An 80-year-old mystery

Wednesday, 10th February 2010

Ruth Rendell talks to Victoria Lane about her long life as a writer, growing up with warring parents and being a working Labour peer

‘The older I get, the more inclined I am to say those three words: I don’t know,’ says Baroness Rendell of Babergh. She turns 80 this week, and seems milder in person than in her writing. In photographs, too, she looks a bit haughty and forbidding, with incredible Ming the Merciless eyebrows. But the door was opened by a smallish woman with a sandy helmet of hair, a quizzical expression and an illuminating smile that appears from nowhere and sends her features skywards. The mouth, the eyebrows, the hair — everything lifts, as though she has stuck her finger in a socket.

She has written, she estimates, about 70 books: her output is catching up with her years. She continues to be heavily productive, churning out about two titles a year, rotating between the Inspector Wexford novels, the ‘psychological thrillers’ written under her pseudonym Barbara Vine, and the rest, published under her real name and also found under Crime. Most of her books are bestsellers and worldwide sales are in the tens of millions.

We are in her Maida Vale house, which overlooks the canal. The sitting room goes right through, so that at the front you can see the pretty houseboats, at the back the garden. Under a glass roof is a table with an open laptop on it, where Inspector Wexford was probably going through some police procedure earlier. A storm has given way to piercing sunshine, patterned by raindrops.

She expects to finish the 23rd Wexford any minute. ‘I’m retiring him but bringing him back as an adviser — because I cannot let him go on because he’s too old.’ The inspector was 52 when the first in the series was published in 1964, so if he aged in real time that would make him 98, the most ancient policeman in the world. There was a scare recently that she was killing him off. ‘Wexford death rumours have been going on for years,’ Rendell says dismissively. In the past she has said that she is ‘not so much creating a character as putting myself as a man on the page’, so perhaps it would be like killing herself off.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page