Rendell wrote a lot of books, and I’ve read a fair few before, and so I thought I knew what I would get here. And you know what, I was right. This is the essence of Rendell. What’s that essence? “Nasty”, my mother says (she and my grandfather are the original sources of my crime fiction habit). My mother is laconic, but perhaps I can say a bit more.
This book is about a psychopathic killer of women who has learnt to control his urges by instead strangling a mannequin in a basement every now and then. Through a series of unfortunate but not far-fetched coincidences, he’s denied this outlet, and so goes back to killing women. Meanwhile, the same series of coincidences brings minor love-life tragedy for his near-namesake and fellow inhabitant of a grotty London rooming house. The latter happens also to be writing a PhD thesis on psychopaths.
Now, that setup promises nastiness in a lurid sense: grime and gore and excavation of the psychopathic psyche. But I think what makes Rendell really nasty is that she does none of that. At her best, she is an incredibly controlled, restrained, exact writer. The image that always comes to mind is of an entomologist dispassionately and precisely skewering specimens.
This restraint and precision are manifest in several respects in the first half of this book. Plot: it’s obvious from the start that something awful is going to happen, but it’s a quiet inevitability, not a runway train. Perspective: she is meticulous in only every evaluating or editorialising from the viewpoint of a given character. There’s plenty of description of dingy lower-class London, but with no judgement except when someone in the book is judging (all the racism, and there is plenty, is from such a perspective). Moreover, there is no hint that any one of these perspectives is favoured or disfavoured. They are all simply reported. Psychology: she hints at explanation of psychopathy without ever tipping over into unfounded speculation. Draw your own confusions.
All this adds up to a horrible sense of creeping dread as the book progresses. The lazy reader wants the author to let things rip, and wants an easy explanation of why they’re ripping, and a steer on what they should think about it all. This author refuses to give any of this, just keeps labelling the insects, and so the tension mounts. This, not luridness, is the essence of nastiness.
I did say “the first half of the book”, and in truth I did find that the tension slackened in the second half—the awful thing happens halfway through and the consequences are less suspenseful. All the same, this is a very good novel. I can’t say I enjoyed it, because Rendell at her best is not enjoyable, but I certainly appreciated it. Which is lucky, because she won this thing three more times, so I’ve plenty more to come.