A dogged foe

Old detectives rarely die — or age, for that matter: Poirot is forever 60, Sherlock Holmes 50, P. D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh a handsome 38 or so. 

Old detectives rarely die — or age, for that matter: Poirot is forever 60, Sherlock Holmes 50, P. D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh a handsome 38 or so. But Rendell’s George Wexford is ageing all right, and it shows. He is all nostalgia and reminiscence and remarking on things that are not getting better in the latest novel set on his old patch, the Suffolk market town of Kingsmarkham.

That has certainly changed. It has expanded, become less genteel and sleepy — though plenty of crime happens and much murder, as ever in these dear old places to which P. D. James once gave the perfect collective name of Mayhem Parva. And Kingsmarkham now has a significant Muslim population, as a rather awkward bow to political correctness. Ruth Rendell seems uneasy about this, not out of any prejudice — she is a Labour peeress, after all — but because she cannot quite make up her mind how they should be viewed by her characters, and ends up uneasily with everyone apologising for everyone else.

But although the story of a clever but rebellious runaway Muslim girl is a substantial subplot, the novel is about a man Wexford has always believed committed not one but several murders, the deeply unpleasant, small, stocky, hard-faced Eric Targo. He is as good a villain as Wexford ever tried to pin down, a man who loves animals more than people — he is not only a dog-lover, and never seen without one, he keeps snakes and a lion.

Targo had a disfiguring naevus covering the whole of his neck, over which he always wore a scarf in the days when Wexford spotted him exercising his dog in the street shortly after a woman was found strangled in a nearby house.