Fifty years of Inspector Wexford – and a new detective on the block

Early on in The Girl Next Door, Ruth Rendell gives the reader a sharp nudge. ‘Colin Quell had very little interest in people, what they might think, how they might act in the future.’ The novel is Rendell’s latest stand alone mystery, the uninterested Quell its detective inspector. Forcibly she announces that neither physically nor temperamentally is this Wexford territory. Quell’s stomping grounds are the outer suburbs of London, where the capital spills into Essex, specifically Loughton, where once the octogenarian Rendell herself attended the County High School.

In the present day, though not at the time of the novel’s buried crime, Loughton lacks the residual rural outlook of Wexford’s Kingsmarkham, itself inspired by Midhurst in West Sussex. Its mesh of streets and manicured green spaces suggest suburban introspection, the very setting for Quell the incurious.

That The Girl Next Door works as a standalone novel is partly attributable to Rendell’s deftness in parrying comparisons with her best-known creation. It also unravels a satisfying mystery, stretching tentacles into the past. Rendell appears to revel in the quirky valetudinarianism of her cast of ageing friends and lovers who are capable of ‘iron control’ and equivocation in the matter of changing speech patterns.

For the diehard Rendellian, however, 2014 is the year of Wexford’s 50th birthday. Half a century ago, John Long published From Doon with Death and introduced to the reading public the detective Rendell afterwards qualified as a ‘big ugly man’ and named after a recent holiday destination in the south of Ireland. Wexford was taciturn, sardonic and intolerant of fools. Happily for the law-abiding citizens of his particular patch of Sussex, he was prone to ‘feelings… about some small thing when a case was about to break, and the small thing always turned out to be vital and his hunch seldom wrong’.