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.