A nest of ungentle Essex folk

Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, is the author of 12 novels which deal with extremely aberrant behaviour treated on the easiest and most companionable terms. There is no doubting that the author herself is on the side of the sane, the balanced, and the well-behaved: this is apparent in the clarity of her sentences, which proceed without flagging from the outset of a complex narrative to its eventual resolution. Her astonishing productivity is another matter altogether. This is not so much devotion to the task as obedience to an impulse with which she is on enviably relaxed terms.

She is in many ways qualified to be our foremost woman writer. Her peculiar virtue, apart from her lucidity, is her ability to create alarming but familiar characters and situations: streets are itemised, habits well established, dilemmas revealed as unexceptional. Nobody is mad, but nobody is quite sane. As Ruth Rendell she has established Chief Inspector Wexford as the possessor of a well-regulated mind; as Barbara Vine she knows that such people are rare and lets her gaze linger on the marginal and the marginalised, on the excluded and the infinitesimally deluded, all of whom are so recognisable that we are almost — almost — in collusion with them.