Ruth Rendell, More than Crime

It is really amazing how much extra time you have when you are cut off from the internet for a day or two. You won´t want to hear about everything I have done, but let me just mention that I wrote 3,000 words this weekend – and read a novel.

Last year I began a series of posts about Ruth Rendell´s long-standing protagonist, the capable and likeable Chief Inspector Reg Wexford. My aim was to look at the development he had gone through over forty-five years. After three posts I ran out of time, however, or more precisely, I decided I wanted to spend more time writing crime fiction, less time reading and reviewing it.

Here are last year´s posts for anyone who might wish to read them, plus a special post about Mike Burden.

Reg Wexford, 1960s
Reg Wexford, early 1970s
Reg Wexford, late 1970s
Mike Burden, the eternal sidekick.

And here is my new plan: a few posts about some of Rendell´s novels from the 1990s, a period when she took up some social and environmental issues in her books. We see evidence of this development e.g. in A Sleeping Life (1978) where women´s liberation is a recurrent theme though Reg and Dora Wexford are less than thrilled by this new-fangled idea.

Coming up: Ruth Rendell, Simisola (1994)