Rendell and her great friend James, who died last November, brought the genre critical respect, and they not only wrote about the law – they changed it, too
On Wednesday evening this week, publishers and readers of crime fiction gathered at Temple church in London’s law quarter for the memorial service of PD James, one of the two finest English crime-writers of the 20th century. A poignant absentee was the other: Ruth Rendell was too frail to attend the farewell to her great friend and co-practitioner following a severe stroke in January, complications from which led to her death, announced on Saturday, at the age of 85.
There is a clearly a bleakness in the fact that the genre of detective fiction has lost two of its giants within six months, but there is also a neatness. Rendell and James were always closely allied, both professionally and personally. One of Rendell’s last public engagements before her final illness had been to attend, in December, the funeral of PD James in Oxford.
For five decades, the two women were the George Eliot and Jane Austen of the homicidal novel: different minds and style but equal talent. They were responsible, in joint enterprise, for saving British detective fiction from the position, after the era of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, in which its popularity with readers was matched only by its unpopularity with most serious literary critics. Solving this paradox, the books of Rendell and James amassed both high stacks of till receipts and piles of admiring reviews. Each, in TV adaptations, gave a major detective to the schedules: Rendell’s DCI Wexford, played by George Baker on ITV, and James’ DCI Dalgliesh, portrayed by Roy Marsden on ITV and then Martin Shaw for the BBC.
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There is a clearly a bleakness in the fact that the genre of detective fiction has lost two of its giants within six months, but there is also a neatness. Rendell and James were always closely allied, both professionally and personally. One of Rendell’s last public engagements before her final illness had been to attend, in December, the funeral of PD James in Oxford.
For five decades, the two women were the George Eliot and Jane Austen of the homicidal novel: different minds and style but equal talent. They were responsible, in joint enterprise, for saving British detective fiction from the position, after the era of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, in which its popularity with readers was matched only by its unpopularity with most serious literary critics. Solving this paradox, the books of Rendell and James amassed both high stacks of till receipts and piles of admiring reviews. Each, in TV adaptations, gave a major detective to the schedules: Rendell’s DCI Wexford, played by George Baker on ITV, and James’ DCI Dalgliesh, portrayed by Roy Marsden on ITV and then Martin Shaw for the BBC.
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