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Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, (; 17 February 1930 – 2 May 2015) was an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries.
Rendell is best known for creating Chief Inspector Wexford.The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Sixth edition. Ed. by Margaret Drabble. Oxford University Press,
2000, p. 847. .
A second string of works was a series of unrelated crime novels that explored the psychological background of criminals and their victims. This theme was developed further in a third series of novels, published under the pseudonym '''Barbara Vine'''.
Rendell has sold an estimated 20 million copies of her novels.
After high school, she became a feature writer for her local Essex paper, the Chigwell Times. She submitted a story narrating a local sports club dinner she had not attended. Because of her absence at the dinner, she did not know that the after-dinner speaker had died midway through the speech, and she failed to report it. She was subsequently forced to resign.
She made the county of Suffolk her home for many years, using the settings in several of her novels. She lived in the villages of Polstead and later Groton, both east of Sudbury. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1996 Birthday Honours and a life peer as Baroness Rendell of Babergh, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk, on 24 October 1997. She sat in the House of Lords for the Labour Party. In 1998, Rendell was named in a list of the party's biggest private financial donors. She introduced into the Lords the bill that would later become the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 (the intent was to prevent the practice).
In August 2014, Rendell was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.
Rendell was a Vegetarianism who was described as living mostly on fruit. "Ruth Rendell". thetimes.co.uk. Retrieved 22 February 2023. She described herself as "slightly agoraphobic" and slept in a specially made four-poster bed because "I like to feel enclosed."
She was a patron of the charity Kids for Kids.
Helicon Publishing, 2006.She was also a patron of the charity Kids for Kids which helps children in rural areas of [[Darfur]]. There is a blue plaque on one of her homes, 45 Millsmead Way, in [[Loughton]]. This was unveiled by her son Simon on 24 February 2016. Four of her novels appear on the British-based Crime Writers Association Poll (1990) of the best crime fiction novels ever written: two under the Rendell name and two under her pen name of Barbara Vine.
Her Crime Writer’s Association Dagger wins (four Gold, one Silver and one Cartier Diamond) remains unmatched, as does her record of being the first author to be nominated and win under multiple names. Her unparalleled Edgar and Dagger finalist nominations include: A Judgement In Stone (1977 Gold Dagger finalist), A Sleeping Life (1979 Edgar finalist for Best Novel), Make Death Love Me (1980 Edgar finalist for Best Novel), The Speaker Of Mandarin (1983 Gold Dagger finalist), An Unkindness Of Ravens and The Tree Of Hands (both 1986 Edgar finalists for Best Novel), A Dark-Adapted Eye (as Barbara Vine, 1986 Gold Dagger finalist), A Fatal Inversion (as Barbara Vine, 1988 Macavity Award finalist for Best Novel), and Going Wrong (1990 Gold Dagger finalist.)
rendell&from_year&to_year Additionally, she was nominated four times in the Edgar Best Short Story category (in 1976 for "The Fall Of The Coin" and 1977 for "People Don’t Do Such Things"), winning twice for "The Fallen Curtain" (1975) and "The New Girlfriend" (1984).
In Introducing Chief Inspector Wexford by Daniel Mallory he says (based on a 1990 interview with Rendell by Marilyn Stasio) that Rendell refers to the hated Agatha (Christie) and that awful Marple woman; and says of St. Mary Mead that she can hardly bear to say the name of that village where one finds a lot of normal, law-abiding people living ordinary, blameless lives, who suddenly decide to murder their aunt. Well, I don't believe that. ( Introducing Chief Inspector Wexford by Daniel Mallory; from 1990 Rendell interview with Marilyn Stasio)
In addition to these police procedurals starring Wexford, Rendell wrote psychological crime novels exploring such themes as romantic obsession, misperceived communication, the impact of chance and coincidence, and the humanity of the criminals involved. Among such books are A Judgement in Stone, The Face of Trespass, Live Flesh, Talking to Strange Men, The Killing Doll, Going Wrong and Adam and Eve and Pinch Me. For the last novel published in her lifetime, The Girl Next Door, she returned to the Loughton of her childhood, with an implied comparison of the moral climate of wartime England and 2014.
Rendell created a third strand of writing with the publication in 1986 of A Dark-Adapted Eye under her pseudonym Barbara Vine (the name was derived from her own middle name and her great-grandmother's maiden name). King Solomon's Carpet, A Fatal Inversion and Asta's Book (alternative U.S. title, Anna's Book), among others, inhabited the same territory as her psychological crime novels while further developing themes of human misunderstandings and the unintended consequences of family secrets and hidden crimes. The author was noted for her elegant prose and sharp insights into the human mind, as well as her cogent plots and characters. Rendell injected the social changes of the last 40 years into her work, bringing awareness to such issues as domestic violence.
Television
The Inspector Wexford series was successfully televised, starring George Baker as Inspector Wexford and Christopher Ravenscroft as Detective Mike Burden, under the title The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, with 48 episodes from 1987 to 2000. Rendell praised Baker's performance, stating "It was a marvellous achievement as an actor to make him more and better than the author intended."
Two episodes of Tales of the Unexpected were based on Rendell's short stories - "A Glowing Future" (series 4, episode 15) and "People Don't Do Such Things" (series 8, episode 1).
Film
She said that Claude Chabrol's 1995 version of A Judgement in Stone, La Cérémonie with Sandrine Bonnaire, was one of the few film adaptations of her work that she was happy with. The novel was also filmed in 1986 with Rita Tushingham. Chabrol made La Demoiselle d'honneur in 2004, based on The Bridesmaid.
Other adaptations are Diary of the Dead (1976), from the book One Across, Two Down; the 1997 Pedro Almodóvar film Live Flesh; The Tree of Hands, directed by Giles Foster for Granada with Lauren Bacall (U.S. title: "Innocent Victim"); and another version of The Tree of Hands, Betty Fisher et autres histoires (2001, a.k.a. Alias Betty), with screenplay and direction by Claude Miller. François Ozon's 2015 film The New Girlfriend was based on Rendell's short story of the same name.
Radio
Rendell's short story, "A Glowing Future", was adapted by BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in November 1992.
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