Ruth Rendell

Page Updated: 09/09/02

Ruth Rendell

Harm Done

A Sight for Sore Eyes

Road Rage

The Keys to the Street

Audiobooks

A Profile of Ruth Rendell by Val McDermid

Writing as Barbara Vine

by Ruth Rendell

About the Author

Bibliography

First British Edition Hutchinson (1999)

Harm Done
Shortly after Lizzie Cromwell returns from the dead, another young woman disappears, just as a convicted paedophile is released back into the community. Local residents are up in arms, and even prepared to take the law into their own hands...
Chief Inspector Wexford is not only concerned very personally with the effects of violence and prejudice, but is involved with a new programme to help the victims of domestic violence. His daughter, Sylvia, whose marriage is in difficulties, has also come to work nearby in a refuge for battered women.
After those early disappearances, two far more serious crimes are committed which will affect the lives and attitudes of police and public alike.

First British Edition Hutchinson (1998)

A Sight for Sore Eyes
See Review by Margaret Murphy
Lying in bed he thought about Francine as she had been, seated in front of his mirror, swathed in stiff silk, her reflected face looking gravely back at her real face. She must easily be the most beautiful girl in the world. A sight for sore eyes. Alfred Chance had once used that expression and it had stuck in his mind. About an object, though, not a person. It meant that looking at beauty took away pain and hurt and made you better. Francine made him better and his eyes were sore when they couldn't feast on her.’
Neither his mother nor his father took much notice of Teddy Brex. No one ever cuddled him, or played with him or talked to him. The only person he could vaguely relate to was Alfred Chance, who lived next door, and made beautiful things in his workshop.
People, Teddy suspected, were uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.
When Francine Hill was discovered by her father, sitting by the body of her mother, her skirt red with blood, she was mute. Not until nine months after the murder did she manage to speak, but she could not tell the police or her father anything to help track down the killer.
Damaged children grow up in different ways. Some can shuffle off the horrors of the past, others perhaps cannot change who they are, or will never know how Teddy Brex became a handsome young man, Francine was beautiful. But it was death that brought them together…
'Ruth Rendell is the ultimate anatomist of the human psyche, probing behind public facades to reveal private torment and distorted visions that change the way we view the world around us' Val McDermid.

First British Edition Hutchinson (1997)

Road Rage
See Review by Andrew Taylor - author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series
See Review by Val McDermid - Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill
The 17th in the Chief Inspector Wexford Mysteries series and Ruth Rendell's 52nd title published to date.
A by-pass is planned in Kingsmarkham; the building of such a road, particularly in such a hitherto unchanged rural environment, was certain to divide the local community. A protest group is formed, which Dora Wexford quickly joins. The Chief Inspector knows he must be more circumspect: trouble is expected.
As the protesters begin to make their presence felt, the badly decomposed body of a young woman in unearthed. The Deputy Chief Constable is rapidly convinced of the murderer's identity but Wexford is uncertain. And as the case progresses, the protest escalates, and a number of people begin to disappear, including Dora Wexford…
'Ruth Rendell is one of those rare writers who genius makes you look at the world in a different way... When people talk sometimes of the poetry of which a novel may be capable, this above everything is what they mean: the ability to make the ordinary seem extraordinary' Allan Massie, Scotsman

First British Edition Hutchinson (1996)

The Keys to the Street
See Review by Andrew Taylor - author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series
See Review by Val McDermid - Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill
Mary Jago had donated her own bone marrow to save the life of someone she didn’t know. And this generous act led directly to the bitter break-up of her affair with Alistair. For him, it was as though her beauty had been plundered.
But the man whose life she had saved would change Mary’s life in a way she could never have imagined.
Located in the area around Regent’s Park, Ruth Rendell creates an atmospherically charged universe, where a young woman’s life is in danger both from the middle class world she knows and another world of the dispossessed and deranged.
Mysterious, complex, dangerously inventive, Ruth Rendell’s new novel may well be her finest achievement.
'A masterpiece' A.N.Wilson
'Ruth Rendell is, unequivocally, the most brilliant mystery novelist of our time. Her stories are a lesson in a human nature as capable of the most exotic love as it is of the cruelest murder. She does not avert her gaze. Once again, she magnificently triumphs in a style that is uniquely hers and mesmerising' Patricia Cornwell

About The Author
Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writer's Association Gold Dagger for 1976's best crime novel with A Demon in my View; a second Edgar in 1984 from the Mystery Writers of America for the best short story, The New Girl Friend; a Gold Dagger award for Live Flesh in 1986; and most recently she was the winner of the 1990 Sunday Times Literary award, as well as the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre. In 1996, she was awarded the CBE.
Her books have been translated into twenty-two languages and are also published to great acclaim in the United States.
Ruth Rendell is married and lives in a sixteenth-century farmhouse in Suffolk.
Ruth Rendell also writes as Barbara Vine

Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

Piranha to Scurfy Short Stories (Hutchinson, 2000)

Harm Done (Hutchinson, 1999)

A Sight for Sore Eyes (Hutchinson, 1998)

Road Rage (Hutchinson, 1997) Arrow Pbk 1998 ( Wexford)

The Keys to the Street (Hutchinson, 1996)

Simisola (Hutchinson, 1995) ( Wexford)

The Crocodile Bird (Hutchinson, 1993)

Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (Hutchinson, 1992) ( Wexford)

The Copper Peacock Short Stories (Hutchinson, 1991)

Going Wrong (Hutchinson, 1990)

The Bridesmaid (Hutchinson, 1989)

The Third Wexford Omnibus (Hutchinson, 1989) ( Wexford)

The Second Wexford Omnibus (Hutchinson, 1988) ( Wexford)

The Veiled One (Hutchinson, 1988) ( Wexford)

Talking to Strange Men (Hutchinson, 1987)

The New Girlfriend (Hutchinson, 1986)

Live Flesh (Hutchinson, 1986)

An Unkindness of Ravens (Hutchinson, 1985) ( Wexford)

The Killing Doll (Hutchinson, 1984)

The Tree of Hands (Hutchinson, 1984)

The Speaker of Mandarin (Hutchinson, 1983) ( Wexford)

The Fever Tree Short Stories (Hutchinson, 1982)

Master of the Moor (Hutchinson, 1982)

Put On By Cunning (Hutchinson, 1981) ( Wexford)

The Lake of Darkness (Hutchinson, 1980)

Make Death Love Me (Hutchinson, 1979)

Means of Evil Short Stories (Hutchinson, 1979) ( Wexford)

A Sleeping Life (Hutchinson, 1978) ( Wexford)

A Judgement in Stone (Hutchinson, 1977)

The Fallen Curtain Short Stories (Hutchinson, 1976)

A Demon in My View (Hutchinson, 1976)

Shake Hands Forever (Hutchinson, 1975) ( Wexford)

The Face of Trespass (Hutchinson, 1974)

Some Lie and Some Die (Hutchinson, 1973) ( Wexford)

Murder Being Once Done (Hutchinson, 1972) ( Wexford)

One Across, Two Down (Hutchinson, 1971)

No More Dying Then (Hutchinson, 1971) ( Wexford)

A Guilty Thing Surprised (Hutchinson, 1970) ( Wexford)

The Best Man to Die (John Long, 1969) ( Wexford)

The Secret House of Death (John Long, 1968)

Wolf to the Slaughter (John Long, 1967) ( Wexford)

A New Lease of Death (John Long, 1967) ( Wexford)

To Fear a Painted Devil (John Long, 1965)

Vanity Dies Hard (John Long, 1965)

From Doon with Death (John Long, 1964) ( Wexford)

Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle

Murder by the Book

Mystery Cats

Heartstones