'I couldn't do without writing' … Ruth
Rendell. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian
Ruth Rendell's most
famous creation, Chief Inspector Wexford, has retired, and at the age of 83,
with more than 70 books under her belt and a Labour life peerage, she'd be
forgiven if her thoughts were beginning to drift towards a gentle exit from the
world of letters. After all, the 79-year-old Philip Roth, after a similarly
half-century-spanning career, told the world he was
"done" with writing last year, and hasn't looked back.
When I ask if this is the case, Rendell, resplendent and formidable in a red
velvet cardigan, leans forward on the sofa in her bright Maida Vale house and
looks horrified. "I couldn't do that. It's what I do and I love doing it," she
says. "It's absolutely essential to my life. I don't know what I would do if
I didn't write."
That's a no, then. Even Wexford, who has been solving murders and easing
injustices since he made his debut in Rendell's own debut, From Doon with
Death, back in 1964, isn't taking it easy. Despite having left the police
force, he solved a decades-old crime in 2011's The Vault, and Rendell
reveals she's just finished a new Wexford novel in which the retired inspector
becomes involved in another investigation.
Perhaps it's her books, and the terrifying hold they exert on her readers, or
the bucketloads of awards she's been given, but Rendell has a reputation for
being intimidating. In person, she is cool, detached, fiercely intelligent –
rather like some of her female heroines. She considers everything she is asked,
looking faintly disgusted if she disagrees or is unimpressed, a small but
infectious smile spreading across her face if she's interested.Unlike Conan Doyle with Holmes, "I don't get sick of him because he's me. He's very much me," she says of Wexford. "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. So I think you don't get tired of yourself."
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