, including a well supported twist ending. 

Some Lie and Some Die

Mike Burden tries. As Some Lie and Some Die opens, he's the single parent of two teenagers, not quite ready to admit that they're becoming self-sufficient while cringing at their taste in music. The latter part plays into Ruth Rendell's eighth Inspector Wexford mystery. John Burden's favorite singer, ZenoVedast is the headline act at a music festival just outside Kingsmarkam and when two attendees who'd snuck off for a bit of privacy stumble across a woman's body, Wexford finds himself wondering about the odd relationship among Zeno, the singer's manager, and the manager's wife. Rendell includes her usual twist ending and psychological motive, but as her books become a bit more modern, so do the motives. She also includes her usual middle-class scorn for working-class people, but it's a bit muted here compared to the early books.

Murder Being Once Done

 Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford novel feel older than they are - or maybe I just don't realize that 1972, a year in which I have a few memories, is so far in the past. Rendell's and Wexford's, attitudes, though come from a prior era. The poor are always dirty - not just in a squalid neighborhood but lacking in personal hygiene as well. And their criminality is assured

Murder Being Once Done Begins with Wexford on a doctor prescribed break with his nephew in London. Hovered over by his wife and niece, he's bore to tears until he comes across a crime shene while on a walk - a crime where his nephew, Howard, a Detective Superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, is the lead investigator. Lovejoy Morgan appears to be a "good girl," too sheltered to hold all but the most menial job, yet her postmortem shows that she'd given birth within the year. Wexford takes on the task fo finding her identity and her killer. Succeeding through a combination of grunt work and luck - but not after getting a very wrong answer that was somehow connected to the truth. I enjoyed how Rendell placed the surprise twist in an unusual place but found the killer's identity somewhat unbelievable. There's also the psychology. Rendell was known as one of the first mystery writers to bring psychology into the genre, but it feels, dated, simplistic at times, and seen through Rendell's upper-middle class British lens. The Wexford series, and most of Rendell's books, feel like a time capsule - enjoyable but somehow her London is more remote than Miss Marple's St. Mary Mead.

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.

A Sight for Sore Eyes

When I first started reading the non-Wexford books Ruth Rendell wrote under her own name rather than as Barbara Vine, I thought that the distinction between the two was that the Vine books were weirder, perhaps a bit creepy.  A Sight for Sore Eyes breaks that theory - it's the strangest of the books I've read so far by her, under either name, and Teddy Brex is possibly the creepiest protagonist I've met.

Teddy's parents married because his mother found a ring. Raised (barely) in squalor by his scrounging, apathetic parents and co-existing with his uncle, his fastidiousness goes unobserved, even by the neighbor who inspires his artistic talents. At a graduation exhibition, he meets Francine Hill who at 7 was the earwitness to her mother's murder and has since come under the control of her father's second wife, a psychologist who'd quit before being struck off. Her stepmother's obsessive protection leads Francine into a relationship with Teddy, and it's not a surprise to find out that this relationship leads to several deaths, including one of the most surprising twists I've read in a long time.

The Best Man to Die

I'd been waiting for one of Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford mysteries to grab me, and The Best Man to Die succeeded.  A bit less obviously psychological (popular understanding of motivations has evolved since the year I was born), it also introduces Wexford's drama-student daughter Sheila.

Sheila, and the dustmop of a dog she's watching for a friend, add a bit of levity to a pair of apparently unconnected mysteries.  Charlie Hatton was supposed to be best man at his friend Jack Pertwee's wedding.  Instead, someone killed him after he left the stag night at the local pub.  Wexford came across his body (and Maurice Cullum, one of the revelers and suspects) while walking Sheila's temporary dog.  While he spends his Saturday interviewing the wedding party, Inspector Burden goes to the hospital to interview the lone survivor of a car crash.  Mrs. Fanshaw, however, insists that her daughter wasn't in the car when her husband ran off the road.  If so, who was the young woman found burnt almost beyond recognition in the wreckage? As Wexford investigates the Hatton murder, he begins to suspect that the dead man's blackmail scheme connects to the fatal crash, but how?  There's an easy to miss, but obvious once it's mentioned twist which neatly (but not too neatly) solves the case, and a bit of comic tension (it's hard to explain without spoiling) which adds to the final pages.  Now I understand why the Wexford novels have remained so popular.

The Rottweiler

I love most of Ruth Rendell's novels written as Barbara Vine, but didn't start reading the works she published under her own name until a few years ago.   I'm not sure why The Rottweiler wasn't published under the Vine pseudonym, because it feels more like The House of the Stairs or King Solomon's Carpet than the non-series books written as Ruth Rendell.  While entertaining and well-written, The Rottweiler is a bit to self-consciously eccentric, tying together several disparate (and one quite depressing) threads.

The Rottweiler is the name given by the press to a serial killer.  He strangles young women, takes a memento, and hides their bodies.  We quickly learn his identity, but not quite as quickly as his landlady, Inez.  A 50ish widow, she runs an antique shop and rents three of the four apartments above it.  Her assistant Zeinab has a loose relationship with punctuality and two rich fiancees, and her tenants (a woman with a fake Russian accent and an affable boyfriend who pretends not to live there, a mentally disabled young man named Will, and a computer consultant) wander in and out of the plot, along with Will's aunt Becky, his boss and his boss's sister, a theft ring, Zeniab's family, Becky's romantic target, and an enthusiastic but less-than-competent police detective.  It sprawls and doesn't quite mesh (Will's and Becky's story is much sadder than the other's, and Zeniab's includes one unexpected and hilarious scene), and relies a bit too much on coincidence.  I'm not sure if I've decided to never read it again (and donate my copy), or re-read it in a few years to see if my opinion was influenced by the personal upheaval I was dealing with while reading this book.

A Guilty Thing Surprised

Several books in, I'm still not sure how I feel about Ruth Rendell's Wexford mysteries.  They're compelling and well-crafted, but the psychology she used so well in her stand alone novels (both written under her own name and as Barbara Vine) feels archaic.

Elizabeth and Quentin Nightingale are the Lady and Lord of the Manor, owners of Mayfleet Manor and the social pinnacle of the community.  When Elizabeth's body is found in the woods, Quentin is a natural suspect.  He's not the only one - a recently patrolled murderer is in town, and Elizabeth and Quentin both had an odd relationship with her brother and sister-in-law.  While I followed the reasoning and psychology and enjoyed the "detection," I still feels like it falls into the uncanny valley.  I'm going to keep reading the Wexford novels because I enjoy them, but I hope that they begin to feel more natural as Wexford enters the 80s.

Wolf to the Slaughter

An artist, his missing sister, a recently released criminal,  and a cop's obsession with a shopgirl.  That's what Ruth Rendell used to frame her third Inspector Wexford novel, Wolf to the Slaughter.  Artist Rupert Margolis reported his sister Ann missing the same day that Wexford received a letter claiming that a woman named Ann had been murdered.  Rupert is neither helpful nor worried (he reported Ann's disappearance by asking the police to find someone to clean his house), and Wexford looks down on the Margolis siblings (Rupert is too disconnected to reality and Ann gets a bit of slut-shaming).  Still, he can't let a possible murder go uninvestigated, particularly since Monkey Matthews is out of jail.  While I found the psychology (Rendell's trademark) a bit out of date, I appreciated her surprising but well-supported plot twists.  The world she depicted is still a bit too foreign for me, but Wolf to the Slaughter was an extremely enjoyable novel.

Sins of the Fathers

A few weeks ago, I realized that fiction written in the last third of the 20th Century can fall into an uncanny valley.  It's familiar but foreign.  I filter most of the 1970s through childhood and the 1980s through the inward focus of a teenager and college student, but I recognize the landmarks.  Ruth Rendell's early novels fall slightly outside that range.  They're not-quite-old movies and TV shows I saw on UHF channels on rainy weekends.

Rendell was rightly lauded for bringing a psychological edge to the mystery novel, but it makes her earlier works rather dated.  Henry Archery's son is engaged to the daughter of a convicted murderer.  A brilliant and charming Oxford student, she can't (according to the common knowledge of the day) be the child of such a brute.  Using this logic, Archery asks Inspector Wexford to reopen the case, one of Wexford's first, and exonerate Herbert Painter of the viscous murder of his employer, the elderly Mrs. Primero.  Rendell provides us, and Archery, with alternative suspects (the victim's grandson, an unstable local woman) and motivations (money), but the twist is itself a twist.  The conclusion of Sins of the Fathers conforms to the beliefs of the day, but upends two things that we think we know at the start of the book.

The Face of Trespass

I'm still not sure why Ruth Rendell's editors asked her to use a pseudonym for her later psychological thrillers.  The Barbara Vine books are a bit deeper, and maybe more likely to be written from a female POV, but the tone is similar.  Who committed a crime doesn't seem as important as why, her narrators may not be reliable, and there's often a twist at the end.

Rendell frames The Face of Trespass with brief scenes featuring a newly elected MP.  At an alumni function, an old friend mentions a schoolmate of theirs, Gray Lanceton, who published a novel and is now living in the MP's district.  Lanceton is living in semi-squalor, minding another classmate's home (rurally placed yet within a few miles of London) and experiencing complete writers' block in the wake of a breakup.  Drusilla wanted Gray to kill her husband; he refused, ending the affair and his ability to write.  He's scraping by on ever-decreasing royalties when his mother's second husband calls him to France to attend her deathbed.  This trip, along with a promise to watch a dog for a vacationing family friend, lead him to call Drusilla for help and eventually to his arrest for the murder of Drusilla's husband in Gray's home.  We know he didn't (couldn't have) committed the murder, but who did?

I enjoyed Rendell's depiction of a tatty, squat-filled, 1970s London, made hazier by the obvious unraveling of her narrator's mental state.  The murder's identity is obvious, and we watch Gray walk through a London neighborhood miles from the murder site.  So why does The Face of Trespass work so well?  It's because Rendell so tightly plotted her mystery, and because the dread I felt as I saw an innocent man stumbling towards a certain murder conviction.

The Bridesmaid

I've had The Bridesmaid on my shelf for decades, since it's early-90s printing.  The book is a bit of a time capsule, a slim trade paperback with the Mysterious Press logo and a form on the back page to subscribe to The Armchair Detective.  The late-80s London depicted in the novel is also a bit of a throwback; a reminder that the exotic locale of my teenage Anglophilic dreams was a bit down at the heels after years of social and economic upheaval.

Phillip Wardman lives in this downtrodden London with his sisters and widowed mother.  He's mildly obsessed with a statue in his mother's garden and has an unnatural aversion to violence and death, obsessions which collide in the first chapter as he carries the statue to his mother's paramour's house after hearing about the abduction of his sister's former classmate.  The date (which includes all three children) does not go well and Phillip assumes he's seen the last of the statue.

A few weeks later, at his sister Fiona's wedding, Phillip meets the statute come to life.  Bridesmaid Senta Pelham is an aspiring actress who bears a freakish resemblance to Phillip's lost statue and the two begin an affair when Senta returns to the Wardman house to change back into her ordinary clothes.  As they grow closer, Philip gradually realizes that Senta has trouble distinguishing truth from fiction, but that there's just enough truth in her stories that he can't dismiss them outright.  Combined with her obsessive love, this leads Phillip to claim to have committed murder.  Senta then claims to have killed for Phillip - but has she, and whom has she killed?

Rendell used her Barbara Vine pseudonym to distinguish her psychological mysteries from the more straightforward ones.  While reading The Bridesmaid, I wondered why this one was published under her real name.  It features a narrator with imperfect insight into and knowledge of an unstable potential murderer, but there's something missing.  Perhaps it's the fact that the solution (which I guessed too early for my taste) is clear-cut.  I still don't know the identity of Jamie's mother, but I easily connected the deaths in The Bridesmaid.

To Fear a Painted Devil

Before she started writing psychological thrillers as Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell made regular detours into that sub-genre.  To Fear a Painted Devil is one of her earliest non-Wexford novels, and while interesting, the psychology doesn't stand up to the passage of 50 years.  Patrick and Tasmin Selby are replacement gentry - wealthy, aloof, married first cousins (as normal as that seemed to Jane Austen's characters, I'm assuming it was unusual by the 1960s) - who appear to have the perfect life.  They don't of course.  Patrick is remote, distant, and psychologically abusive; Tasmin was raised to be dependent and there are no other suitable and suitably rich men for her to marry, even if she could get a divorce.

The neighbors, of course, don't know the state of the Selbys' marriage when they assemble for Patrick's birthday.  It's an awkward grouping, including impoverished old money, social climbers, harried parents, Patrick's mistress, a middle-aged man and his much younger third wife, and the local doctor.  Just the ordinary social gathering in this newly built bedroom community, until Patrick and a late-invited guest try to eliminate a wasps' nest.  They end up disturbing the nest and the wasps sting Patrick several times, but Dr. Greenleaf treats his stings with an antihistamine and a sleeping pill.  When Patrick dies in the night, Dr. Greenleaf assumes he either took an extra sleeping pill or had an unknown heart condition.  That's not the case - he's been murdered, and Dr. Greenleaf solves the mystery (but not too easily).  I did as well, but I was somewhat hampered by the setting.  Mid-20th Century England is a bit of an uncanny valley for a modern American.  It's recognizable, but foreign enough that I can't really trust my perceptions.  That's only a problem when reading a mediocre book, and it didn't bother me while reading To Fear a Painted Devil.

From Doon With Death

I'm a Bad Mystery Fan.  I've only read a few Sherlock Holmes stories.  The only book I've read by PD James was Death Comes to Pemberly.  And until a few weeks ago, I hadn't read the books Ruth Rendell wrote under her own name (although I've read most of the books she wrote as Barbara Vine).

I like to read series in order, so I bought  From Doon With Death at the Book Corner a few months ago, and it quickly floated to the top of the pile.  One evening, Ronald Parsons asked his neighbor, Detective Mike Burden, to find his wife.  Margaret Parsons had not come home from her daily errands, and the next morning her body is found in a wooded area.  Why would anyone want to kill a dowdy, downmarket woman with no family other than her husband?  The only clue is a series of love notes hidden in a trove of books Inspector Wexford finds in the Parsons's attic.  They're signed "Doon" and while Doon's identity was probably shocking in 1964, I figured out who the murder was pretty quickly.  Rendell rightly gets some credit for raising the mystery genre from a simple "whodunnit" to the more complex psychological study that merits reviews in serious periodicals, but the motives feel almost as dated as the linoleum in the Parsons's kitchen.  I enjoyed From Doon With Death but it's not up to the level of the Barbara Vine novels.