RUTH RENDELL – The Fever Tree and Other Stories of Suspense. Pantheon, US, hardcover, 1982. UK edition: Hutchinson, hc, 1982. Paperback reprint: Ballantine, 1984.

    One of the most impressive qualities of Ruth Rendell’s work is her grasp of the dark side of the human character and her ability to portray it in a dramatic and convincing fashion. Whether she is writing a short story, one of her compelling novels of psychological suspense, or an entry in her popular series featuring Chief Inspector Wexford of the British village of Kingsmarkham, she depicts fully fleshedout characters in all their complexity.

    The plots work, not so much because of neatly placed clues or clever twists (although these are present, too), but because the underlying motivations are logical and true to the participants’ inner natures.

    The Fever Tree is Rendell’s third short-story collection. (The others are The Fallen Curtain and Other Stories, 1976; and Means of Evil and Other Stories, 1979.)

    The stories are varied, but all carry the Rendell trademark of evil lying just below the surface of ordinary, even mundane, events. In the title story, a man and his wife are on vacation in an African game preserve, a vacation that is also a reconciliation. The man has been unfaithful and only recently returned to his wife. And as the wife, a childlike woman who insists on breaking the preserve rules, gets out of the car time and time again to look at the animals, terrible thoughts begin to form in both of their minds-thoughts that do not lead to a predictable conclusion.

    Likewise, “Thornapple” is a plant, but nothing so exotic as Africa’s fever tree — merely the jimsonweed that appears in many English gardens. James, a young boy, is a bit of an amateur botanist, and poisonous plants particularly interest him.

    “Not that James had the least intention of putting these poisons of his to use.” But then the accepted order in James’s family is disrupted, causing a great many things to get out of hand.

    Things get out of hand quite frequently in the life of the protagonist of “A Needle for the Devil.” As a child, Alice Gibson’s personal devil often “led her to violence.” She learned to control her impulses by practicing handicrafts, but when she goes into nurse’s training, circumstances force her to abandon most of them, and knitting becomes her salvation. Knitting, with all those lovely sharp needles …

    This is a well-balanced collection, and the stories included are among Rendell’s best short fiction. (One of her short stories, “The Fallen Curtain,” won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar in 1974.)

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.