Rendell, Ruth Barbara, Baroness Rendell of Babergh

Rendell, Ruth Barbara, Baroness Rendell of Babergh (1930- ), English writer of detective and mystery novels, whose work crosses the divide between genre and literary fiction. She also writes under the pseudonym Barbara Vine.

She was born Ruth Grasemann in Leyton, east London, and educated at Loughton County High School. Both her parents were teachers. When Rendell was a child, her Swedish-born mother died from multiple sclerosis. On leaving school she worked as a journalist on various local newspapers, beginning at the Chigwell Times, where she met her husband, Don. They divorced in 1975, but remarried two years later. Rendell began writing in her 20s, trying out different styles and genres until one of her books, From Doon with Death (1964), was bought by Hutchinson, which has published all subsequent titles under the Rendell name. The novel, which introduced the gruff but shrewd, literature-loving Chief Inspector Reg Wexford, was a police procedural set in the fictional Sussex market town of Kingsmarkham. The story centred on the disappearance of a married woman who is found strangled. After the success of this first book, Rendell continued the series. The Babes in the Wood (2002) is the 19th Wexford novel. Rendell has described her preferred subject as “oblique crime, or somebody who is an oblique murderer, very much off-stage”, and as a writer she is more interested in the motivation behind a crime than in its execution; there is little violence in her work. She has also used the Wexford novels to make social commentary, dealing with issues such as racism (Simisola, 1994), environmentalism (Road Rage, 1997), and domestic violence (Harm Done, 1999). The books were made into a long-running television series starring George Baker.

Rendell also writes short stories and mystery novels, which often deal with deviant psychology, such as A Judgement in Stone (1977, filmed by Claude Chabrol), The Lake of Darkness (1980), Live Flesh (1986, filmed by Pedro Almodóvar), A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998), Adam and Eve Pinch Me (2001), and Thirteen Steps Down (2004).

In 1986, Viking (Penguin) published Rendell’s first novel under the name of Barbara Vine (the maiden name of her great-grandmother), A Dark-Adapted Eye, later followed by others including A Fatal Inversion (1987), Asta’s Book (1993), Grasshopper (2000), and The Blood Doctor (2002). These more measured novels, typically narrated in the first person, are less sensational and more psychologically detailed.

She was made a CBE in 1996 and became a Labour life peer in 1997.