A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Susan Dunlap:


RUTH RENDELL – Speaker of Mandarin. Pantheon, US, hardcover, 1983. UK edition: Hutchinson, hc, 1983. Paperback reprint: Ballantine, 1984.

RUTH RENDELL Speaker of Mandarin

   This is the twelfth novel featuring Detective Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford and his subordinate, Mike Burden, of the English village of Kingsmarkham. By now they have developed into a competent, professional, and thoughtful pair who work comfortably together.

   It is their very decency and stability that give them the ability to spot the aberrations of the guilty. People trust the middle-aged, overweight Wexford, but frequently they underrate him. Wexford notes and makes use of this. The reader, too, can trust Wexford, accept his judgments, and enjoy the sense of immediacy that creates.

   In Speaker of Mandarin, we see Wexford away from the village that provides a closed environment for many of the books in this series. He is in China, where he has completed a police-related mission and joined a British tour group.

   In the few days he spends with them, he is haunted by an aged Chinese woman hobbling on her tiny bound feet, seemingly desperate to speak with him. She appears and disappears and turns up at the next stop, the next city, only to vanish again. Is she real, or is Wexford hallucinating? The inspector wonders and worries.

   The tour group takes a trip down the Li River, and a man — “Not one of us. A Chinese” — drowns and is forgotten. But months later, back in Kingsmarkham, one of the group is shot in the head, and the plot turns and turns again as Rendell teases the reader into thinking he has the solution — only to surprise him anew.

   Other enjoyable titles in this popular series are From Doon with Death (1965), Wolf to the Slaughter (1968), A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970), Shake Hands Forever (1975), and An Unkindness of Ravens (1985).

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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.