Author Archives: Galit Gottlieb

1930-2015 Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE, was an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries. She is best known for creating Chief Inspector Wexford, starting with From Doon to Death, 1964 and ending with the 20th Inspector Wexford novel, End in Tears, 2005. Her first novel as her Barbara Vine pseudonym was A Dark-Adapted Eye, 1985. Rendell was said to have worked out her plot idea and who will commit the crime before she started writing her detective novels. She told Michael Hanlon of the Toronto Star, “I write intending this Perpetrator X in mind. I write without letting my readers know that it’s X.” She said that when she got to the last chapter, she usually found that someone else was the killer. Books under her own name tended to be more plot-driven while her Barbara Vine books focused on the mind of those with pathological, sometimes obsessive, problems. But everything of hers that I’ve read has stayed with me (often as a nightmare) over the years.

The Monster in the Box, A Wexford Case

“Do you enjoy reading?”
“I enjoyed Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Bryant quailed at the thought. “That’s not really reading, is it? More like staring at an assortment of words.”
“It’s very popular.”
“So is taking photographs of your dinner for Facebook, but that doesn’t mean it adds to the total sum of human knowledge.”

“Lord Ingram, travelling from his brother’s country estate to his own, had stopped in London to see Holmes, with whom he shared a long, complex, and increasingly line-blurring friendship. He had intended to tell her that he was ready to erase the lines altogether. And as he’d waited in the afternoon parlor of Mrs. Watson’s house to be received by Holmes, trying to rein in his anxiety and agitation at the enormity of what he was about to do, Mrs. Treadles had arrived, with the news that her husband had been arrested on suspicion of murder.”