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Inspector Wexford Returns
Ruth Rendell's long, varied career has been a constant source of astonishment and pleasure. Since the appearance of her first novel, From Doon with Death in 1964, she has published nearly 50 books, most of which fall into three general categories. There are the Inspector Wexford novels, a long-running series of police procedurals set in the fictional Sussex village of Kingsmarkham. There are the psychological thrillers, such as The Bridesmaid, The Crocodile Bird, and Live Flesh, many of which contain eerily precise renderings of violent, abnormal mental states. Finally, there are the Barbara Vine novels, subtle, sometimes leisurely narratives that straddle the imaginary boundary between mainstream and genre fiction.
Rendell's latest, Harm Done, is a Wexford novel, the first since 1997's Road Rage and one of the longest, most ambitious entries in the series. In this one, Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford is confronted with an assortment of investigations that intersect -- or appear to intersect -- at a number of points. For reasons that will eventually become obvious, Wexford later comes to think of this intertwining series of occurrences as the Children's Crusade.
Harm Done opens with the disappearance of a not-quite-retarded 16-year-old named Lizzie Cromwell. Three days after her abduction, Lizzie returns home, obviously unharmed but unable -- or unwilling -- to explain her absence. (She is also, as Wexford quickly learns, pregnant, a circumstance that may or may not be related to her disappearance.) One week later, a college student named Rachel Holmes -- older, brighter, more aggressive than Lizzie -- vanishes in a similar fashion. She, too, returns within three days and is equally unwilling to cooperate with local investigators. Shortly afterward, the three-year-old daughter of a wealthy airline executive also disappears, stolen from her bedroom in the small hours
of the morning. This particular victim -- Sanchia Devenish -- does not immediately return, and the mystery of her whereabouts provides this complex novel with its dramatic -- and thematic -- center.
Wexford's life -- and village life in general -- is further complicated by two unrelated elements. One concerns the arrival of a once-notorious pedophile -- Thomas Orbe -- who has just been discharged from prison and has taken up residence in Kingsmarkham. When the news of Sanchia Devenish's abduction is made public, Orbe becomes the focal point of the community's outrage, outrage that has violent, ultimately tragic consequences. The second element concerns the presence in Kingsmarkham of a controversial haven for battered women called The Hide. Wexford's daughter Sylvia, a social worker with marital problems of her own, works as a volunteer at The Hide. Through her, Rendell provides us with a window on the grim realities of women victimized by violent, endlessly self-justifying husbands.
In the end, Sylvia's familiarity with the symptoms of marital abuse provides Wexford with the key to Sanchia's disappearance. Studying a group portrait of the Devenish family -- handsome, self-confident husband; pale, self-deprecating wife; blank, expressionless children -- Sylvia understands immediately that Stephen Devenish -- husband, father, extraordinarily successful businessman -- is a wife-beater. Once the nature of life in the Devenish family is made clear to Wexford, he finds his way to the heart of the novel's central mystery and sets in motion a series of events that
ends, inevitably, in murder.
Rendell is at the top of her game in this one, skillfully manipulating a large cast of characters and a multitude of subplots to produce a wide-ranging, deeply felt meditation on the infinitely vulnerable institution of the family. The numerous families that populate this novel are threatened, and sometimes destroyed, by the forces of poverty, insanity, greed, ignorance, and, most centrally, violence. Rendell's portraits of battered and beleaguered women, her anger over the lingering belief that domestic violence is somehow "acceptable," and her gradual revelation of the casual brutality of life in the Devenish household combine to give this gritty, aptly titled novel an immediacy, a sense of moral and emotional urgency, that lift it well above the level of more traditional detective stories and onto the level of
literature.
During the course of her career, Rendell has won virtually every award that the mystery community can bestow: multiple Edgar awards, multiple Gold Daggers, Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the Mystery Writers of America and the Crime Writers Association of England. Reading her latest, it's not hard to understand why. Harm Done is a well-constructed, deeply affecting novel. It offers further evidence -- as if further evidence were needed -- that its author is one of the preeminent figures of 20th-century crime fiction.
—Bill Sheehan
barnesandnoble.com
A Letter from Ruth Rendell
After publishing her first Inspector Wexford mystery in 1964, one might think Ruth Rendell had had enough. Not true. The amazing Rendell, clearly one of the genre's preeminent 20th-century talents, returns with Harm Done, her latest Wexford page-turner. In an essay written exclusively for barnesandnoble.com, Ruth Rendell discusses her inspiration for Harm Done: an attempt to bring the very real and tragic issues of pedophilia and domestic abuse to the forefront of popular fiction.
The Political Wexfords
by Ruth Rendell
Dear Reader,
For want of a better name, I call them the "political Wexfords." They are the detective stories I write featuring Detective Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden with this difference: As well as being mysteries with, I hope, an exciting plot and a problem in detection to solve, they present aspects of the contemporary social scene.
Simisola was the first of them. That was about racism in the English countryside, that and domestic slavery, the situation in which young women are brought to Britain as family servants, inadequately paid, if paid at all, and
virtually imprisoned. The second political Wexford was Road Rage, not an investigation of that phenomenon whereby people involved in road incidents or accidents abuse each other, but concerning the environment. It exposed the rage people feel when a new road is built through their countryside, often contrary to their wishes and needs.
Harm Done, the third of these, is both darker and lighter than its predecessors. There is some light relief and humor to offset the very disturbing problems of pedophilia and domestic violence with which the narrative is concerned, but the major part of the book is devoted to exposing what really
goes on when a brutal man -- in this case a wealthy, middle-class man -- habitually beats up and tortures his wife.
As a member of the Board of Management of Refuges for Abused Women, I have for some time now been involved in movements to counter domestic violence. Talking to some of the women who have suffered at the hands of husbands
and partners, and hearing their shocking and often tragic stories, led me to decide I must write about all this. In the context of a detective novel and the exciting narrative this implies, I wanted to let readers know what savagery in the
home really is, why women in this situation remain in it, how children, too, suffer, perhaps irrevocably, and how, strangely, those to whom being such a victim or perpetrator is unthinkable, shy away from the problem.
Harm Done is different from anything I have previously written in that, although the names, the setting, and the family pattern are my own invention, everything that happens to the victim has happened to some woman somewhere. Every word uttered has been spoken by some abused woman or some brutal man caught up in this dreadful situation. What happens in HARM DONE really
happens, across all classes and ethnic groups, to the poor and the rich, the young -- and because bad habits die very hard -- to the old as well. And the biggest fallacy of all is that this only happens when the man has been drinking.
I wanted to write about it and I have. While my readers enjoy this mystery and reacquainting themselves with Wexford and his family, I hope it will also open their eyes and help them to understand.
--Ruth Rendell, November 4, 1999
Diane White
Fans of Ruth Rendell's work can't help wondering how she does it. How does she turn out so many wonderful novels, sometimes two or three a year, year after year? The woman is clearly some kind of genius who deserves all the many honors that have come, and continue to come, her way.
— Boston Globe
Ottawa Citizen
Rendell just seems to get sharper and sharper.
Chronicle-Herald
British crime at its best can be found in the fiction of Ruth Rendell, for
whom no superlative is sufficient.
New Yorker
Rendell’s clear, shapely prose casts the mesmerizing spell of the
confessional.
Gazette (Montreal)
No one plays head games quite as well as Rendell.
Los Angeles Times
Rendell writes with such elegance and restraint, with such a literate
voice and an insightful mind, that she transcends the mystery genre and
achieves something almost sublime.
Library Journal
Chief Inspector Wexford is having a busy month. First two young women are taken from a bus stop; then a pedophile is released from jail, triggering violence from members of the community. During the course of these events a colleague is killed. Then a child is stolen from her crib in the middle of the night, and later her father is found murdered. On top of this Wexford must deal with the disintegration of his daughter's marriage and her new job in a shelter for victims of domestic violence, a job that lands her right in the middle of several of the cases he is working on. How does the inspector deal with these cases as well as the crises that are arising from his own family? Unlike most crime mysteries, this seems to be more of a slice of life focusing on a variety of tales and their aftermaths. Though the novel, read by Christopher Ravenscroft, starts out promisingly, it gets bogged down, and the stories come to boring, contrived endings. Since Rendell is a popular writer, libraries will want to have this title to satisfy demand. Otherwise, not a necessary purchase.--Danna Bell-Russel, Library of Congress Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\
Patricia Craig
Harm Done is not so much a murder mystery (although a murder does eventually take place) as a novel evoking one kind of abuse after another, detailing all the symptoms of a vast malaise...[A]ll this is recounted in Ruth Rendell's usual manner which is unimpassioned, shrewd, and faintly ironic...a lively speculative tone is maintained throughout.
—From The Times Literary Supplement.
