Ruth Rendell, a prolific British novelist who brought a new sense of psychological tension to her crime fiction, which often explored contemporary social and sexual themes, died May 2 at a hospital in London. She was 85.
She had complications from a recent stroke, said a grandson, Phillip Rendell.
Rendell was considered one of the foremost writers of crime fiction in recent decades, with more than 60 books to her credit. She and her friend P.D. James, who died in November, were often called Britain’s “queens of crime,” although both of them despised the title.
Rendell was so prolific that she wrote under two names and in three distinct styles. She published more than 20 novels set in the English countryside that featured her imperturbable detective, Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. She also wrote dozens of dark suspense novels that seemed to peer inside the murderer’s state of mind.
Beginning in the 1980s, she published a series of noirish books under the name Barbara Vine, in which she explored sometimes shocking psychological obsessions or sexual behavior.
In whatever form she chose, Rendell was admired for her careful plotting, her vivid descriptions and the rich complexity of her characters.
Julian Symons, a historian of the mystery novel, wrote in The Washington Post in 1987 that Rendell had created “a body of work that says as much about the habits, manners, talk and behavior of people in contemporary Britain, as those of Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, or any other novelist in current practice.”
Rendell’s first novel, “From Doon With Death” (1964), introduced Wexford, the stoic, scholarly detective from the fictional Kingsmarkham, a Sussex town with an exceptionally high murder rate.
The Wexford novels are straightforward police procedurals, but over the years they touched on the inevitable problems of the modern world, including urban sprawl, youthful rebellion, feminism and social hierarchy.
Rendell said her poetry-loving Inspector Wexford was “born at the age of 52,” but she often put his life in danger, forcing him from a life of contemplation into action.
In the end, he sorts out the mystery with a calm, deliberate manner that Rendell said was an amalgam of her father’s approach to life and her own.
“I don’t get sick of him because he’s me,” she told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2013. “He doesn’t look like me, of course, but the way he thinks and his principles and his ideas and what he likes doing, that’s me.”
Ruth Barbara Grasemann was born Feb. 17, 1930, in London. Her mother was Swedish, and both parents became teachers.
Rendell worked as a newspaper reporter early in her career and was married in 1950 to Donald Rendell, a fellow reporter. They divorced in 1975, then remarried two years later. He died in 1999.
Survivors include a son, Simon Rendell of Denver, and two grandsons.
A woman of remarkable self-discipline, Rendell exercised for 30 minutes each morning before sitting down to write at 8:30. She produced up to 2,500 words a day and usually published two books a year.
“Each has flaws,” Washington Post critic Michael Dirda wrote in 1989, “though these hardly matter when the plotting is so masterly, the storytelling so perfectly cadenced.”
Exploring more psychological territory, Rendell began to publish under the name Barbara Vine in 1985, using her middle name and an ancestral name. The characters were darker, the obsessions more intense, the secrets more shocking.
“I couldn’t have written the Vines under the Rendell,” she said in 1999, “and I can’t account for that.”
She continued to produce stand-alone psychological thrillers, as well, including “The Bridesmaid” in 1989, which Dirda called “an extremely disturbing novel, but so beautifully composed that no one could wish it otherwise. It’s like some old master painting of Judith holding the head of Holofernes — gruesome and wonderful, shocking and irresistible.”
In 1997, Rendell was named a baroness, which gave her a seat in the House of Lords, alongside her fellow mystery writer James. She was outspokenly liberal in her political views and contributed 100,000 pounds a year to charities.
Rendell’s Wexford novels became a British television series in 1988, with actor George Baker in the lead role. Rendell received letters from women who wanted to marry Wexford, if he ever left his wife, Dora.
“Freud wanted to know what it is that women want,” Rendell said in 1990. “Well, one thing women want is someone to make them laugh. Wexford is quite witty, I think. He is also a big, solid type, very cool and calm. He also likes women very much and always has time for them. What more could you want in a man?”