Crime writer Ruth Rendell Award – The Volkswagen among the investigators – Frankfurter Rundschau

03 May 2015

The British crime writer Ruth Rendell, 1991. Photo: AP

On the death of Ruth Rendell, inventor of the entirely unkapriziösen Inspector Wexford, and author with an exciting double life as Barbara Vine.

In 1964 came a detective story in which neither a cranky old lady, even an eccentric, drug-dependent combination of genius, even a sealing sophisticate convicted murderer, but so to speak, the Volkswagen among investigators: Inspector Wexford is neither noble nor handsome, has a rather boring wife and two daughters, drink no more than a beer in the pub (but, alas, the belly), in his spare time he Gardener happy, makes otherwise conscientiously his policing – is, in short, an average British Bloke in an average (fictional) British backwater called Kingsmarkham. However, it can also be from anyone on the nose dance around because he is like its creator Ruth Rendell, who could leave their Inspector solve a total of 24 cases between 1964 (“From Doon with Death”, dt. “Much love from death”) to 2013 than that of the criticism something plucked “No Man’s Nightingale” was released. The fit unglamorous George Baker played Wexford, as this made it into English, and later in the German television from 1987 to

. Write Generic double life

Ruth Rendell, born in 1930 in South Woodford, London, died last Saturday at a stroke, hated allegedly when it was called “Queen of Crime”: She did not (only) plugged into this drawer be. And in fact, may they not be reduced to its rock-solid, but stylistically certainly not brilliant Wexford series: Ruth Rendell led a writing skills Double, yes triple life, she published both under its own name as well and especially as Barbara Vine psychological thriller that could have it in them. Then she left the safe Wexford reason put himself sometimes radically – and to the consternation of some reader: quite sympathetically – into a perpetrator soul

Effects, Geisterbahn-. horror she spurned

One might Barbara Vine / Ruth Rendell call old-fashioned, and it would be a praise: Because the superficial effect, the ghost train horror was not her thing. Whether in her Wexford whodunnits or the other novels (there were last more than 50), always interested Rendell the very human motivations of her characters. You drechselte no artificial serial killer psyches, they let ordinary people pretty unremarkable family love, hate, jealousy, envy, greed, fear, panic and feel often kill on impulse. You did not create a monster, maybe its just about exciting thriller: So a murderer could all live in the neighborhood, yes, perhaps you would be even capable of such anger or such murderous despair

. “No one in his senses will call me a first-class author” Ruth Rendell is quoted, “that does not bother me, because I’m doing my best, and thousands, millions of people are enjoying my books.” journalists (they was itself a until it “cold” wrote the report on a probably die boring speech and the speaker dropped dead, which of course will not stand in the newspaper) describe it as a hand withdrawn, on the other hand, if they went public, as snappy and opinionated. So opinionated and that she married the same man, the journalist Don Rendell, twice. Politically, it was – on the part of Labour – and committed charitably

Last year, died ten years older, a friend of Rendell PD James (inventor of sealing fine spirit Adam Dalgliesh).. With the death of Ruth Rendell’s a great, almost basic British crime era has now come to an end.